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One of the most common questions when comparing network monitoring tools is "What does Zenoss do that Nagios doesn't?"

X.Org has issued an Call For Proposals for its X.Org Developer Conference 2012 (XDC2012) which is Sept 19-21 in Nuremberg Germany.

We've had plenty of stories over the years of Monsanto's incredibly aggressive stance when it comes to its "Roundup Ready" patents. The company has now been awarded $1 billion from Dupont for infringing on one of these patents. Now, here's a case where we're talking about competing companies, so perhaps no big deal, right? Except there's one tidbit here that makes this interesting: Dupont never brought the product in question to market. So the "damages" to Monsanto would seem to be minimal... except in a court of law apparently.

Do you have an old hard drive that you use to store valuable data and you need to determine approximately how much of life is left in its electronic heart? Did your hard drive travel and you want to check any possible damaged that it may sustained? Do you want to see information like attributes, features, firmware version etc but you don’t know how? You should check out GSmartControl!

In what can only be interpreted as a desperate attempt to catch up with the rest, the GNOME Desktop Project has announced that it will be developing its own operating system.

If memory serves, the only evidence we ever saw were some clumsily disguised lines of code from Linux that matched Unix code line for line. There was a good reason for the match; it was BSD code dating back to the infamous settlement between AT&T and Berkeley.

Much is being made of how sloppy it was for both companies to allow this to happen. I've got worse news: this stuff has been going on for a decade or more. I can say this with confidence because in 2001, when I worked as a consultant, I was asked into a meeting at which a very large Australian financial institution sought advice on a problem. The problem was that famous people had been ringing its call centres and telling sob stories about how they'd lost their passwords. The famous people pleaded that, as extremely busy and important individuals, they simply couldn't remember the details of every bank account they had opened.

XenSummit will be held later this month in San Diego, CA

Today I want to share with you some of my favorite features of bash, I called them hidden because I’ve discovered that a lot of people don’t know or don’t use them, but to be honest they are not so hidden after all, they are in the man page of bash, but how many of us have read it all ?

Licensed to swap files with your PC: Sharp has succumbed to the charms of a Microsoft licensing deal for the filing system exFAT. Microsoft will license its Extended File Allocation Table technology to Sharp in a deal covering the consumer electronic giant’s Android-based smartphones.

I'm sure all the cloud naysayers are sitting there smirking after last weekend's epic cloud hack report, but before you gloat, remember that the social engineering methods used to access Mat Honan's account could be used on your data center too.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Linux Mint 13 (Maya) desktop (with the XFCE desktop) that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

ROSA Marathon 2012 GNOME Edition is a community-driven release with the GNOME 2.32 on the board. This release is intended for people who have not powerful machines, but do not want to use LXDE, or for people who do not want use GNOME 3. Software included: Linux kernel 3.0.38 with the latest security fixes; GNOME 2.32 software pack with the GDM 2.20 and original ROSA theme; Chromium browser 21; LibreOffice 3.4.5 LTS; ROSA Media Player 1.0; Pidgin 2.10; FBreader; GIMP 2.6; EasyTag; Cantarell font used by default.

Much as we here in the Linux community may wish that everyone could cut their proverbial computing "teeth" on our favorite operating system, the fact remains that the majority of the world starts off on Windows. That, after all, is why the tragedy of "Microsoft Trained Brain Syndrome" has persisted all these years.

This is a quick look to the new Lock (Screen Shield) of Gnome Shell, and the new interface of GDM, which both come to brake more the visual coherence between Gnome and Ubuntu that ships LightDM.

The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the August 2012 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine.

Open source has created a new way of mobilising communities but it has also allowed a democratic deficit to open up between developers and users. Glyn Moody offers his take on this gap and how it is being slowly closed.

Hacker Highschool is an open source after school program that teaches students the best practices of hacking with hopes that they'll be responsible hackers in the future.

Valve's SIGGRAPH 2012 presentation last night -- about the Source Engine on Linux and their experiences with maximizing the OpenGL performance of their game engine on Linux -- was a success. More details about the presentation will be available in the coming days, including the slides. However, for those overly-excited, here's a few photos from the Valve Linux presentation in Los Angeles. There's also a photo of Left 4 Dead 2 on Linux, although it's not too clear and doesn't show (Ubuntu) Linux in the background with my photos from April when at Valve HQ being much more clear.

Two leading GNU/Linux players have explained their plans about how to deal with secure boot. While Canonical decided to ditch Grub2 due to GPLv3, Fedora's approach was to use Grub2 and use Microsoft keys. That left openSUSE/SUSE Linux Enterprise.