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The good news for everyone is that you can get a good, solid laptop for under a grand these days. The bad news for Vista users is that many of those laptops, even though they're sold with Vista, have nothing like enough resources to run Vista decently.

But in these modern times it's not necessary to gain root privileges to commit nefarious deeds, yet the primary purpose of most security schemes is still to protect root. Users are considered dispensable, like the red-shirted crewmen on the original Star Trek series. As soon as a guy in a red shirt appeared, you knew he was going to be toast before the second commercial break. Think about it—what's the most important stuff on your computer? The system files? You can easily replace those. An attacker might still want to acquire root privileges so they can replace key system binaries to try to cover their tracks. But the system files themselves are not valuable. The valuable stuff sits in your home and other data directories. If you're storing sensitive data of any kind, such as databases full of customer data, that's what an attacker wants.

The Taiwanese tech heavyweight Asus has introduced a $400 laptop with most of the capability of a $2,000 Sony or Fujitsu subnotebook; the convenience and usability missing from members of Intel's Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) club; and the goofiest name of the year. How does this Linux-based system stack up to other, larger systems? Surprisingly well...

Continuous Integration (or CI) is a process that consists of continuously compiling, testing, inspecting, and deploying source code. Get introduced to the fundamental aspects of Continuous Integration and the steps on how to set up a CI process using best-of-breed open source technologies.

Update to award-winning open source children's art software adds programmable plug-in support

openSUSE is one of the most popular free-software-only distributions, and it's jointly developed by Novell and members of the community. In the first week of November the openSUSE developers released installable live versions of the distro's latest 10.3 release, one each for KDE and GNOME desktop environments. The live versions are replicas of their install-only cousins in terms of software, and apart from a few quirks, they seem set to replace the older versions soon.

This article explains how you can download additional SpamAssassin rulesets resp. automatically update these rulesets with a shell script called RulesDuJour. These additional rulesets can increase your spam recognition rate dramatically. Most of the rulesets that RulesDuJour supports can be found on the SA Rules Emporium web site.

I made this same point over the weekend in a post or three. But when it comes from Linus Torvalds, it means more. When asked in an InformationWeek Q&A how Linux compares with Windows, Torvalds didn't go into a marketing discussion of Feature Y over Feature X. Instead, he discussed the strength of Linux's process/approach over Windows' "We are Microsoft--trust us to be your god" approach.

In a recent interview, Linux founder Linus Torvalds offered some of his thoughts on the progress of the Linux kernel so far and some ideas as to where development was headed for the year ahead.

One thing that Ubuntu has left half finished is power management. It goes a long way supporting standby, hibernation, laptop buttons and switches out of the box, but leaves many important features hard to configure. Currently at least two different systems coexist in a Ubuntu installation: laptop-mode-tools and acpi-support. Out of both we have powernowd and gnome-power-manager which only take care of a particular aspect. As you see there are too many programs doing small bits of a bigger job...

Most people lock their doors and windows, use a paper shredder to protect themselves from identity theft, and install antivirus software on their computers. Yet they routinely surf the Internet without giving a second thought to whether their browser is secure and their personal information safe. Unfortunately, it's easy for someone with nefarious intentions to use a Web site to glean data from -- or introduce spyware to -- your computer. Even worse, sometimes all you have to do is randomly click on a site to have your data probed in a most unwelcome way.

In a role created for him in February this year, Red Hat's president for the Asia-Pacific region is vocal about the power of "talent attracting talent" which, he believes, is vital to growing the business. "Since I joined the company earlier this year, we've brought in some executives who are veterans. We want this leadership to attract high-profile executives, to inspire, set the direction and to talk with key clients," Messer said.

Check out 3 ways to install wireless on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon; works out of the box, ndiswrapper and manual install.

Ravi Simhambhatla's latest project employing open source has been to juice up the web site for Virgin America, the US's newest carrier, so travelers can surf smoothly and purchase tickets without waiting for pages to build. Virgin America relies heavily on the power of virginameica.com, which pulls in 80 per cent of sales, with 150,000 unique hits a day in the week and 100,000 at weekends.

Launchpad Personal Package Archive gives developers space to collaborate and publish their own software for multiple architectures running Ubuntu Linux.

I have been anticipating kde 4.0 the next major releas. But it seems that is just its problem! Its too much of a major to be pushing out in such a hurry. Rather than rant let me put forward my issues

The Oregon State Linux Users Group just finished creating a huge Firefox crop circle. With the help of some volunteers, they stomped out a gigantic version of the Firefox logo in an Oregon field.

Welcome to this year's 48th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! We don't often get a chance to report about the BSD part of our open source world, but last week brought an unusual number of interesting developments: a new beta release of FreeBSD 7.0, new live DVDs from RoFreeSBIE and TrueBSD, and even a promise of a real print BSD magazine! Is this increased activity among the BSD developers a sign of greater acceptance of their preferred operating system? In other news: openSUSE releases new bleeding-edge software packages for beta testing, KDE 4.0 RC1 draws mixed reaction in the developer community, sidux celebrates its first birthday, and Linux Mint branches out to develop user-friendly solutions for Debian GNU/Linux and Fedora. Finally, don't miss our lead story - a first look at the newly released Linux Mint 4.0. Happy reading!

LXer Feature: 25-Nov-2007

How do you release your version of Linux without actually releasing it? Just ask Google, whether by coincidence or design Walmart has started selling computers pre-installed with a version of Linux called "gOS" that is seriously Google centric and guess what? Its not a bad little distro and the computers? They're selling like hotcakes. We have some Linux gaming news, One shoppers Linux inspired assault on Black Friday, Macedonian Students start to get there Edubuntu computers and a funny take on SCO's lawsuit.

For some time I've been considering writing a book about what has become a standards war of truly epic proportions. I refer, of course, to the ongoing, ever expanding, still escalating conflict between ODF and OOXML, a battle that is playing out across five continents and in both the halls of government and the marketplace alike. And, needless to say, at countless blogs and news sites all the Web over as well. Well, I've taken the plunge, and if you are so inclined, you can help.