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LXer Feature: 26-Jan-2011

In this extension of his two part guest editorial and tutorial Dr. Tony Young (an Australian Mycologist by trade) goes into detail comparing the functions of Konquerer and Dolphin and along the way discovers that he might actually keep Dolphin as his file manager.

The Document Foundation launched the first stable version of its open source LibreOffice productivity suite, following a breakaway from OpenOffice.org and Oracle's control. Due for inclusion in Ubuntu 10.04, among other Linux distros, LibreOffice 3.3 is a bit leaner than OpenOffice, and aims to get more so in the future to support mobile devices, says the group.

A popular Oracle-controlled open-source project faces a forking after the software giant reiterated that it will restrict what coders can change. Oracle has said that open sourcers are free to extend Project Hudson, the software-build and monitoring service it inherited from Sun Microsystems. They can add as many plug-ins as they like to the core code, and they don't have to contribute the plug-ins back to the community. But if they build such plug-ins, they'll have to give their code another name.

The Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LAMP) architecture is one of the most popular choices for web server architectures in use today. Author John Mertic examines five things every LAMP application should take advantage of for optimum performance.

ZDNet ran an article titled "Happy Birthday, Macintosh" yesterday, and I clicked, somehow thinking it would be a significant birthday. Nope. It's No. 27. Not 30, which we'll all be enjoying in three years' time. But just as I turned from Macintosh to Unix in the 1980s, I do as much of my computing as I can these days in Linux.

Saline OS 1.0 has been released. Saline is a new Linux distribution based on Debian Squeeze with the main purpose of bringing some of the things users' might want that doesn't fit in with Debian Open Source philosophy. It uses Xfce for the desktop, making it light weight enough for some older machines and netbooks while still bringing modern amenities.

While the LibreOffice project is a fork of Oracle's Open Office, Meeks also noted that the door remains open for Oracle to become part of the effort. "I think that there is a very real and sincere offer for them to join the community, the only blocker is Oracle," he said. "They could become a leading light in the LibreOffice community. We'd love that. We'd love to have Oracle. This is not attempt to attack them, this an attempt to do something better."

Here comes even more movies and short films made using Blender for visual effects. For starters, Blender is a free and open source 3D content creation application. If you have seen the brilliant collection of Blender made videos we have featured here before, you probably don't need any more lecturing on the abilities of this incredible open source tool called Blender.

A quick look at Dreamlinux 3.5 GNOME. Dreamlinux has been requested a number of times since the blog launched, and this week I’ve finally gotten around to taking a peek at it. Dreamlinux is based on Debian and it comes with Xfce or GNOME as the default desktop. I picked the GNOME version for this quick look.

The TLF is interested in having someone talk about Koha during the 2011 event. Texas Linux Fest will kick off on the 2nd of April and run through the weekend. Here are some important dates you might find useful.

Gray beard Bell Labs scientists and Unix operating system co-creators Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson have been awarded the 2011 Japan Prize for information and communications. Ritchie worked at Bell Labs (in its many incarnations) until he retired in 2007. Thompson held positions at Bell Labs as well as at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Sydney and is currently a distinguished engineer at search engine behemoth Google. Ritchie was the primary creator of the C programming language, arguably the most popular and cursed-at programming language in the history of the world.

Cisco is expanding its push to attract more small business professionals to its networking gear. This week Cisco announced a new set of 200-series switches and a new Linux powered router platform that adds several big-business features tailored for the needs of small business.

Starting with version 11.04 alpha 2 (to be released on February 3rd), Xubuntu will use a new theme called "Greybird" as the default theme.

“Against all odds, Linux.conf.au is here!” This week more than 500 people from around the world are arriving in Brisbane for Linux.conf.au 2011. As last month Brisbane and indeed much of Queensland was devastated by severe flooding, it’s an incredible effort by the conference organizers that the conference is able to continue at all.

While NVIDIA puts out beta Linux graphics drivers quite often as a means of soliciting testing prior to declaring a new stable GPU driver update, AMD does not but rather they rely upon their NDA-covered select beta testers to put each Catalyst release through its paces before declaring a stable update in their timed monthly manner. Today though it seems AMD has put out a Catalyst Beta driver that's targeting their workstation customers (those with the FirePro / FireGL / FireMV hardware) but as in their usual unified manner, it will work with any supported Radeon (R600+ GPU) as well.

The Red Hat sponsored Fedora community Linux project has suffered a security incident in which its infrastructure was compromised. Long story short is that a Fedora contributor had his/her credentials stolen and then an attacker began to use those credentials to attempt to tamper with the Fedora infrastructure. Due to the limited privileges of the exploited account (and some good luck) it appears as though there has been no risk to Fedora's build or infrastructure. This story could have ended up far differently - just look at what happened to Fedora in 2008.

A few minutes ago, the Document Foundation company launched the final and the first stable release of the LibreOffice open source office suite for Linux, Windows and Macintosh platforms.

Fedora 14 has version of Libvirt 0.8.7 and qemu-0.13.0-1 installed via Rawhide Preview Repo. However, straightforward attempt to virt-install Windows 7 on virtio boot device fails to detect device after viostor.sys gets preloaded. It’s a known bug [1]. Actually, thread at Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 656353 contains required patch , but doesn’t contain any explanation how to rebuild and reinstall required package python-virtinst-0.500.4-1.fc14.noarch.rpm.Detailed workaround for this issue follows bellow.

Let me start with a short story about a situation I dealt with this past summer. I flew out to a client site where I found a broken architecture, management with no idea what was wrong while pointing fingers, and a completely dispirited team. After two weeks of taking a look at what was running (and what wasn't) we'd isolated a dozen specific problems with specific workable solutions, and did so using that dispirited team getting excited about fixing stuff and showing up for meetings. Other teams at the client - testing and environment groups - were shocked with the speed we moved as well as how informed and on top of things we were. The two real bad employees were corralled and worked around - the rest lined up and rocked through.

This document describes how to install a PureFTPd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota and upload/download bandwidth limits with this setup. Passwords will be stored encrypted as MD5 strings in the database.