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Quest Software, owner of PacketTrap MSP, has quietly invested in Jaspersoft, which develops open source business intelligence software. The big question: Will Quest eventually connect the dots between PacketTrap, managed services and BI software capabilities?

Tarsnap is an online backup service written and run by Dr. Colin Percival, the FreeBSD Security Officer. It is built for the "truly paranoid" and those who don't trust their data to other services such as Mozy and Dropbox.

Now, if you’ve ever tried to use sudo to run a command sequence such as a pipeline, where each step required superuser priveleges, you probably got a Permission denied error. This is because sudo only applies to the first command in the sequence and not the others. There are multiple ways to handle this, but there are two that stand out to me. First, you can use sudo to start a shell (such as bash) with root priveleges, and then give that shell the command string. This can be done using the -c option of bash. To illustrate how this works, I’ll start out using sudo to run cat on a file that I created in the /root directory that I normally wouldn’t have access to.

Jos blog post today reminded me that I had a look at the Harmony Agreements and tried to decide for me whether I would consider to sign such a CA. To make it short: signing a Harmony Copyright Assignment is for me unacceptable.

As soon as Oracle announced they were offering OpenOffice.org to The Apache Software Foundation, there went up a collective sigh of relief from the FOSS community. Some, no doubt, would have preferred the project to be turned over to the folks at The Document Foundation, whose members had worked with the code for the better part of a decade and who’d already done a bang-up job improving OOo with their fork LibreOffice, but you don’t always get what you want, and Apache is an open source organization not lacking in credibility. At least now OpenOffice is out of the hands of Larry Ellison, who is a friend to open source the same way that a fox is a friend to a chicken.

Last week there was a GNU Hurd status update, which generated a fair amount of attention as it stated there are plans for a Debian GNU/Hurd release in conjunction with Debian "Wheezy" when it's out in late 2012 or early 2013. After being in development for more than 20 years, the Hurd is finally taking some shape. The Debian GNU/Hurd installer for Wheezy is even now working, which I tried out and ended up porting the Phoronix Test Suite to GNU Hurd. In this article is a brief look at Debian GNU/Hurd along with the first-ever benchmarks of Debian GNU/Hurd against Debian GNU/Linux.

One of the age-old criticisms of Linux-based operating systems is that they are complicated, not easy to learn, and not user-friendly. Those who actually use Linux, however, know this is not the case. Like any new technology, you do need to take time to learn it, but once you do, it will open up doors for you, allowing you to unleash the full power of your server.

This tutorial shows the process of installing CentOS 6.0 using the HTTP NetInstall method. This method is much faster for basic systems since you don't have to download ISO files or one huge DVD based ISO just to get started. If you are installing many systems you may want to look into the stand-alone DVD as it will save time in the end.

I'm here again. Since the beginning of my UGP gameplay videos series on youtube (Youtube UGP channel), i never did a comparison between Ubuntu, Windows and another linux distro. So i decided, now, to do this. The reason of the long time between this and the last post, is that i had to install also Windows 7 (such a weird experience...) and Chakra (Arch Linux). Why Chakra? Simple. Because Chakra seems to perform better in playing games. Thanks to Jeff for his benchmarks that made me do this choice! (link post Jeff). Are you ready? Let's start with a beautiful game from Lionhead Studios... Black & White 2!

So I finally got to test Google Talk Video on the Nexus S. The result is simply: Excellent. It feels like a completely new era of communication has begun. Walking around with your phone in your hand having a nice, fluid video conference is just great.

Today, Google announced they were adding Git support to Google Code. This is certainly the most requested feature, and one I've been patiently waiting on. I move from Google Code's SVN repositories to GitHub's Git repositories almost 2 years ago. I love GitHub, but frankly, I'd rather have one less account to worry about and move over to Google Code with a few projects

So, you want to pimp up your Gnome 3 desktop? The good news is that Gnome 3 is incredibly customizable. The appearance of the icons, mouse pointers, window decorations and the Gnome 3 Shell itself can all be altered to suit your tastes, and web sites like Deviant Art have a huge range of themes to choose from. The bad news is that customizing Gnome 3 is not really a point and click affair. While every element can be customized, generally these are customized separately, and it can be confusing. What I will show you is what tools you need to customize the various aspects of Gnome 3.

LXer Feature: 18-Jul-2011

In the LXWR this week we have the 10 best open source apps you never heard of, the freeload factor in FOSS, why Jason Perlow is smarter than an Open Source surrender monkey, IBM donates its Lotus Symphony code to OpenOffice and will Toyota's membership in The Linux Foundation actually spur it to contribute? Enjoy!

On 10 July CentOS 6 has been, finally, released. CentOS-6.0 is based on the upstream release of Red Hat EL 6.0 and includes packages from all variants. All upstream repositories have been combined into one, to make it easier for end users to work with.

CentOS stands for Community ENTerprise Operating System and it exists to provide a free enterprise class computing platform and strives to maintain 100% binary compatibility with its upstream distribution, in this case Red Hat EL 6.

This tutorial explains how you can store the contents of your /etc directory in a version control system (VCS) with the help of etckeeper on Debian Squeeze. etckeeper hooks into Debian's package manager apt so that whenever you install/remove a package with apt, etckeeper will commit all changes to the /etc directory to your VCS; it also tracks file metadata such as permissions which is important for files such as /etc/shadow. Using etckeeper, you can go back to a previous version of /etc if an update has overwritten valuable configuration files. Not only will etckeeper track apt's changes to /etc, it will also do a daily auto-commit so that your manual changes go to VCS as well; in addition to that, you can do commits at any time manually.

Money. It’s something that most of us don’t have enough of. And what we have, we want to hold on to and keep track of. For many people, an old fashioned spreadsheet is perfect for their needs. The rest of us need a little something more. Not with the features, of say, ,KyMyMoney or GNUCash but something that isn’t as confusing or convoluted as a spreadsheet can be. Presented for your approval: wxBanker, a software that makes it easy to manage your finances. It might not have every bell or whistle, but it does have most of the bells and whistles that you actually need.

Recently I decided I should make a permanent backup of my files on to blank DVD discs just in case my backup hard drive fails. I had the following requirements..

While NVIDIA yesterday released a new Linux driver, it was quick to be pointed out in our forums that NVIDIA Optimus Technology still is not officially supported under Linux. But that's not all that's missing from their proprietary driver.

Tired of automated attacks on your systems? Want to beef up security a bit by denying would-be attackers a third or fourth chance? Then you need Fail2ban. Fail2ban watches logs and then bans IP addresses, based on too many password failures, by updating the firewall rules. Specific rules can be defined by the user and multiple log files can be monitored. This weekend, let's get started on improving security with Fail2ban.

According to an article which recently appeared on LinuxInsider, “the biggest change and impact to the Linux landscape and market to date has been the advent of cloud computing”. The IT industry is headed towards a centralised data centre model once more with cloud computing gathering momentum and a swagger of big integrators and small start ups alike are offering services in this arena. Open source solutions such as Linux naturally thrive in the current environment where multiple platforms seek solace under the same apparent cloud.