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Ubuntu Software Center is seeing its second round of upgrades, this time changes are even more dramatic. Good to see Canonical putting so much thrust on Software Center which has the potential to become Ubuntu's major money spinner in the near future.

There has been a lot of talking, over the past few months, about a Firefox extension called Firesheep which, in the words of author Eric Butler,

“demonstrates HTTP session hijacking attacks“.

Discussions around the Internet on the matter have been quite heated, with lots of people thanking him for his efforts in raising awareness on the security issues of modern Internet applications, and many others blaming him for making it way too easy for anyone -even people who know close to nothing regarding security- to hack into other people’s accounts on social networks, webmails and other web applications, provided some conditions are met.

LXer Feature: 22-Aug-2011

Is the tech press too focused on negativity, to the detriment of the FOSS community? I don't know how he does it, but Bruce Byfield writes calm, thoughtful, lengthy articles that somehow ignite mad passions and flamefests. In his latest piece he discusses some of KDE4 developer Aaron Seigo's thoughts that the tech press presents an unbalanced, negative perspective, and sparks yet another round of heated discussions. So what's going on here?

Computing environments may revolve around heavy usage of NFS infrastructure. Network areas are hosted and provided by storage file servers, with compute servers mounting the exported areas into their directory tree. Periodically, the mounts expire when not in use and are removed from the directory tree on local machines.

KDE Italia, the Italian community backing the KDE Italia website and the KDE Italia forum, is pleased to invite you to CoNAsSL 2011, an end-summer event aimed at gathering all the Italian associations involved in Free Software. The event will take place on 9, 10 and 11 of September, in a beautiful location: the Tuscan seaside!

For the second time this year, Canonical, through David Planella, announced a few days ago that the Ubuntu App Developer Week event will take place between 5th to 9th September, 2011, on the Ubuntu IRC channel.

If Google were to make Android proprietary, with devices built exclusively by Motorola, it could earn $10.5 billion in profits by 2015, yet that still may not be worth it, says Piper Jaffray. Meanwhile, Google's Motorola acquisition should bolster Google TV, other analysts say.

If you were hoping that the Linux 3.1 kernel would fix the big power regression problem that's caused by PCI Express Active State Power Management (ASPM) being disabled on more systems since the release of the Linux 2.6.38 kernel, you're not in luck. There has not been any active work in this area. Making things worse though for mobile Linux users interested in a long lasting battery is another new regression in the Linux 3.1 kernel. Affected systems can easily see a 30% increase in power consumption simply when comparing the Linux 3.0 kernel to the current code being assembled for Linux 3.1. For an Intel Sandy Bridge notebook, the power consumption is up by 76% just over the course of this year from Linux kernel regressions.

Almost all of the 25,000 workers at thirteen hospitals in the Copenhagen region will over the next year begin to use Libre Office, an open source suite of office productivity tools. The group of hospitals is phasing out a proprietary alternative, 'for long term strategic reasons', which at the same time saves the group some 40 million Kroner (about 5.3 million euro) worth of proprietary licences.

I had the pleasure of talking to the CEO of Linux game store Gameolith!

Maude's dept applies locks to 'level playing field' gate The Cabinet Office and its IT underlings have exhaustively championed the need for more OSS across government since the ConDem Coalition was cobbled together in May 2010. Nonetheless Francis Maude's department has just snubbed open source players by awarding a contract to a proprietary software provider to help establish how much money the government spends on technology.…

This tutorial is supposed to show useful terminal commands to people who are new to Linux. Terminal commands are powerful tools if they are used correctly, but can cause great damage if you are not completely aware of what you are doing. Before using commands that are new to you, look up the manual page and make sure you have your files saved and backed up.

This post is about my open source remote bandwidth usage stats logger project. I have multiple devices at home that access the internet so it is not feasible to install a bandwidth monitor individually on all these devices as I’d still need to add up all logs and many of such devices don’t even have a way to install a monitoring software installed (e.g. my PS3, my TV, my media players, etc). So, I thought of monitoring the usage at my router. It is a smart one (Asus wl-500w) and I can install various linux software on it but then it requires a hard disk to run most of them which I don’t turn on all the time. Moreover, even if I could run the software directly from router flash, it doesn’t have enough space to store the logs (neither is it a good idea to keep writing to the flash often). Hence I came up with the idea of a light weight remote bandwidth usage logger where in the router has to do the bare minimum possible (here, it just has to make a GET call to a webpage with current status of received and transmitted bytes, accomplished by a single line of wget command). The system is completely open source. The logging and parsing is all done on server side and provides various useful things.

Scheduling the classes wasn't easy at first. We wanted to hold the three day, one hour a day classes for every other week. They run from Tuesday to Thursday, 7-8 PM. That would have been a doable thing until Diane suffered two strokes and renal failure. As important as HeliOS is to me, I cannot in good conscious leave her alone when she needs someone there with her. So what were we to do? Thanks to several community-minded folks that have worked with HeliOS in the past, we are able to offer our classes on the above schedule, with a qualified and dedicated instructor for each night. Let me introduce you to the HeliOS Project Instructors.

LXer Feature: 21-Aug-2011

This week's installment of the LXer Weekly Roundup. Enjoy!

Recently, I wrote an article about the lack of acceptance of GNOME 3. I received a private email from Aaron Seigo of KDE in which he took me to task, politely, thoughtfully, and with his usual thoroughness, for focusing on negative news. Since I often debate this issue with myself, with Seigo's permission, I'm summarizing the discussion here.

Seigo begins by asking, "Is it useful to spend time concentrating on the negatives in FOSS when we have not only a tremendous number of positive events occurring but many detractors who are willing to do the negativity thing for us?

Earlier this year Apple introduced Thunderbolt ports on their new systems while more hardware vendors will be offering these next-generation high-speed connections on their systems going forward, particularly when the Ivy Bridge hardware is rolled out. Thunderbolt, which was developed under the Light Peak codename, can transfer data at 20 Gbit/s and offers much potential, but how's the Linux support?

I must admit, results are not exactly what I expected. But they reflect true situation on the KDE "market", I can't object.

Windows is by far the most used operating system, and for many people it works just fine. However, it is not necessarily the best, and you may find that you benefit from going to another operating system.

This tutorial shows how you can speed up your Drupal 7.7 installation on a LAMP stack (Debian Squeeze) with the help of Boost and nginx. Boost provides static page caching for Drupal enabling a very significant performance and scalability boost for sites that receive mostly anonymous traffic. Boost makes sure that your logged-in users always get fresh content by not caching pages for logged-in users. In a first step I will show how to make your site faster by enabling Boost on a normal LAMP stack (Apache2, PHP, MySQL), and in a second step I explain how to make your site even faster by using nginx as a reverse proxy sitting in front of Apache and delivering the static HTML pages cached by Boost. nginx delivers static files a lot of faster than Apache and uses less memory/CPU.