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The competition for market share between the leading desktop OSes, Windows, Mac and Linux, has seen no major revolution this year. But based on data from Net Applications, there have been subtle changes that suggest major shifts in the years ahead.

In this article I will show how to install and configure fail2ban on an OpenSUSE 10.3 system. Fail2ban is a tool that observes login attempts to various services, e.g. SSH, FTP, SMTP, Apache, etc., and if it finds failed login attempts again and again from the same IP address or host, fail2ban stops further login attempts from that IP address/host by blocking it with an iptables firewall rule.

Ubuntu founder and IT entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth tells Computing SA that picking open source software was not only good for South Africa but also important for the rest of the African continent. Shuttleworth says the goal for any country, including SA, should be sustainable economic growth, part of which is derived from the contribution made from a technology perspective. "In this context it is wealth creation that matters, since the former will potentially generate high-quality jobs."

I'm fairly sure that this is not open source software. My reasoning for stating this, since I have yet to see anything even close to Express Scribe, in the open source world as of yet. Much like MainActor is to those who want entry level software for decent video editing, I see Express Scribe as filling this same need, and perhaps even hitting a more important piece of the Linux puzzle.

Google has released a beta version of Google Desktop 1.1 for Linux. Google software engineer Jim Zhuang writes on his blog:"Because many people wanted to search and launch applications, we added that functionality to the product. Desktop for Linux now supports many more image formats and will show better thumbnails for them in your search results.

Avangate BV, announces sponsorship of the 7th edition of the Independent Software Developers Forum Conference (ISDEF) taking place in Moscow this autumn, 19-21 October.

Which OS do you think is best for computer forensics? Obviously, being as we are Linux users, we'd likely recommend admins consider using a Linux-based approach for such a task. But which applications are honestly available on this platform? Not only that, are any of them open source?

I cannot tell you how many times I have found myself looking at that ugly and rather useless Xorg reconfigure screen that has never worked on Ubuntu for me. Generally, I would see something like this (not the exact image, but close) and then ask you to diagnose the problem from the x server output. This is fine for an advanced distro, but not for Ubuntu or its derivatives.

If OpenOffice.org's own bibliography feature doesn't really cut it for you, you have several choices. One popular bibliography solution is Bibus, a cross-platform tool that integrates nicely with OpenOffice.org. It is, however, not the only bibliographical tool out there. In fact, there is another nifty tool called Zotero that turns Firefox into a powerful research tool. More importantly, it comes with an OpenOffice.org extension that allows you to use Zotero as a bibliography database. Zotero also sports a few clever features that make the process of creating and managing bibliographies much more efficient.

MDNG has an extremely frank article that is noteworthy by who its author is: a medical doctor who is president of an EHR company. The article states in number 1-4 that: the award an EHR received, the 'non-biased expert', the referred EHR using physician, and the respected physician leader of your local society may have been paid off by the EHR company to say favorable things about a product!

Most people like it, many others don’t, the fact is that Ubuntu is the king of Linux distributions right now - and for some very good reasons. Below I will attempt to identify those reasons that made Ubuntu the most popular distribution and explain why its success was “inevitable”.

Welcome to this year's 42nd issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Following the openSUSE 10.3 release two weeks ago and the new Mandriva Linux 2008 announced last Tuesday, the rapid succession of major Linux distribution versions continues this week with Ubuntu 7.10. Will the developers of these projects succeed in enticing more computer users to switch to Linux? Chris Smart tries to answer the question in the upcoming issues of DistroWatch Weekly by reviewing these new products - today he installs openSUSE 10.3 on his trusty MacBook to see how it fares. In the news section: Mandriva simplifies its product range, Ubuntu prepares for another download rush, and Fedora embraces artwork developed by the user community. Finally, don't miss two interesting interviews with Lucas Villa Real from GoboLinux and Gerard Beekmans from the Linux From Scratch project. Happy reading!

LXer Feature: 15-Oct-2007

So far in this randomly-appearing series I haven't talked all that much about Linux, but mostly camera gear. Today I'm going to talk about photography fundamentals. Because a skilled person can use an image editor to doctor any photo to look like anything, but for me that is not the point. I'm not interested in devoting my life to repairing inferior photos; I want to take the best-quality pictures possible and not have to spend endless hours mucking about to make them look like anything. So step one is Find Good Camera Equipment, and step two is Learn To Use It.

Jaka Kranjc discusses his Linux beginnings, plus his current work on Source Mage GNU/Linux.

Packt is pleased to announce a new book on OpenLDAP for Application Developers and System Administrators running OpenLDAP. This book teaches the reader to build a directory using OpenLDAP and then employ this directory in the context of the network, taking a practical approach that emphasizes how to get things done.

Avi Kivitiy postednumerous KVM updates which Linus Torvaldsmerged into his mainline kernel source tree to be included in the upcoming 2.6.24 kernel. Avi summarized:"Highlights include in-kernel pic/lapic/ioapic emulation, improved guest support, preemptibility, an improved x86 emulator, and a fair amount of cleanup."The changes outside drivers/kvm/ and include/linux/kvm*.h fix the CR8 mask definition (which is not otherwise used in the kernel) and expose some ioapic register definitions even if ioapic support is not compiled in. The diff is appended below."read more

"I've never looked at the Reiser code though the comments I get from friends who use it are on the order of'extremely reliable but not the fastest filesystem in the world'," Matt Dillon explained when asked to compare his new clustering HAMMER filesystem with ReiserFS, both of which utilize BTrees to organize objects and records. He continued,"I don't expect HAMMER to be slow. A B-Tree typically uses a fairly small radix in the 8-64 range (HAMMER uses 8 for now). A standard indirect block methodology typically uses a much larger radix, such as 512, but is only able to organize information in a very restricted, linear way." He continued to describe numerous plans he has for optimizing performance,"my expectation is that this will lead to a fairly fast filesystem. We will know in about a month :-)

With the arrival of Windows Vista , lots of people are looking for alternatives. And Linux has emerged as the best contender. As I have used Windows XP and Linux for last 5 years, and Vista since its release. I thought why not write an article for the people who may want to know/use/switch to Linux from Windows.

For this article we've decided to not only deliver power benchmarks from Ubuntu 7.10 and Ubuntu 7.04 to compare the tickless kernel effect, but we have went back and retested all of the Ubuntu releases going back to Ubuntu 5.04, or also known as Hoary Hedgehog. With the past six Ubuntu releases we had tested the power consumption of a Lenovo laptop when running from its AC charger and off the battery, when the system was idling and then again under load. We had also monitored the temperature of the Intel Centrino mobile processor. You may be surprised by the results of Ubuntu's power usage.

KDE 4 is the next major release of the K Desktop Environment software. It contains a new multimedia API, called Phonon, a device integration framework called Solid and a new style guide and default icon set called Oxygen. Let me say this first: KDE 4 is still not ready but it is nice to see the major improvements in usability, performance and stability. KDE 4 (preview) is already included in the latest Mandriva release. This article describes the installation on a Mandriva 2008 desktop

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