The educational community has discovered open source tools in a big way. Analysts predict that schools will spend up to $489.9 million on support and services for open source software by 2012, and that only includes charges related to operating systems and learning management systems.

You can select from a set of application templates and use some simple quickly commands to create, edit code and GUI, and publish your software for others to use. Quickly's templates are easy to write. So if you are a fan of language foo, you can create a foo-project template. Or if you want to help people making plugins for your killer app, you can make a killer-app-plugin template.

cpulimit is a simple program that attempts to limit the cpu usage of a process (expressed in percentage, not in cpu time). This is useful to control batch jobs, when you don't want them to eat too much cpu. It does not act on the nice value or other scheduling priority stuff, but on the real cpu usage. Also, it is able to adapt itself to the overall system load, dynamically and quickly.

I thought it would be fun to list 10 of these old-school Linux tools and then see what other people refuse to let go of (regardless of platform). Not only will it be a trip down memory lane for some users, it might show others a tool they hadn’t thought of that could solve a perplexing problem.

Linux (and indeed Unix) has long held the philosophy of "one tool for each job, and one job for each tool." This can lead to quite a paradox for newcomers to Linux: Why are there so many tools that do similar things?

To take advantage of the excellent Linux development environment, you need to have the right tools. Here’s a rundown of some of the best ones out there and the features they have to offer.

These days everyone is looking for a bargain, and laptop manufacturers are eager to deliver. As you might expect, these cheaper netbooks often lack the performance and security features you'll find in higher-priced models. Fortunately, you can overcome many of these limitations – without spending an extra cent – by turning to open-source software.

I have been over the past 3 years writing about all these nifty little tools and applications that makes your life on Ubuntu simple and better, also allowing you to configure your Ubuntu installation easily.