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The fact that Debian Etch -- a modern, up-to-date Linux distribution -- can run so well in 233 MHz of CPU and 64 MB of RAM is something truly to behold.

When ripping CDs from my own collection or (shh) my friends', I didn't always bother to include the cover art. Personally, I never considered album art for my iPod all that important. That has changed now that we have an iPod touch in the family. If I'm missing a lot of album art, the experience of virtually flipping through my music collection, something Apple calls "cover flow," is diminished. iTunes doesn't always offer art for albums I didn't purchase from iTunes. Thankfully, a little GPL-licensed application called Album Cover Art Downloader (ACAD) solved my problem.

When is a Switch Like a Router?

Port-based VLANs are specific to their switches, and cannot cross multiple switches. However, you can make a smart switch function like a router. Let's say that three ports are not enough for VLAN East; you want to connect more hosts. You could buy a bigger smart switch. Or you can uplink a second switch to one of VLAN East's ports, like this:

..the sad truth is, an embedded engineer needs Windows. There are just too many specialized tools for programming devices, analyzing signals, and device drivers that are Windows only and no amount of Wine-ing will do.

It's possible to carry out an ARP poisoning MITM attack manually using Wireshark (Ethereal) to intercept and edit ARP requests, but actually it's very easy for anyone who can get on to your network (using Aircrack-ng to get on wirelessly, for example) to carry out such an attack using automated open source tools. The best known one of these is called Ettercap.

The rhetoric surrounding Steve Ballmer's unsolicited $44.6bn offer for Yahoo! will focus on the obvious - the potential market share growth that a Microsoft and Yahoo! tie-up would have against Google. For all the talk of saving Yahoo! shareholders, Google is uppermost in the Microsoft chief executive's mind, and Microsoft is - once more - trying to buy its way into the internet club having already spent billions to no visible effect.

Do, is an application to find things on your system and quickly perform actions, similar to Quicksilver for OSX and GNOME Launch Box. It works on a variety of different desktop environments, including GNOME and KDE. Basically, all you need to do is to press Super + Space on your keyboard, and the Do dialog will open.

This February, the team at Linuxsecurity.com has chosen NMAP as the OS Security Tool of the Month! In January, we chose GnuPG in part because it had just celebrated its 10th anniversary. Well, it wasn't alone. As of this past December Nmap ("Network Mapper"), the free and open source utility for network exploration and auditing, celebrated its 10th Anniversary as well! And because of its popularity, chances are very good that you've already used NMAP for quite some time. Even if you have, it's always good to take a look at how it all got started and what it's all about...

Last week AMD introduced the ATI Radeon HD 3400 and 3600 series, which are the new low-end graphics processors compared to the Radeon HD 3800 series. These budget graphics cards are branded as the Radeon HD 3450, 3470, and 3650 and are all available for under $100 USD. While they may be cheap, they are the first graphics cards to introduce support for DisplayPort. DisplayPort is the newest digital display interface standard, backed by VESA, and is direct competition to HDMI. DisplayPort has yet to be fully supported by the available Linux display drivers, but the Catalyst Linux driver already supports these new ATI graphics cards and there will be open-source support through the RadeonHD driver in the coming days. At hand today we have the Sapphire Radeon HD 3650 512MB graphics card as we deliver the first Linux benchmarks for this RV635 GPU.

When Yahoo acquired the Zimbra open source email platform in September 2007, some Zimbra backers worried the search company would mismanage the email asset. Fast forward to the present, and some Zimbra proponents have gone from concern to outright panic over Microsoft’s bid to acquire Yahoo (and, ultimately, Zimbra). Here's why.

RPM Fusion aims to end the confusion over 3rd party repositories and Fedora by merging Livna, Dribble and Fresh RPMs: they hope to be a one-stop shop for all the extra packages Fedora can't ship by default for various different reasons. Promising to never replace packages that already exist in Fedora, and combining the vast experience of the three major Fedora add-on repositories, this is sure to be a stable, high-quality repository providing a huge range of software.

PHP 4, deployed on tens of millions of servers globally, is among the most successful languages of all time. But its run is coming to an end. Active development for the scripting language has been discontinued and security updates will conclude in August. And for some developers, PHP 4 will be history before Valentine's Day.

The KDE on Windows team is not only working on the port of KDE applications and libraries but also on the Windows Installer application: The Kdewin-Installer is supposed to be the preferred way to install KDE applications on Windows. Screenshots at The Coding Studio.

Microsoft has confirmed that it’s seeking to acquire Yahoo! Some folks — you know, the open source crowd — will likely bash a proposed Microsoft-Yahoo! combo. The VAR Guy, however, is willing to give Microsoft a chance to explain the proposed business combo. Here’s why.

The rsync utility is smart enough to send only enough bytes of a changed file to a remote system to enable the remote file to become identical to the local file. When that information is sensitive, using rsync over SSH protects files while in transit.To protect the files when they are on the server you might first encrypt them with GPG. But the manner in which GPG encrypts slightly changed files foils rsync's efficiency.rsyncrypto allows you to encrypt your files while still allowing you to leverage the speed of rsync.

I have been using Vista for well over a year now (since Beta 1). Of course Vista is slow, its bloated (over 10x the size of XP), aero kills system performance (even though this should be done on the video card), networking is pathetically slow, etc etc. We all know Vista sucks.

Linspire is now offering customized desktops to customers. It's Linux's modular, open philosophy that makes this popular. Fat chance of Microsoft or Apple ever offering a customized desktop solution.

I have previously discussed the XO's hardware, as well as its multimedia and web activities. The XO has several tutorial activities that can be used in a fairly productive (read 'useful') way.

In the past week alone, Windows deals in Dubai, in Paris and even in Greece were announced not quite by Microsoft, but by Bill Gates, who had met politicians. We seem to recall press releases suggesting so — giving Gates all the credit. This was a not technical decision as much as a political one.

Microsoft Corp. has pounced on slumping Internet icon Yahoo Inc. with an unsolicited takeover offer of $44.6 billion in its boldest bid yet to challenge Google Inc.'s dominance of the lucrative online search and advertising markets. The Justice Department says it is interested in reviewing antitrust issues associated with it.