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A couple of months ago, I discovered a tool called rpmrebuild while searching for a way to reverse engineer the files installed on an older Fedora system back into its original RPM package. Rpmrebuild is able to reconstruct an RPM by looking up the information about it on the RPM database that is part of every RPM-based distribution like Fedora.

On Dec. 4, Red Hat announced the first public beta of Red Hat Enterprise Messaging, Real-time, Grid. The company claims that MRG will offer new capabilities for financial services and government agencies that need exceptional performance through reliable enterprise messaging, real-time capabilities and advanced grid and high-throughput computing technologies for deployment on RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and other operating systems.

One of the biggest arguments for windows that everybody uses and indeed in my last rant I actually had a few comments specifically mentioning it. The basic argument is that you can do everything in windows via the GUI and you have to use the command line in Linux. I was informed in an earlier article that windows 2008 is able to be installed without the GUI so I wondered. If the GUI is so good. If all programs and system configuration can be done through the point and click interface. Then why is Microsoft giving the option of installing windows 2008 without the GUI interface? Further why are windows aficionado's touting this as a "Good Thing (TM)"?

The Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE) resembles a classic Unix project -- it's partly constructed out of pre-existing programs, its emphasis is on speed, and its configuration requires taking time in a text editor. Even the relatively low quality of fonts on the desktop makes it feel like a vintage program. The result is a desktop environment that is short on innovation, but performs well on low-end machines, and blazingly fast on recent ones.

For the last several years, Red Hat has been pushing forward the development of real-time enhancements for Linux. Yet the company has made no formal product announcement of how it would attempt to productize its real-time Linux innovations. That changed today, with the announcement of the Red Hat MRG (Messaging, Real Time and Grid) platform. The product is expected to be available as a public beta this month, with a generally available release set for early 2008.

It may be a brave opinion but I predict that Ubuntu Linux and Windows Vista are going to be the two operating systems that will take over the largest chunk of the desktop OS market during the next couple of years. This comparison is based on my experience with both systems during the last couple of weeks on two different computers.

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...