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VLC (VideoLan) is a cross-platform universial media player. It supports a variety of different inputs, including DVD, VCD, MPEG, AVI, WMV, MP4, and MOV. It has full subtitle support, as well as built-in video filters. There are skins for VLC available at the developer website.

Darkstar Linux 2008.1 is one of the first stable distro releases of the year. This distribution from Romania is based on Slackware and is available as a DVD image. For a desktop-oriented distro with its first release in 2004, Darkstar Linux has a lot of scope for improvement; its rock-solid performance and range of applications is overshadowed by its poor hardware skills

Dwayne Bailey tells us that Translate.org.za was awarded the coveted Pan South African Language Board award for its contribution to multilingualism and nation building over the past decade. The award, ‘Multilingualism and Nation Building: eBusiness Institution of the Decade’, was awarded to the non-profit organisation for its long-running and ground breaking work in the area of multilingual software.

SCO has filed its latest annual report with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and it makes grim reading. The company warns that its shareholders could end with nothing because: "A plan of reorganization could result in holders of our stock receiving no distribution on account of their interests and cancellation of their existing stock." SCO is Chapter 11 - US bankruptcy protection.

December's release of Nmap 4.50 marked the popular port-scanning tool's tenth anniversary. The 4.50 release includes Zenmap, a cross-platform GUI front end for Nmap which includes a command creation wizard, a scripting engine, and a host of other improvements. Zenmap makes it easier than ever to use Nmap. Port scanners are security auditing tools that allow you to discover hosts and the ports they have open on your LAN or across the Internet.

So vishing is not very exotic from a technical perspective, because it's just another form of social engineering, and it's been going on as long as there have been telephones. But VoIP offers some powerful tools to make vishing a more attractive endeavor over VoIP than the old-fashioned PSTN. It's a lot easier to hide your back trail over the data networks (thanks to the the World Wide Botnet), it's easy to spoof Caller ID: Automated calling tools are cheap and easy, and it's dirt cheap to call anywhere.

My (decidedly personal) conclusion:This is one cool platform. The idea of accessing files, pictures, videos and music files anywhere on any computer is appealing, especially to hardcore geeks. Just think of a combination of iPhone + eyeOS, or Archos + eyeOS , or Wii + eyeOS(provided the Opera support improves).

So, the last two days I’ve been hard at work coding on the 0.2 structure and user interface, the application layout is a lot simpler and I’ve completely decoupled the user interface from the core functionality.

Torvalds has been to Linux.conf.au and Torvalds has spoken. During a wide-ranging interview the Linux founder speculated on the future of hardware and the control that open source offers vendors. The ramifications of this are remarkable. Come hear the word of Torvalds.

But thanks to some cool folks at Linuxchix.org, I learned of two excellent resources for recycling or adopting out old stuff. Costco will give members a few bucks trade-in value on their old electronics, and if your stuff has no trade-in value they’ll send it to a recycler at no cost to you....

Are we doing enough to attract new users from the IT community? The results are right here, many of the IT pros do not see Vista as an option any longer, and I personally see a fantastic opportunity for various Linux distros to make a name for themselves going forward.

There are two things that bother me about this article. The first is pirating any copyrighted content. The second is using the tools designed to make computing affordable for all to catch people breaking the law.

A great list of games available for Linux. A lot of people don't realize how many great open source, free, and paid games are available on the Linux platform.

Google Inc. is adding more e-mail security and storage products for businesses, sharpening its aim on a Microsoft Corp. stronghold while the competition between the two rivals also heats up in Internet search and advertising.

Yes, Sun is acquiring MySQL for $1 billion. But Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz isn’t done modernizing his company. Not by a long shot. The VAR Guy isn’t ready to predict which company Sun will acquire next, but he has noticed Schwartz getting pretty darn cozy with two fast-growing open source businesses.

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, will announce on Feb. 6 that it's making Parallels Workstation for Linux available to users through the Ubuntu Partner Repository. Parallels, formerly SWSoft, the company behind the open-source virtualization program OpenVZ, is best known for its Parallels virtualization software that works with Mac OS X. Parallels Workstation for Linux won't let you run Mac OS X, but it will enable you to run multiple versions of Windows or Linux with Ubuntu.

Did you know Red Hat’s introducing online training? When we heard that, we went digging to find somebody that could tell us more. Joshua M. Hoffman, the Product Manager for Virtual Training / Live Access Labs, was willing to fill us in. So here’s the details on Linux training… from the comfort of your living room.

Thoughts on being a good System Administrator. Best practices for keeping things running and minimizing the number of off hours work.

Let me ask you a basic question: Which operating system do you use? What are the possible answers? Windows, Linux, Solaris or Mac OS X of course. But let us try to think different for a moment. Maybe it is possible, that this answer would be, for example KDE?

While the world is still recovering from the work on KDE 4.0.0, we are ready to announce the release of KDE 4.0.1, the first bug fix update of the KDE 4.0 desktop. KDE 4.0.1 contains numerous bugfixes such as stability improvements, performance improvements and, as in every point release, updated translations for most components. Lots of work has been put into shared components making the life of most applications easier. Particularly striking is also the high number of bugfixes in KHTML.