A few years ago, the great epic battle of the IT industry was all about operating systems. MS-DOS versus OS/ 2, Windows verses Mac. Novell NetWare rode the wave of the network operating system for a while, until Microsoft punched back with Windows NT. The first couple of years I was in my editor’s chair, it seemed like every month we were writing about some hyperbolic new FUD from Microsoft as it sought to bring down Linux.

The DVD attached to this issue brings you a pair of the world’s most popular Linux distributions. Mint 15 “Olivia” is the latest release from the ever-friendly Linux Mint, a desktop distro based on Debian and Ubuntu that keeps the emphasis on simplicity and ease of use. Mint tops the DistroWatch downloads list and describes itself as: “The 4th most popular home operating system after Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS, and Canonical’s Ubuntu.”

• RHEV 3.2 released
• FreeBSD 8.4 Released
• Cisco Introduces New Backbone Routers
• AMD Chips, Strategies, and Roadmap
• Java Enterprise Edition 7 Released
• Crafter Studio 2.2

Full-text search engines like Solr, Xapian, and Sphinx make the daily data chaos on your hard disk searchable – and they even cooperate with relational databases.

openATTIC promises open source, unified storage management for heterogeneous media. The easy web interface even supports network drives accessed through SMB and NFS.

When a computer is lost, your data falling into the wrong hands is often more serious than the loss of hardware. In this article, we explain how to use LUKS and ZFS to encrypt a system so you can keep your privacy when you lose your laptop.

MongoDB combines the usual advantages of NoSQL databases with sharding, load balancing, replication, and failover.

If you want to enjoy all the benefits of a cloud solution without losing control of your data, AeroFS offers an intelligent solution.

6 Linux tools reviewed for your pleasure.

Thanks to the scalability of Amazon's web services, the Angry Birds shop and its databases do not fail even when visited by a teaming mass of bird lovers.