While desktop search engines like Beagle and Recoll can quickly find any file on your hard disk, they can't help you organize documents and files into neat and easy-to-manage collections. That's why we have tools like digiKam for managing your photos, BasKet Note Pads for keeping tabs on your notes, and Referencer for filing and tagging your documents.

Amanda is the most popular open source backup and recovery software in the world, protecting more than half a million servers and desktops running various versions of Linux, UNIX, BSD, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems. Amanda allows system administrators to set up a centralized backup server to back up multiple hosts to a tape- or disk-based storage system.

Of all of the industies deploying Linux and open source software, financial services have been among the earliest adopters. But what do banks and brokerages see in these emerging alternatives besides possibly lower up-front costs?

AstroMenace is a 3D space shooter game. This game features include: create your own levels by using script, allow mouse, keyboard and joystick control, support Linux and Windows platform. AstroMenace is a very funny game.

I really like Gmail, but I also like having backups of my data just in case. Here’s how to use a simple program called getmail on Unix to backup your Gmail or Google Apps email. We’ll break this into four steps.

For years Microsoft has had the de facto "standard" everything simpy because the majority of people use it and think it is the standard. Microsoft never did anything about this. It enjoyed the de facto standard position and never actually sought to makes it formats actual standards. But in 2006 something happened.

OpenOffice may support Microsoft's Office Open XML standard in future, but the organisation behind the open source productivity suite anticipates that everyone including Microsoft will have "difficulty" in making the format work.

The British Standards Institution (BSI) has always been one of those iconic central points of reference in British life – a kind of Big Ben for standards. But it's a little hard to square that image – perhaps hopelessly outdated – with the BSI's recent decision to vote in favour of Microsoft's OOXML document standard.