Showing all newswire headlines

While many today see Linux as a "just download it" or "just buy it" product, it hasn't always been that way. Installfests were actually the norm. Well, that's what is happening in Nicaragua. I received the following announcement in email—not from a geek mailing list but from the list of a social rights activists.read more

Secret knocks have been used for purposes as simple and childish as identifying friend or foe during a schoolyard fort war. Fraternities teach these knocks as a rite of passage into their society, and in our security world we can implement this layer of security to lock down an SSH server. With this guide on FWKNP by Eckie S. (one of our own), you are taken on an easy-to-follow process of securing your platform with your own client and server port knocking set-up. Installation, iptable Rules setup, configuring access for the client and server, and everything in between. Check it out!

Linspire has announced the beta of CNR.com, its online tool for easily installing Linux-based software onto the desktop.

8GB of flash storage is currently the best you can hope for in a standard (though imported) Eee PC. However, if you're industrious and determined enough, you can marry your 4GB Eee with a $150 (or so) 16GB Corsair Flash Voyager drive for a full 20GB of storage. That's exactly what Johnx did over at eeeuser.com.

[Only sideways related to Linux, but very cool nonetheless - Sander]

Guardian Digital is proud to announce the newest release for EnGarde Secure Linux Community. One of the open source community's oldest secure server distributions (2001), EnGarde is a fully-functional platform for DNS and email functionality, integrated intrusion detection and SELinux policies, advanced kernel and network security features, virtualization capabilities, robust engineering, graphical auditing and reporting and more.

Last wednesday I ordered a new laptop. I’ll definitely be installing Vista on it, if only for gaming and DirectX 10, but I also plan to use it as an excuse to get to grips with Linux. I’ve read many accounts of the various distributions of Linux, and they all agree on a few things: It’s massively more stable than Windows, there are so few viruses, they’re not even worth worrying about and it’s fast. Why wait for the laptop to arrive, I asked myself? I cleared up some space on my second hard drive, downloaded the latest Ubuntu release, and gave it a go. This is my account of it, as a completely new user.

One of the frustrations of an easy install from one CD is that regardless of your processor, you will get a generic kernel that may not be well suited for your hardware. This tutorial shows you how to upgrade from the generic kernel that is designed for the Desktop to a kernel that provides better use of a higher end CPU.

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of CentOS-5.1 for the i386 and x86_64 Architectures. CentOS-5.1 is based on the upstream release 5.1, and includes packages from all variants including Server and Client. All upstream repositories have been combined into one, to make it easier for end users to work with. And the option to further enable external repositories at install time is now available in the installer.

The appearance in the past year of so-called "completely libre" distributions such as gNewSense and Gobuntu, especially against the backdrop of existing distributions, like BLAG, Dyne:bolic, Ututo and others, might seem to point to an increased interest in software freedom. Should we be looking for the "rise of the completely libre distros", or is there something more subtle that we should notice?

I’ve now updated to the latest openSUSE KDE4 Packages and got another video (first one being: KDE 4.0 RC1+ Video Tour) to add, and it’s one all about the new KDE 4.0 KWin composite; that is, the new desktop effects that will be available with KDE 4.0. You will no longer need to run Compiz to get many standard and convenient composite features: they will be available right inside KDE.

Mozilla's chief operating officer, John Lilly, revealed in a recent blog posting that the company estimated the number of Firefox users as at least 125 million, double from a year ago. This figure appears to be very conservative, however, and it does not seem to account for Linux users. But the good news is that it is growing rapidly.

The mayor of Birmingham, Alabama has agreed to purchase 15,000 of OLPC's XO laptops. The laptops will be given to children in grades one through eight. This will be the first major sale of XO laptops to a US school system.

This guide shows how you can create a Live-CD from your Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon or Linux Mint 4.0 system with a tool called remastersys. Remastersys is available in the Linux Mint romeo repository. You can customize your Ubuntu/Linux Mint system and then let remastersys create an iso image of it which you can then burn onto a CD/DVD.

A little while ago, I posted a blog entry that dealt with reasons why small businesses really should consider using Linux. I listed the freedom from vendor lock-in as one very important consideration and specifically stated that vendor lock-in here refers to data formats, not even specifically to Linux. Surprisingly (or not?), I got a very strange and negative reaction from some of my readers. They started to talk about Linux distro lock-in...

For the last year I've waged war across my desktop, wiping out Microsoft fortifications and bunkers in anticipation of abandoning Windows, but Redmond's last remaining stronghold is the Outlook Calendar.

Have ready some clean towels and a cardboard box, Sun Microsystems is whelping the first in a litter of virtualization products next month. Sun is sneaking off to a nice quiet closet to birth xVM Ops Center, the physical and virtual resource management stack for the xVM product family. This puppy will be available January 8, 2008. The software is based on the open-source Xen hypervisor project. The lineup will eventually center around xVM Server (the hypervisor part) and xVM Ops Center (the management part). Sun is heralding in Ops by releasing the source code used to build the software on the OpenxVM.org community site this month. The Common Agent Container source code will hit Dec. 10, 2007.

Looking for a lightweight Linux alternative? Damn Small Linux 4.1 is now available and clocks in at under 49MB in size. Get a copy and run it from CD, hard disk or even boot from a USB stick.

A friend of mine kept going on about how amazing Ubuntu was. He showed me some YouTube videos of the Beryl/Compiz interfaces and I got really excited. He assured me that it was possible to run it on my laptop. That night I installed it (it took a week to get everything working) and I haven’t used Windows since. I’m now on my second laptop (my old one didn’t have a good enough graphics card) and have since installed Ubuntu 7.10 (fresh install). I don’t hate Ubuntu (or Linux for that matter), I just have a long list of things that I hate about it.

[How often can you miss the ball in a single article? Quite a lot it appears... - Sander]

Gartner has gone on the warpath, smacking down proprietary vendors' practice of discounting upfront license fees in order to lock customers into lucrative, ongoing maintenance contracts. The ironic thing is that it sounds somewhat similar to how commercial open-source companies price their software, except that there is no upfront license fees.

Towards the middle of last month, NVIDIA had released the 169.04 Beta Linux Driver. The change-log was quite lengthy and what we had discovered while benchmarking the GeForce 8 series was that there were improvements to be found in this release and it was far more than a simple version bump. One of the reported changes for this driver release was "improved RENDER performance", and out of requests from readers and interest by the Linux desktop community at large, we have conducted XRender benchmarks using render_bench and have the NVIDIA results available today.