Showing headlines posted by linuxmag

According to the company, Novell would consider being acquired should the right buyer come along. Could that buyer be Microsoft? And what would that mean for SUSE and the Linux ecosystem?

When it comes to system security, there’s no single correct solution. But with vigilance and these techniques, you will be five steps closer.

When other mailers aren’t doing the trick, it’s time to break out Claws: An extremely configurable and extensible GUI mailer that gives you all the control you’d ever want over your mail without sacrificing ease of use.

Some of us are still waiting for the year of the Linux desktop. Some think it’s already here. One thing is certain however, Linux does not have a majority desktop market share. By the time we get there, perhaps the entire idea of what a Desktop is will have been re-defined, thanks to “The Cloud”.

Exposing a system to the Internet means that you’ll soon (within hours) experience login attempts from random locations, from people you don’t know and from those with unclear motivations. DenyHosts is an SSH security tool in the form of a python script that helps prevent brute force and dictionary-based attacks against your systems. On my home system, I have at least one such attempt added to my /etc/hosts.deny file per day. I use DenyHosts to maintain that stealth watch over my insignificant system here in my dusty little corner of the Internet that I call home.

Bring the mightiness of Vim to Firefox! If you’re ready for a fully keyboard-driven browser, the Vimperator add-on for Firefox can help you do away with mouse-based drudgery and add the awesomeness of vi-like keybindings to Firefox 3.5 and later.

It’s popular to hate on IE8, and easy to do! But the truth is, Firefox could take a few cues from stodgy old Internet Explorer. From user-friendly features to deployment tools, there are still a few things that IE does better.

The inability to play the latest off the shelf commercial games has been a thorn in the side of Linux for a long time. With companies such as Valve starting to embrace other platforms, will that be the catalyst Linux needs to become a first class citizen?

POSIX IO is becoming a serious impediment to IO performance and scaling. POSIX is one of the standards that enabled portable programs and POSIX IO is the portion of the standard surrounding IO. But as the world of storage evolves with greatly increasing capacities and greatly increasing performance, it is time for POSIX IO to evolve or die.

Gentoo is a source based distribution which lets the user decide how to optimize their system in many ways and includes building for a specific CPU architecture. Linux Magazine benchmarks four such options; i486, i686, pentium3, core2, and throws in Ubuntu for good measure.

A confirmed GNOME superfan takes a new look at KDE 4.4 and likes it. This article isn’t a formal KDE 4.4.x review. I’m looking at it with a discerning eye and a prejudiced viewpoint. I don’t feel compelled to present a purely journalistic “fair and balanced” point-by-point arraignment of KDE. There are plenty of lighthearted reviews and cosmetic critiques of the new interface dawdling about so I dare not add another to the din. Instead, I’m stepping back into KDE from a GNOME user’s viewpoint with a single question in my mind: “Does it work yet?”

The nouveau project has done it! Finally, an open source 3D driver for NVIDIA video cards has arrived and will ship with Fedora 13. Let’s take a look (including a few benchmarks).

Psst. Hey, would you like to hear an Ubuntu secret? OK, how about five secrets?

Another year goes by without the "Year of the Linux Desktop" (whatever that means) but that doesn’t mean that Free software is standing still. What highlights have there been over the last year and what is still holding us back?

Linux’s history can be measured in both releases 2.0, 2.6, and so on, and in its major distributions, which brought these releases to the masses at large. Here’s my list of the top five major Linux distributions that had the most impact in the operating system’s brief history.

Do you think that converting your clunky, maintenance-burdened physical desktop OS to a clunky, maintenance-burdened VM will save you some money? Think again.

Android is maturing, both for developers and consumers. Will it dominate the mobile market? 2010 may bring the answer. Two years ago I began writing a book about writing applications for Android. Back then, most people had not heard of Android — in fact, unless you’re a phone-geek or a Linux fan, you may still not have heard of Android. When asked to describe my project, I simply described it as a book for folks like me who want to write software for the “Google Phone”. Of course, a “Google Phone” really didn’t exist at the time. But now, as 2010 approaches, rumors abound about the new phone built just for Google, named the “Nexus One”.

When dealing with large distributed systems, knowing some basic performance and failure numbers helps you understand what you can reasonably expect both in terms of performance and reliability.

If personal computing is moving to the web, then where are all the lightweight Cloud focused distributions? Meet xPUD, a brilliant little distro that boots straight to a fullscreen browser. It uses a simple, unique interface, and includes everyday software such as a media player and more! We talk with the lead developer about what makes this operating system unique.

How can users protect themselves from the loss of important data when a computer goes missing? Well, the latest release of Ubuntu makes this not only possible, but frighteningly easy!