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If you've ever had that sick realization that you made a mistake immediately after emptying your Trash or deleting a file with Shift-Del, then Magic Rescue may be the cure you're looking for. Magic Rescue searches block devices for particular file types, then restores them to a designated directory where you can sort through them. Although subject to certain limitations, such as how recently a file was deleted and the availability of a definition for the file header of a given format, Magic Rescue is not difficult to use. It even features a man page with a few mini-tutorials. However, it does require organization and planning in order to use effectively.

Plug-in development in Eclipse is somewhat of an art form. If you're new to the concept of plug-ins it can be quite burdensome learning the myriad tools Eclipse has to help you write plug-ins. The purpose of this article is to help you learn some basic plug-in development skills with some best practices sprinkled in for good measure.

Whether it is a big or small update, every month AMD releases a new Catalyst package for both Linux and Windows for their supported ATI Radeon products. Last month in the Catalyst 8.01 Linux driver the changes had just consisted of a few bug fixes and nothing more. Today the Catalyst 8.02 Linux driver has been released, and like last month, it's short on the change-log. The fglrx changes are very brief and the driver version is still in the 8.45 release stream and wasn't even bumped to 8.46.x.

Have you ever said, "This program is pretty nice, but I wish it would ..."? For applications that offer the capability, scripting gives users the ability to customize, extend, and tailor a program to meet their needs. Scribus, a free page layout program that runs on Linux (and Mac OS and Windows) uses the Python programming language for user scripting. Python scripting in Scribus can drastically improve your work flow, and it's relatively easy for beginners to not only use scripts, but also write them.

Unlike a lot of the events that I discuss in my Blog, the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit is a "by invitation only" event with a twist. Normally for "invitation only events", the potential attendee sits by the phone with their prom clothes on, waiting for the call that may or may not come. In this case the Linux Foundation wishes to engage "leaders of the development, ISV, distro, end user, non-profit and vendor communities". In other words, a representative form of governance, rather than a full democracy. Therefore leaders of various communities are encouraged to apply, with no guarantee of admission.

After a number of years in development Linux Test Drive is becoming a reality, from the page:

The Free and Open Source Developers conference, one of Europe's finest free technical conferences, opens its doors Saturday the 23th in Brussels, Belgium. In anticipation of the main track talks, a batch of interviews with FLOSS project leaders have been published at the FOSDEM website. You can read up on Linux in Hollywood, Perl6, klik2 and much more at fosdem.org/2008/interviews. The event features a busy line-up of project development rooms, a Lightning Talk track and a social beer tasting event the night before.

Sangoma produces telephony cards and writes drivers that work with open source applications such as Asterisk, Yate, FreeSwitch, and CallWeaver. Sangoma CEO and founder David Mandelstam says that before Sangoma started producing cards to work with Asterisk, the open source project was "kind of a toy for hobbyists."

Today’s the first day of the largest-ever JBoss World! To celebrate, we’re giving you a few links to bloggers who are talking about it. What’s below are just clips from what they’ve posted so far. Watch JBoss bloggers and check back here to find out more as the event goes on.

Yesterday I went on about the man page for fvwm, the default X window manager in OpenBSD. It clearly says that, in the absence of a .fvwmrc file in the user's home directory, fvwm will look in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fvwm/ for a file called system.fvwmrc ... There's a file called system.fvwm2rc in that directory, but it doesn't control fvwm. I know this because I added a line to it, stopped X and restarted it. No change.

I hate accounting. The one accounting class I took in college proved that to me. The fact that I could get an A in the class by doing one homework problem and copying all the others during class was only part of the reason. But, it's related. I hate doing the same thing over and over and, to me, that is exactly what accounting is.

Having a great defense involves proper detection and recognition of an attack. In our security world we have great IDS tools to properly recognize when we are being attacked as well as firewalls to prevent such attacks from happening. However, certain attacks are not blindly thrown at you - a good attacker knows that a certain amount of reconnaissance and knowledge about your defenses greatly increases the chances of a successful attack. How would you know if someone is scanning your defenses? Is there any way to properly respond to such scans? You bet there is...

Some of us use Linux, some of us tell others about Linux, and a smaller percentage of people Advocate Linux. Let me introduce you to a true Open Source Advocate. Freedomeware indeed. Let the bell toll, let the news be heard. Now if we can all do about 1/10th of what this guy does, we can say we've truly helped spread the word. Let's take a look at some of the work this Author has done.

South African Linux and open source specialists, Obsidian, will from March be offering official training for the Ubuntu Certified Professional programme. In terms of the deal with Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu Linux, Obsidian will start offering the training from March 2008. Obsidian will be provide both Ubuntu Professional Courses 1 and 2 for system administrators wanting to pass the required Linux Professional Institute 101 and 102 and Ubuntu 199 exams to achieve the Ubuntu Certified Professional certification.

AMD has today launched their new open GPU documentation website for register-level documents covering their ATI Radeon products. In addition, they are now providing an email address for any open-source developers who may have questions concerning these documents.

With the number of CPU cores in desktop machines moving from two to four and soon eight, the ability to execute computationally expensive tasks in parallel is becoming more important. The mgzip tools that can take advantage of multiple CPU cores during file compression, while pbzip2 uses multiple cores for both compression and decompression.

This article reports that Sun Microsystem has acquired Innotek the makers of Virtualbox. Sun asserts that Virtualbox will remain open source and will compliment Sun's xVM Server products which addresses both desktop and server virtualization. It was only a few weeks back that Sun had acquired MySQL for a cool billion dollars.

When users say the documentation is excellent in the BSD operating systems, they're not lying. Besides the excellent handbook/FAQs available for download or online browsing for NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD, the man pages are way more valuable than I ever though. In OpenBSD, they're up to date -- and they have plenty of plain language throughout.

The Slackware team has released some kernel patches to fix the local root exploit you have probably read about recently. It seems that the updated kernel was available yesterday, but a lot of people, including us, did not receive the security advisory email due to some recent work on the mail server.

Presens Technologies is the newest "Advanced Business Partner" to Red Hat, and will provide software, hardware and application services using Red Hat's open-source platforms to clients, according to an announcement. he Winston-Salem-based Presens serves more than 1,500 clients and will continue to support other software platforms besides Red Hat, the company said.