What happens when you feed an ODT document created with OpenOffice to a word processor like AbiWord, KWord, or Writely? Read on to find out.

With a little help from the ODF plugin, Microsoft Office can open up documents saved in the free Open Document format. A short test reveals just how well it works.

If OpenOffice is too fat and feature-rich for your taste, try one of the office alternatives. We found much to like and much to wish for when we put six office suites to the test.

A mobile office without a laptop? No problem – a new generation of web applications converts your browser into a word processor or spreadsheet.

OpenDocument format offers a new approach to data storage and document exchange for office applications. But what does ODF mean for the user? What’s inside an ODF file? How portable is ODF? We examine these questions in this month’s cover story.

Whether you are troubleshooting or just configuring for efficiency, it is a good idea to explore your options for accessing your Windows partitions from Linux.

The ntfsprogs toolset lets you manage NTFS resources from the Linux command line.

Captive offers access to NTFS through the original Windows driver. We tried out Captive 1.1.7 in a real-world dual-boot scenario with low-end hardware.

A Linux live distro may be just what you need to recover a Windows computer brought down by a system problem or virus attack. Knoppix creator Klaus Knopper gives you some tips for accessing NTFS from live Linux.

Modern websites bear little resemblence to their legacy predecessors. We’ll show you why the new web is different and how you can benefit from the system of technologies we know collectively as Web 2.0.

AJAX offers a fast and efficient approach for building interactive websites. We’ll show you how to call upon the powers of AJAX for your own web creations.

If you are thinking about starting a wiki, and you don’t want the overhead of a full-scale, database-driven system, try these light and lean wiki wonders.

TiddlyWiki brings the spirit of the new Internet to a tiny scale. We’ll show you how to get organized with this wiki for one.

Today’s computers are fast enough for some very sophisticated cryptography techniques. We’ll show you how to keep your data safe from the prying eyes of snoops and spies.

If you’re not a security expert and you're looking for a crypto filesystem, you may be wondering about the alternatives. We took at a look at some popular crypto options for Linux.

Encrypting a home directory is easy. Encrypting your whole hard disk – including the root filesystem – takes a little more effort.

An encrypted hard disk on your server is no help if valuable data on CDs or DVDs falls into the hands of spies. We’ll show you some convenient solutions for encrypting data on removable media.

Hotplugging is invisible and automatic – if you want it to be. But a close look at the Linux hotplug system reveals interesting opportunities for customization.

Debian hotplug is designed for little more than loading drivers and configuring devices. The collection of scripts discussed in this article helps Linux to respond when a network cable is plugged in or when a cellphone is in the vicinity. Read on for more on how to define custom hotplug events.

Better knowledge of the Linux hotplug system opens the door to to innovation and automation. We’ll show you a custom backup solution for laptop computers.

After three years of hanging around on the sidelines, Udev has finally ousted the legacy Dev-FS system. We take a look under the hood at the Udev device management system inside your Linux system.