The UI of your latest TouchSmart computer says something about you. You may not have recognized your own weaving-in of meaning, but it comes across quite clearly if one reads just right: You want out. You want to escape the world of Windows to which Microsoft has sequestered you for the better part of two decades.

With the Open Source Conference (OSCon) and IDG's LinuxWorld show in the rearview mirror of 2008, it is clear that open source is no longer just a trendy conversation.

State IT organisation representatives from Brazil, South Africa, Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba and Paraguay have signed a declaration expressing their dissatisfaction with the International Standards Organisation (ISO).

MySQLTuner is a Perl script that analyzes your MySQL performance and, based on the statistics it gathers, gives recommendations which variables you should adjust in order to increase performance. That way, you can tune your my.cnf file to tease out the last bit of performance from your MySQL server and make it work more efficiently.

The contents of /etc/motd are displayed by login after a successful login but just before it executes the login shell. The abbreviation “motd” stands for “message of the day”, and this file has been traditionally used for exactly that (it requires much less disk space than mail to all users).

Could ISO ever get another chance? Some people seem to think so.

Let’s face it, Linux has come a very long way. I recently installed Linux on my little brother’s old computer and the only thing he said about it was that “Windows” was running much faster and that it looks different now. What he thought was a different looking, newer Windows XP was actually Linux Mint 4.0.

To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 21 high quality Linux productivity tools. Hopefully, there will be something of interest for anyone who wishes to organise their daily life.