Another great format war ended this week, with Blu-Ray to 70% of released films and, according to the Financial Times, HD-DVD left with one major studio. HD-DVD owners are either mildly put out, or happy they can now pick up HD movies for a few dollars as they’re tossed out by major retailers.

We’ve been here before: whether RealPlayer versus Windows Media, BSD versus Linux, or boxers versus briefs. Let’s take a look back at some of the great format wars of our time.

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The following guide allows you to wirelessly sync an iPhone with Amarok in Ubuntu 7.10, including:

• adding, editing and playing songs to the iPhone
• creating and copying playlists to the iPhone
• copy songs from iPhone to the Amarok library

It takes less than 10 minutes, and is completely graphical. Read the rest of this entry »

Need to access your Mac files from Linux? Downloaded something on one OS and need to put it on the other? Sharing files between OS X and Ubuntu is easy. The following guide takes 10 seconds and doesn’t involve any terminal usage or extra software.

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Bash, the default shell in Linux and OS X, loses history data after running multiple shells at the same time - for example, using multiple tabs in the terminal. The fix is simple, but not widely known.

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Although Distrowatch may say your mate’s homemade Linux rules the world, we’ve always been Google Trends fans. When reconfirming that the big three - Ubuntu, Fedora, and OpenSuSE - are still the most popular Linux distros, we noticed that Ubuntu has reached another milestone entirely.

Ubuntu is the first Linux distribution to overtake Jesus in Google Trends, establishing a firm lead over the bearded one since the end of Q1 this year.

To help explain the results (and to help distinguish the two if you’re confused) we’ve produced following handy comparison chart.

Bloomberg believe VMware’s IPO today may the largest technology offering since Google. But doubts have been cast over the company’s supposedly proprietary ESX product, which may be derived from Linux.

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Amazon’s web services have been around for a while now. The Elastic Compute Cloud provides incredibly cheap Xen based virtualization, and Simple Storage Service provides terabytes of storage for around the cost of a cinema candy (and not the expensive cinema candy either).

They’re popular with a bunch of startups, including 37Signals’ Basecamp, but haven’t been suitable to run a full LAMP stack based server.

Until now.

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Amazon uses Linux. eBay uses Windows Solaris. But what OSs and webservers run Web 2.0? We tested 17 of our favorites and found out. The script is included below to check for yourself.

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This simple guide will bring up the Windows start menu inside GNOME and allow you to run, use and install any Windows app (that can run in a VM) inside your existing desktop. It takes about 10 minutes to setup, minus the time to install Windows, and involves one command in total.

Final Update September 2007: Virtualbox 1.5 includes seamless virtualization! Go read about that instead!

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We love GNOME. Sometime around 2.6 it started becoming really, really damned good, and a lot faster and more responsive. All kinds of nice things like Network Manager, the Nautilus CD burner and the SFTP support popped up. It helps that most major Linux apps like like Firefox, Evolution, GAIM, and OpenOffice use the same toolkit and themes too. Obviously we’re not alone either: Ubuntu, RHEL and SuSE all use GNOME by default.

Here’s a bunch of ideas to improve it.

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