I am not a programmer. What I am is a journalist and author. In other words, I'm an end-user. I've spent a lot of time "reverse engineering" the culture of Linux. What's interesting about the world of Linux is that there aren't many critics within the community.

The latest beta of The Fedora Project's Linux includes new security, desktop and developer features that offer a glimpse of the direction Red Hat could take with its enterprise Linux distribution.

Once upon a time, Xen was the hot virtualization story. The Xen developers had a working solution for Linux - using free software - well ahead of anybody else, and Xen looked like the future of virtualization on Linux. Much venture capital chased after that story, and distributors raced to be the first to offer Xen-based virtualization. But, along the way, Xen seemed to get lost.

Global Regular Expression Print is the rather un-catchy full name of grep, the staple of any Linux users toolkit. It is a search tool run from the command line that is evolved directly from Unix, and is so useful it deserved a post of its own.

Along with the Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting, the Open Source Business Conference was one of the two best conferences I've been to recently (I generally hate conferences). I got my geek on at: FOSDEM and actually enjoyed and learned from the technical sessions. Where OSBC is at the other end of the spectrum with business sessions, so I got my suit on.

Print-on-demand sites allow you to create a book the way you want it. But when it comes to creating a cover for your book you might be tempted to hire a professional designer. But before you do that, why not give it a try yourself? After all, there are some great open-source tools at your disposal that can help you to achieve impressive results.

This is an overview of 5 most popular applications for ripping DVDs in Linux: dvd::rip, K9Copy, AcidRip, thoggen and HandBrake.