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Today's IT managers face tough choices. PCs that run fine today have an uncertain upgrade path, now that Microsoft has chosen to discontinue Windows XP. Upgrade costs associated with Vista, coupled with the ever-escalating cost of application licenses, make switching to desktop Linux an increasingly attractive option. For many businesses, however, it's difficult to know where to begin. The Linux market is broad and thriving, with myriad options to choose from. Most organizations will want to phase in Linux gradually, which in many cases will mean supporting a heterogeneous computing environment for the first time. As a result, it can be hard to predict where software incompatibilities might affect critical business processes.

Linux is a hacker’s dream computer operating system. It supports tons of tools and utilities for cracking passwords, scanning network vulnerabilities, and detecting possible intrusions. I have here a collection of 10 of the best hacking and security software tools for Linux. Please always keep in mind that these tools are not meant to harm, but to protect.

Today Linux desktop manufacturer Xandros acquired Linspire for an undisclosed amount. Xandros will also be keeping existing engineering, support, and key sales employees and long-time Linspire employee and CEO Larry Kettler will be joining the Xandros executive team as the VP of Business Development. While Xandros didn't mention their total employee numbers Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos claims Xandros to be the third largest Linux company in the world after the acquisition. Former Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony has some harsh criticism of the deal on his blog.

A controlled dial-on-demand router is a convenient tool. An uncontrolled dial-on-demand router is not. The Wireshark network protocol analyzer helped me track down the cause of some strange and unwanted dialup connections. Wireshark is a 20MB download. The GPL-licensed utility runs under Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, and Windows. The problems I needed to solve were all with a Windows client. My SMC Barricade 7004AWBR wireless router has an RS-232 port and can control an external modem, which I use for Internet connectivity. While there is quite a bit of Ethernet traffic on my network between several Windows machines and a Linux server, only a small portion of the traffic is addressed to the gateway, calling for an outside connection. Connections are made automatically if required, and if the connection is idle for a specified interval, the router quietly drops the connection and waits for later requests to dial out again.

Venture funding for open-source companies rose to $115 million in the second quarter, a 14 percent increase over the same period a year ago, according to The 451 Group. And funding for the first half of the year is up 62 percent over the first half of 2007. That's all the good news. The bad news is that seed and series A funding remains anemic and may continue to remain so while venture-backed companies struggle generally to find a public exit, i.e. an initial public offering. In the second quarter, there were exactly zero IPOs for venture-backed companies--whether they were open source or otherwise.

There's something strange going on. As Bill Gates steps down from active involvement in the day-to-day running of Microsoft, there's a natural tendency to speak about the “end of an era”. That's certainly true enough, but people are going beyond this factual statement to indulge in some serious revisionism.

If you need a very easy to install, feature complete Linux distribution, do not look any further than PCLinuxOS. This gem of a distribution is an absolute joy to use.

A simple command line procedure for making one-off backups of some large files to DVDs or a USB drive. Update and correction.

Why pay $650 for Adobe Photoshop when you can have 97 percent of the functionality of Photoshop for free? That's a question software developers and distributors plan on addressing at "Lindependence 2008," a free event in Felton starting July 13, which promoting the Linux operating system and other Free/Open Source Software.

Microsoft Corp. today unveiled projects to improve data portability between Office 2007 and other document file formats, including the design of a new translator for exchanging OOXML (Office Open XML) and HTML documents. The company also posted the 1.0 version of technical documentation for protocols in Office and other software that enable those applications to interact with third-party programs.

Apple's OS X, which has been an official certified Unix system for some time now, is often installed onto Internet-exposed or intranet-only Web servers for serving up dynamic content. I've worked with such configurations for a couple of years, and with GNU/Linux alternatives for even longer. There are at least three reasons why GNU/Linux systems do the job better. Web servers are key corporate assets, and systems administrators are supposed to keep them humming along, but that's not always easy. Security is always an issue for sites, as shown by daily vulnerability reports and security advisories. Performance, in terms of load time and response time, is another key issue. Customers get frustrated if it takes longer to add something to their browser's shopping cart than it would take them to visit a nonvirtual shop to buy it there. Sysadmins also must focus on availability. If your site is down, you'll lose all the benefits an otherwise well-administrated Web site provides.

Back in March we had looked at the Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 mobile processor with its Penryn core and 6MB of shared L2 cache between its two cores clocked at 2.50GHz. We were very pleased with the performance of this mobile processor on Linux, which was found within a Lenovo ThinkPad T61 notebook, and today we are looking at the Penryn's desktop counterpart. Intel's Core 2 Duo "Wolfdale" E8000 series processors were released earlier this year with 6MB of L2 cache, 45nm manufacturing, a 1333MHz FSB, and support for SSE 4.1. The processor from the Wolfdale series we are looking at today under Linux is the Core 2 Duo E8400.

Bonnie++ allows you to benchmark how your filesystems perform various tasks, which makes it a valuable tool when you are making changes to how your RAID is set up, how your filesystems are created, or how your network filesystems perform. Bonnie++ is available for openSUSE 10.3 as a 1-Click, for Ubuntu Hardy, and in the standard Fedora 9 repositories. I installed Bonnie++ from the 64-bit Fedora 9 repositories. The packages for Ubuntu and Fedora both install Bonnie++ into /usr/sbin, while openSUSE installs into /usr/bin. Bonnie++ will complain and fail to work if invoked as the root user, but if Bonnie++ is installed into /usr/sbin instead of /usr/bin, to invoke Bonnie++ as a regular user you will probably have to include its full path.

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install VMware Server (version 1.0.6) on an Ubuntu 8.04 desktop system. With VMware Server you can create and run guest operating systems ("virtual machines") such as Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, etc. under a host operating system. This has the benefit that you can run multiple operating systems on the same hardware which saves a lot of money, and you can move virtual machines from one VMware Server to the next one (or to a system that has the VMware Player which is also free).

How to find out what options a command takes, and what it does, when you have no clue what it's used for and don't want to make a huge mess!

OK, so over the past few months I’ve grown from being a Linux skeptic into being quite a Linux fan. I’ve still got lots to learn but it’s great having the ability to roll out a no-cost OS onto systems that don’t need to have Windows on them (I understand that not everyone reading this will need Linux, but I do …). That said, there are a few aspects of Linux that do annoy/frustrate/anger me/make me hulk out* (delete as overall mood dictates), and one of these aspects is so core to an OS that I’m surprised that it hasn’t been addressed already.

Firefox 3 has been out for two weeks now, so get with the program: It's time to hack it. The newest version of Mozilla's browser has plenty of new features, including the site identification button, the Bookmarks Library and what has become known as the "Awesome Bar" -- and I'll show you how to hack them all. You can also force the browser to use Gmail for mailto: links, discover a hidden "Easter egg" and more. So fire up your browser and get ready to teach it some new tricks.

Due to some issues with the PlayOnLinux's IRC server, the integrated IRC client now connects you directly at irc.freenode.com, on the #playonlinux channel other new thing, independent from the POL's version: there is one channel per language. So you can now join one of the following channels, depending on the language you want to speak.

In math, two negatives make a positive. In the fledgling world of desktop Linux, unfortunately, this is unlikely to be the case. According to reports from OStatic and others, Xandros is buying Linspire. Who cares, you ask?

Freedom has many facets. I wanted to capture many of these in this song I composed and uploaded to YouTube.