Like any self-respecting Linux journalist, I’m often predisposed to take Microsoft to task. For the record, I do manage to spread it around, with occasional reflections on Apple and Google, because I truly believe our universe has room for more than one evil empire. But Microsoft is still the easiest mark. It used to be easy to make fun of Microsoft because they were so formidable and vast. Now it is easy to make fun of them because they get it wrong so often, and it is downright amusing to see so much hype and media attention going to such inelegant products.

This month, Rasp Pi becomes a multimedia system, then we look at three great tools to create, manage, and monitor your virtual environments.

If you’re new to this magazine, take a tour and let’s get acquainted. If you’re a long-time reader, now is your chance to find that issue or article you missed. The DVD attached to this issue comes with the latest edition of the Linux Magazine archive – 149 issues of technical Linux, spanning a history of more than 12 years. All the tips, all the apps, all the hacks …. If it matters to the open source community, chances are we’ve documented it somewhere. You’ll find in-depth articles on important tools such as Drupal, Apache, Nagios, Tripwire, and Samba. Or discover a lesser known tool that might be just what you need for a problem you’re facing right now. Build a deeper understanding of Linux by reading the complete history of Klaus Knopper’s troubleshooting advice, and chart the story of the Linux kernel through Zack’s Kernel News.

Jailbreak Spat

• White House goes on record in support of freedom to jailbreak cell phones
• News Bites

10 RHEL 6.4 Released

• Yahoo ends telecommuting,
• Canonical UDS
• LG purchases WebOS from HP

11 Passwords Passé

• FIDO alliance seeks new authentication methods
• Largest Mersenne prime discovered

• Zend Studio 10 Announced
• Django 1.5 Released
• Tizen 2.0 Now Available
• Ruby 2.0 Released

Tired of that big clunky media center unit taking up shelf space in your living room? We’ll show you how to put together a tiny multimedia system with the versatile and ever-popular Raspberry Pi.

The Proxmox Virtual Environment has developed from an insider’s tip to a free VMware ESXi/ vSphere clone. We show you how to get started setting up a PVE high-availability cluster.

Putting all virtualization tasks on a separate server saves significant resources on the client. phpVirtualBox makes it possible to create, configure, manage, and use remote VMs in a browser window.

Dynamic resource allocation and migration of virtual machines between hosts mean that VMware environments pose new monitoring challenges. A new version of the free OpenNMS network management tool now includes an option for monitoring VMware-based infrastructures.

KDE SC 4.10 was released six months after KDE 4.9, adding many new features. In the background, work is in full swing for the next generation, KDE Frameworks 5: a KDE based completely on Qt5 and QML.

Spreadsheet scripting with Google Apps Script is made possible by server-side JavaScript.

We’ll show you a practical project for monitoring home energy usage with SSH and OpenWrt.

Klaus Knopper is the creator of Knoppix and co-founder of LinuxTag expo. He works as a teacher, programmer, and consultant. If you have a configuration problem, or if you just want to learn more about how Linux works, send your questions to: klaus@linux-magazine.com

USB sticks and SD cards quickly lose their value, but if a script distributes the data across several such devices, flash memory is still useful as a fast and shockproof backup medium despite limited capacity.

XML security problems are numerous, but you can take steps to limit your exposure – or you can use a different standard.

Even state-of-the-art computers need to use clever methods to process ever-increasing amounts of document data. The open source Lucene framework uses inverted indexing for fast searches of document collections.

Occasional worries about the system status are part of the sys admin’s daily life, and admins usually keep a fat toolbox of top and stat tools to alleviate them. Charly says he can manage with just one multitool – for the time being, at least.

Linux users have an array of open source gaming options at their fingertips. We take a look at five first-person shooters that really stand out.

With the right tool and a bit of artistic talent, you can create two-dimensional cartoons, even without Flash. In this article, we present four animation programs and look at how well they perform in practice.

The mysterious /proc virtual filesystem is a rich mine of information about everything in your system.

A browser and a text editor are staples of daily computing, so it makes perfect sense to combine the two for better efficiency.

When memorizing facts, learning, storing, and processing internalizes the subject matter. The Fresh Memory program offers various methods to help you anchor the facts in your memory.

We talk with Jean Hollis Weber, a volunteer with ODFAuthors, the LibreOffice Documentation team, and the Friends of OpenDocument Inc.

Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the latest news, views, dilemmas, and developments within the Linux kernel community.

maddog looks at the progress Linux has made in the past 12 years and considers what it would take to move Windows XP users to FOSS.