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The Black Hat USA 2007 Briefings got underway this morning at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. Founder Jeff Moss opened the proceedings with a few brief remarks and statistics about the show. Officially, there are more than 4,000 attendees from more than 50 countries, Moss said, and that number would have been higher if Halvar Flake been admitted to the country instead of returned to Germany by immigration officials.

It was a blast. The 2007 SourceForge Community Choice Awards Party was held last Thursday evening in Portland, Ore., during OSCON. You should have been there, cheering along with everyone else when the winners were announced.

In one of the most significant transformations of its worldwide data centers in a generation, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that it will consolidate about 3,900 computer servers onto about 30 System z mainframes running the Linux operating system. The company anticipates that the new server environment will consume approximately 80 percent less energy than the current set up and expects significant savings over five years in energy, software and system support costs.

Say you need to debug a pesky problem by running some traces for 30 minutes at midnight, or you would just like to use your Linux system as an alarm clock. This tip helps you stop jobs, such as those started with the cron and at capabilities, after the jobs have run for a certain time, or when some other criteria are met.

In part 1, you were shown how to set up hibernate and modify the configuration scripts to make it possible to suspend your desktop to RAM. In part 2, you'll step through how to implement your changes.

Basically, tcptrack is a sniffer which will show the information about TCP connections on a specific interface. tcptrack will watch all the connections that occur and show the information in a nice interface.

PCLinuxOS Magazine has reached an important milestone today with the release of our August 2007 issue (#12) which marks one year PCLinuxOS Magazine has been in print!  Our previous issues can also be downloaded.

We are simultaneously publishing the HTML Version of the Magazine as well for our low bandwidth users.  The HTML Site is W3C standards compliant for easy browsing.

Some highlights include:

1. KDE User Guide Part 7
2. Using Amarok to Transfer Files to Zen
3. MS Vista/Linux Dual Boot Tutorial
   
4. Installing and Using Peerguardian on PCLinuxOS
5. Your Friend, the Alias, part 1
   
6. As always, much more
   

Download August 2007 Issue 12

Mirror Download August 2007 Issue 12 

HTML Version August 2007 Issue 12

This edition announces the latest Foresight release 1.3.2 as well as the GNOME 2.18.3 Live Media, introduces a new Foresight logo, shows how to add packages not in the Foresight repo in the tips and tricks section, introduces the Foresight community in social networking, and features the Avant Window Navigator as Package of the Month.

KnowledgeTree, the Cape Town based open source document management system, has taken off with a number of major customers, including the Nasa Goddard Space Flight Centre.

Need a simple yet effective way to back up your laptop or desktop machine to a network-attached storage device or a network hard disk running Samba? Using Samba's smbmount utility and the grsync backup tool, you can set up a backup system that is both reliable and straightforward in use. And since both programs are available as packages for most Linux distributions, you don't have to get your hands dirty compiling from source code and fiddling with settings.

Last summer, CareGroup CIO John Halamka began looking for a viable alternative to the Microsoft Windows desktop operating system. After 16 years using Windows, he had enough of its instability and the countless updates that automatically installed themselves on his computer—often at inopportune times, like when he was in the middle of a presentation. As CIO of a health-care organization and affiliated medical school with 40,000 employees and 9 million patient records, Halamka has to be sure that the computers in the hospital, its administrative offices and medical school are secure, stable and easy to use.

Five days ago, the guys at 64 Studio released their official 2.0 'Electric' version. With a realtime 2.6.21 kernel and lots of preconfigured audio/video productivity applications, it's well worth a look.

The one thing about FOSS that I love is that you can take whatever you need from various sources and build what you opine is a better wheel. Take Ubuntu for instance...they took Debian and made it into something that many users are happy with.

Is this wrong? Not at all. Each day, many non-commercial distro makes wake up and check various distributions for updated security fixes. They pull source rpms, updated tar.gz's, and debs into their distro, make minor adjustments, and drop it into their repository. Distros share with one another...they take and hopefully give back. If not monetarily, at least by the number of users that they have that may report bugs or provide fixes.

So what's the beef that some Distrowatch Weekly commenter's seem to have with PCLinuxOS? During the past 3 weeks of comments on the DW, some have been hounding PCLinuxOS with accusations saying that the developers hide things from their community and that PCLinuxOS eradicates changelogs and/or lights small dogs on fire while chopping kittens to bits in blenders, etc. Let's take a look at these "myths" shall we?

An investigation by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has determined that OpenHAL -- which facilitates Linux wireless connections for LAN cards using Atheros Communications technology -- does not incorporate any elements that might infringe on copyrights held by Atheros.

In my last installment of this series I introduced a variety of GUI-based tools that can help you discover more about your system to help identify potentially troublesome components. This week we'll look at some of the command-line utilities that do similar work. In fact, some of these utilities are the engines underneath the more attractive GUI tools, and there may be good reasons to employ the engines directly instead of relying upon their graphic incarnations.

Back in February I wrote about using xli to add a desktop background of your choice to a minimalist window manager. I chose to write about xli for two reasons. First, several window manager developers choose to use xli by default. For example, if you look at a .jwmrc file, the configuration file used by JWM, a lightweight window manager I am rather fond of, you will see that xli is used in the section. The second and perhaps more important reason I chose to write about xli is because it’s what I knew and used for years. One thing about Linux and UNIX: there are always different ways to do things. It turns out that many distros include something a bit newer and perhaps better than xli.

The second edition of the Air Mozilla video webcast will take place on Wednesday 1st August at 3:00pm Pacific Daylight Time (10:00pm UTC/GMT). Hosted by Asa Dotzler, the show will feature Bret Reckard, who works on recruitment for the Mozilla Corporation, JT Batson, who is currently working on the new Firefox support project, and Seth Bindernagel, who coordinates the community giving programme, which shares Mozilla's riches with valuable volunteers. The programme will end with a broadcast of Mitchell Baker's OSCON 2007 presentation.

GeeXBoX, a small media center Linux live CD distribution, can run from any small device, such as a USB disk or a wallet CD-R, and can play both disk-based media like DVDs and online media like Icecast streams. The project has been in development for several years and has just released version 1.1. I fed it every kind of media file I could lay my hands on -- Ogg, MP3, MP4, AVI, DVDs, VCDs, and their ripped versions -- and it played them all without a hiccup. But what makes GeeXBoX a fantastic distribution is its ease of use and malleability.

DataPilots are OpenOffice.org Calc's equivalent of what MS Excel and other spreadsheets call pivot tables. Under any name, they are a tool for extracting and summarizing the information contained in spreadsheet cells in a more convenient form. Using a DataPilot, you can immediately see relationships between different pieces of data that would be difficult -- if not impossible -- to find using formulas, and tedious to extract manually. In effect, a DataPilot gives you something of the power of using a database without actually switching out of a spreadsheet. Small wonder, then, that over half of spreadsheet users are said to use datapilots or pivot tables.

Some of the concerns expressed about the Completely Fair Scheduler were reports that it might not handle 3D games as well as the SD scheduler. In a recent thread, Ingo Molnar noted, "people are regularly testing 3D smoothness, and they find CFS good enough and that matches my experience as well (as limited as it may be). In general my impression is that CFS and SD are roughly on par when it comes to 3D smoothness."