Showing all newswire headlines

Several weeks ago, I was flying west past Chicago, watching the ground slide by below, when I spotted the signature figure eight of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, better known as Fermilab. I shot some pictures, which I put up at the Linux Journal Flickr pool (Flickr also uses Linux). I figured Fermilab naturally would use Linux, and found that Fermilab has its own distro: Fermi Linux. Its public site provides a nice window into a highly professional and focused usage of Linux. Within Fermi Linux, specific generations are known as Scientific Linux Fermi, each with version numbers and the code names Charm, Strange, Top, Bottom, Up, Feynmann, Wilson and Lederman.

It's been a while since we've taken any time to look at any formal systems or number systems (all the way back to The M I U Puzzle, so today we're going to kick off a quick beginner post that is, somewhat Linux and Unix independent(although we'll be scripting and using Linux/Unix tools to do this work for us in future posts). It's going to segue into something more complicated in a future post, but, for today, we're just going to lay the groundwork. In fact, the beginnings of this process will seem almost brain-dead simple. Which is okay, because they pretty much are ;)

In the first part of the libpcap series a rudimentry packet reader (or sniffer) was built which could read and print tcp/ip traffic on a particular interface. In the second text a look at some simple checks of the data itself, adding options like interface selection, libpcap filter options and verbosity levels. Some of the checks included are:

• IP Packet Truncation
• IP Header Length
• Ethernet Header Length

The filter options are eventually passed exactly like tcpdump using the tcpdump argv vector copy.

  Text

Before the big launch, the Jesus Phone accounted for just 0.16 percent of the operating system market as measured by web browsing usage. After the iPhone 3G hit the streets that global share shot up to 0.3 percent. Linux, meanwhile, currently has a 0.93 percent share...

In the latest twist in the OOXML - ODF document format story, ISO and IEC, two of the most venerable standards organizations In the world, have been dealt a slap by government IT agencies in six countries.

One of the essential ingredients to running a successful business is maintaining an advantage over your competition. Many different types of computer software can significantly enhance performance at the workplace, or in the home. A polished office suite, a reliable backup system, an intuitive desktop environment, even a welcome break from reality with an immersive game all have their part to play in helping users achieve their maximum potential. However, this article focuses predominately on software that helps individuals organise their day, capture and retrieve information, assist them fulfilling their various roles in life (whether as a parent, employer, employee, good neighbour etc), as well as streamlining the desktop.

Deluge is a full-featured free opensource BitTorrent client for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. It uses libtorrent in it’s backend and PyGTK for it’s user interface. Deluge was created with the intention of being lightweight and unobtrusive. Deluge features a rich plugin collection; in fact, most of Deluge’s functionality is available in the form of plugins. Deluge is not designed for any one specific desktop environment and will work just fine in GNOME, KDE, XFCE and others.

To no one's surprise, except perhaps the New York Times, internet traffic is going global, and more so with each passing year. The result is that more traffic is flowing through servers outside the United States. The chief concern about this development, according to the NYT article, was the fact that it has made it more difficult for US intelligence agencies to spy on internet traffic.

For a time, GNU/Linux music library tools seemed to be, well, non-existent. Sure, XMMS was an awesome media player. But if you wanted to catalog your music, you were out of luck. Apple users had iTunes and were always rubbing it into the free software world’s face. Even Microsoft, the sleeping Redmond giant, had upgraded Windows Media Player to include a library feature. Then, a giant wolf named Amarok charged to the rescue. Andrew Min at Freesoftware Magazine sings the praises of Amarok, the musical poster boy of GNU/Linux, and explores it major features. You can read the full, illustrated article at FSM

Intellectual property rights (IPR) are usually associated with large software or music companies. This impression can easily obscure the critical connection between open source and property rights. Just because software is given away, it does not mean all property rights are thrown out of the window. In fact IPR is critical to the health of the open source movement. Many open source developers are ill-equipped to deal with IPR but one who did tackle the issue was Robert Jacobsen, whose case against US company Kamind was recently decided in the US Appeal Court.

I follow a lot of mailing lists…all of them either Linux or open source in nature. Some of these lists I have been following for years. And from those lists I have seen trends come and go. I have seen technologies blossom and die. I have met a lot of people, some wonderful some not so wonderful. But the one constant that I have noticed throughout this journey is that the Linux and open source community hold some common bonds. One of those common bonds is etiquette.

Tony Mobily, Editor in Chief of Free Software Magazine, interviewed one of the founders of Dreamhost to explore their committment to free software on their server and hosting systems. Read the full article at FSM

A common topic of discussion in the Windows world - in fact, in any operating system - is boot performance. Many systems take a long time to reach a usable desktop from the moment the power switch is pressed, and this can be quite annoying if it takes too long. In a post on the Engineering 7 blog, Michael Fortin, lead engineer of Microsoft's Fundamentals/Core Operating System Group, explains what Microsoft is doing to make Windows 7 boot faster.

Linux users have always vocally encouraged major hardware vendors to unbundle the Windows operating system or offer Linux pre-installation. Although several prominent vendors are beginning to embrace this concept, they only support it on a limited subset of their hardware offerings. This means that Linux users often pay for a Windows license that they never use, and it also means that Linux users are forever attempting to recoup the "Windows tax."

The world of Linux distribution has traditionally associated the arrival of September with the start of a grand testing period as all major projects are about to finalise their feature lists, freeze their development trees and begin fixing any remaining bugs. So what can we expect when the final products eventually hit the download mirrors? We'll take a look at the feature lists of all major distributions to see what's coming up in the next few months. In the news section, Debian announces the code name of its post-Lenny release, Novell launches SUSE Studio - a web-based tool for building custom distributions, and Linpus Technologies releases an installable Linpus Lite live CD for netbooks. Also among the interesting web links, a user reports how Xubuntu has managed to turn an OLPC into a perfect travelling companion, while the developers of FreeNAS tell us why their FreeBSD-based distribution is an excellent way of storing important files on a remote machine. All this and more in this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. Happy reading!

In this article I will show how to install and configure fail2ban on a Mandriva 2008.1 system. Fail2ban is a tool that observes login attempts to various services, e.g. SSH, FTP, SMTP, Apache, etc., and if it finds failed login attempts again and again from the same IP address or host, fail2ban stops further login attempts from that IP address/host by blocking it with an iptables firewall rule.

Korean company MIZI Research, a developer of mobile application platforms based on embedded Linux, has been bought by US based Wind River, a developer of tools claimed to "reduce effort, cost and risk and optimise quality and reliability at all phases of the device software development process, from concept to deployed product." MIZI has 65 employees and, according to Wind River, is one of the earliest Linux pioneers in the mobile market.

Almost one-third of the 25 top-selling laptops at Amazon.com are sold with Linux. (Shown is their top-selling Linux laptop, an Asus EEEpc 900 unit.) When I last reported on my search for such a laptop, we learned that this is not something you just go into a store and ask for, unless you like blank stares from clerks. But a correspondent linked me to an Amazon page showing a number of Linux-based laptop configurations, mostly from MSI and Asus. So I asked their nice PR lady about it.

Another year has come and gone and, once again, the most counter-intuitive holiday rears its head ;) Today's a day when we celebrate labor by not doing any at all. Probably most comedians have already covered this material extensively, so I'll not tread on sacred ground.

The Daily News is leaving the windowless box it has called home since some time in the '80s to move down the street to a newer, window-rich building. The current spot has lots of space — and that means lots of space filled with old hardware. The paper's design desk used to subsist on Power Macintosh G4 computers hooked up to 22-inch LaCie monitors. Resident Mac guru and digital photography expert Roger Vargo announced that anybody who wanted a G4 could get one ... until they were all gone. So how does Debian perform on a Mac PowerPC with 450 MHz of CPU and 128 MB of RAM? Surprisingly well. And there were absolutely zero configuration issues. Everything came out perfectly.