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After 3 weeks, we have the semblance of a Development Team for an application that will help autistic kids learn how to use a mouse.

The SquirrelMail package from the Debian/Ubuntu repositories comes with a configuration file for Apache, but not for nginx. This tutorial shows how you can use the Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 11.04 SquirrelMail package in an nginx vhost. Nginx is a HTTP server that uses much less resources than Apache and delivers pages a lot of faster, especially static files.

LXer Feature: 17-Oct-2011

Welcome to this week's collection of big stories from the LXer Newswire. Enjoy!

Friday's filings indicate a couple of things. First, it is becoming increasingly clear that Judge Alsup does not expect this trial to start on schedule, and second, he is going to give latitude in hearing disputes outside of trial to try to reduce the number of issues to be handled at trial. Consequently, while Oracle filed objections to allowing motions on patent marking and striking of portions of Dr. Serwin's rebuttal report, Judge Alsup is allowing both of those motions to proceed along with Oracle's requested motion to strike portions of the Cox/Leonard reports.

I guess many old school admins reading this will "crucify" me for trying to say that there is another process scheduling system besides cron. While cron does its' job and does it well, other more recent systems offer new capabilities that might help the administrator one way or the other. One example is lance, a young project written in Python which offers, among others, remote task administration and web-based control. Since the project is sometimes a little rough around the edges, don't start replacing cron tasks just yet.

A quick method to access your favorite websites and RSS feed posts through Google Readers indicator on Ubuntu 11.10 Unity Panel.

This tutorial shows how to prepare an Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) server for the installation of ISPConfig 3, and how to install ISPConfig 3. ISPConfig 3 is a webhosting control panel that allows you to configure the following services through a web browser: Apache web server, Postfix mail server, MySQL, BIND or MyDNS nameserver, PureFTPd, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, and many more.

ModSecurity is sophisticated application firewall that monitors the content of ports 80 and 443. ModSecurity can protect you from hack attacks, zero day exploits, directory traversals, SQL injection and a lot of other bad stuff. This script will help you locate the blocks that ModSecurity is performing for you so you can evaluate.

I’ve just built locally and uploaded to Launchpad Libvirt 0.9.6 via Debian Unstable, applying standard set of Ubuntu’s patches updated for 0.9.6. It allows follow http://planet.spice-space.org/ update VM’s XML profile under /etc/libvirt/qemu/ as suggested in second blog entry of Hans de Goede manage VMs via virsh or VirtManager having USB redirection support active in Spicy’s sessions. View for further details my previous posting to LXer

As an Ubuntu 11.04 user, Ubuntu 11.10 came knocking at my doorstep a few days ago. But the upgrade process wasn't the smoothest of operations. In this article, I've mentioned a few thoughts about switching to the new system.

An October 5 press release from The Document Foundation provides a bit of information about a vulnerability that was fixed in recent versions of LibreOffice (LO). The vulnerability sounds fairly serious: "This flaw could have been used for nefarious purposes, such as installing viruses, through a specially-crafted [.doc] file." It was evidently fixed, silently, in versions 3.4.3 and 3.3.4 of LO, which were released in August. The details (such as they are) were withheld "until users have been given time to migrate to the new version", but it isn't at all clear that Linux distributions have put out fixes yet. Worse still, OpenOffice.org (OOo) is vulnerable as well, but there has been no release from that project since January.

Installation problems with some key packages makes me not recommend that newbies install and use it regularly, but it's officially a pretty awesome live distribution again.

A mild rant on Microsoft Hotmail's odd "sweep" feature. A Microsoft employee responds in the comments section, and gets into a short conversation.

Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot has been released now. Here is a list of things you should immediately do after a fresh installation.

With the Free Software Foundation having removed GNU PDF from their list of high priority projects after declaring the open-source work to implement proper Adobe PDF support a success, what's left to the FSF high priority project list and how are those remaining projects coming along?..

The release of Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" this week captured most of the Linux spotlight, but also arriving this week was Sabayon 7, the Gentoo-based Linux distribution that's meant to be easy-to-use and desktop-oriented. In this article Sabayon 7 has been pitted against Ubuntu 11.10 with its stock Linux 3.0 kernel and its new experimental Fusion kernel.

An indication of the extent to which people in today's world are prone to hypocrisy is evidenced by the way they react after someone dies.

The R500 texture semaphores work, the feature I wrote about and tested earlier this month, has been merged to master. This feature in the R300 Gallium3D open-source driver can provide some impressive performance improvements...

OpenIndiana is a distribution of illumos, which is a community fork of OpenSolaris. And OpenSolaris itself was the open source version of Solaris, before it was discontinued by Oracle, after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, Inc., in January 2010.

OpenIndiana Build 151a is the latest development release, and the third so far. A stable edition is slated for release before the end of this year.

There is a desktop edition and a server edition. This review is based on test installations of the desktop edition.

It would seem to be another slow week in the FOSS news world. As always however, there were a few tidbits, and the passing of a computer pioneer who’s work has effected everyone who’s ever sat in front of a monitor and keyboard.

U.S. Predator and Reaper Drones Hit by Virus…or Not

We learned on Monday from ars technica that the U.S. Predator and Reaper drone fleet has been hit by a virus. According to the report, the malicious code logs the keystrokes of those in the “cockpit” flying missions over Afghanistan and “other war zones":