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Now there is an official date for the release of Debian 7 “Wheezy”: it will be between 4 and May 5. Neil McGovern, on behalf of the project development team has officially communicated this on the Debian mailing list. We now have a target date of the weekend of 4th/5th May for the release. We have checked with core teams, and this seems to be acceptable for everyone. This means we are able to begin the final preparations for a release of Debian 7.0 – “Wheezy”. Date will change only if a critical problem arise in the while.

Recently I’ve posted an article about the Windows manager and desktop environments that use less resources on Linux and thanks to a comment of Sebastian I’ve discovered Livarp, a lightweight GNU/Linux Distro. Livarp is a DEBIAN-based distro that tries to take the best part of available Debian GNU/Linux applications without loosing accessibility or design, special attention was paid to the documentation that in a simple page collects all the most important information you need to know on the available software of this distribution and how to configure it.

Fail2ban is an intrusion prevention framework written in the Python programming language. Fail2ban’s main function is to block selected IP addresses that may belong to hosts that are trying to breach the system’s security. It determines the hosts to be blocked by monitoring log files (e.g. /var/log/pwdfail, /var/log/auth.log, etc.) and bans any host IP that makes too many login attempts or performs any other unwanted action within a time frame defined by the administrator. Today I want to show you some configurations that you can use to improve the security of your Apache.

One of the main features of Linux is to provide a complete and functional operating system that can completely work also on dated PC where Windows XP has now become too old and the new Windows 7 requires too many resources. Linux can revive pc set aside because the hardware is no longer supported by Microsoft operating system and so providing a fast, complete and secure environment. On GNU/Linux there are many desktop environments some specially designed to be lightweight but at the same time they offer customization, effects etc.. In this article we will see some of the “light” desktop environments for Linux, the consumption of resources required and how to install them.

Proxmox Virtual Environment, the open-source server vitualization platform, is celebrating its 5th anniversary today. When Vienna Proxmox Server Solutions launched the first version of Proxmox VE V0.9 on April 15, 2008 – exactly five years ago – the software was the first open-source solution providing an integrated GUI for KVM and container-virtualization. With this approach IT administrators can manage their KVM and OpenVZ containers easily via a web-based interface. In the last five years Proxmox VE has become the mainstream open-source business alternative to commercial virtualization platforms like VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Oracle VM or Citrix XenServer.

Scrot (SCReenshOT) is a screen capture utility using the imlib2 library to aquire and save images. scrot has a few really interesting options, detailed below. The basic usage is to specify a [file] as the filename to save the screenshot to and scrot will take a screenshot of the whole desktop. The latest release (0.8) has almost 10 years, still this small program can be useful for his ability to be run completely from the command line and so you could use it to concatenate other commands or just because it’s really lightweight and easy to use.

As a system administrator, Linux security technician or system auditor, your responsibility can involve any combination of these: software patch management, malware scanning, file integrity checks, security audit, configuration error checking, etc. If there is an automatic vulnerability scanning tool, it can save you a lot of time checking up on common security issues. One such vulnerability scanner on Linux is lynis. This tool is actually supported on multiple platforms including CentOS, Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD, Mac OS and Ubuntu.

Atom Zombie Smasher is a real-time strategy game developed by independent developer Blendo Games. In it, the player attempts to rescue as many citizens as possible from an oncoming zombie horde using helicopter rescue units and an array of military units to protect the citizens and defeat the zombies.

This is a game released on 2011 and I’ve talked about it in my article 5 zombies games on Linux so why talking about it as news ?

Because it’s this week star at the Humble Weekly Sale

ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems. The features of ZFS include protection against data corruption, support for high storage capacities, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, snapshots and copy-on-write clones, continuous integrity checking and automatic repair, RAID-Z and native NFSv4 ACLs. And now after more than two years in the experimental stage, the ZFS file system for Linux is ready for widespread use.

A fantasy-based strategy game with a decidedly medieval flavor, Conquest of Elysium 3 is an excellent diversion for those on the Linux platform, although it is available for the PC and Mac as well. With a host of colorful main characters to choose from and a beguiling strategy-based gameplay, Conquest of Elysium 3 offers pretty much everything for everybody.

Serial ATA (SATA) is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives and optical drives. Serial ATA replaces the older AT Attachment standard (ATA; later referred to as Parallel ATA or PATA), offering several advantages over the older interface: reduced cable size and cost (seven conductors instead of 40), native hot swapping, faster data transfer through higher signalling rates, and more efficient transfer through an (optional) I/O queuing protocol.

More and more games are published for Linux and so it’s becoming more important to have a good performance with our beloved system, but some of the Desktop Environemnts can really slow down your gaming experience.

Certainly I ignited a small fire regarding the Open Source Office Suites Versus Microsoft Office. Let me state several things for the record.

This required more time if compared to Libreoffice versus Open Office, but it seem that the critical mass of users of another piece of open source software is moving away from Oracle, I’m talking about Mysql versus MariaDB. Mysql is probably the most used open source database, it’s used in most of the more successful LAMP applications, such as WordPress, Drupal or Magento, after all the M of LAMP was an acronim for Mysql until today. All started back in February 2013 when two large open source projects, Fedora and openSUSE, announced their intention to abandon the venerable MySQL database, now a property of Oracle, and adopt instead MariaDB.

A lot of sniffers, rootkits, botnets, backdoor shells and malwares are still on the wild today, which are used by malicious attackers after successfully pawning a certain server or any live network in order to maintain their access, elevate their access privilege, and spy other users in a network. In order to protect our network or server from such intrusions and further damage, there are free and open source detection tools that can be deployed and used as part of our security strategy. They are mandatory when our server or network is up and running, especially if a certain user is downloading a file which could possibly be malicious or harmful.

The tool that usually I use to download from the command line is wget, it’s simple to use and it’s installed (or easily installable) on any system, but if you want something that can do the same job in a smarter and faster way you must really test Aria2. Aria2 is a lightweight multi-protocol & multi-source command-line download utility. It supports HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, BitTorrent and Metalink. aria2 can be manipulated via built-in JSON-RPC and XML-RPC interfaces, let’s see some practical use and examples.

Cuttlefish is a tool which can execute various actions when specific events are triggered, and it allows you to create events that only happen under certain circumstances. For example, you could set a condition/reaction such as “when the lan network is connected start Transmission”, or “Unmute the audio when I start Banshee and mute it when I close Banshee”. The nice things of this program is that it’s completely configurable via a nice graphical interface that makes the creation of any task extremely easy and intuitive. The software is wrote in python, open source and is born on Ubuntu as “Ubuntu app” and so it’s easily installable on this distribution or Derivate, there is a package from AUR for Arch Linux and I’m sure soon you’ll find it for any distribution.

CPU-Z is a freeware system profiler (system monitor) application for Microsoft Windows (for all versions from Windows XP on) that detects the central processing unit, RAM, motherboard chipset, and other hardware features of a modern personal computer, and presents the information in one window.

I hate typing long shell commands, so I often create for myself short shell scripts that perform common tasks for me. I can hard-code all those options and arguments. Sometimes, though, there are a few bits that I want to change on a run or I don’t want to hard code into a shell script. Here’s an excellent example: I don’t want my password stored in a shell script. Ideally, what I want is to be prompted for my password. There is a very simple shell built-in that you can use to do this: read. Here’s how it’s used.

Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message, a form of security through obscurity. And now that we have saw the definition of this word, let’s take a look at three open source programs for Linux that you can use to play with this concept: Steghide and Outguess and one closed source Steg