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Whether you're looking to run your own web server or searching for an ideal web host for your next PCI compliant e-commerce site, it's extraordinarily beneficial to know about security. In our ongoing effort to help spread the word about security as it pertains to web hosting, we would like to present a list of 7 of the best web server security tools available. All of these tools are powerful and freely available, and they should all be utilized on a truly secure server.

This weeks interview in this series of behind KDE is with a well known old-timer. We all know that he is the guru of kdelibs, but do you know what he does for kdesysadmin? Or should I say 'did'? Meet the guy who developed for KDE while some of you were not even born. Meet the one who moved files manually in the cvs era and see how Charm and Jazz play an important role in his life. Meet David Faure!

I'm working on a new Ubuntu configuration to deploy for friends and family. One of the capabilities I wanted to add was simple remote webcam viewing. While webcam-server is old it met my requirements but it's a command-line application. To deploy webcam-server I had to make it more friendly which meant making a video device selection dialog for it. My current programming hammer is BASH shell scripting but to make a GUI I turned to utilities that can produce dialogs and provide feedback to command-line applications. There are many to choose from but for different environments I had to make custom versions of the script, select the dialoger with a script parameter, or try to select it dynamically. In the great tradition of overdesign I chose the latter.

The downside to eReaders is generally the small screen. You open up a PDF file and the fonts are smaller than you’d wish them to be. You can always zoom, but why not prepare your file from the beginning? If you have a CHM file and you want to convert it to a PDF to be later loaded on your eReader, try this:

Little dinky underpowered mobile phones, netbooks, and laptops are getting all the attention these days. Well what about us folks who still need good capable desktop PCs? So I asked for a hotrodded version of ZaReason's Limbo to review, even though the $799 base model has plenty of goodies for the demanding user

Photo management software is a type of computer application that helps users to organize their digital image collection.

Michael Geist writes: "In the years before the emergence of the Internet, three online service providers battled in the United States for market supremacy. America Online (later AOL), Prodigy and Compuserve each adopted "walled garden" strategies that pinned their hopes on exclusive content to attract large subscriber bases." History has shown that "walled gardens" don't work (except if you're a gardener!).

A full review of aptosid 2010-02. I recently reviewed Linux Mint Debian, a very user-friendly version of Linux Mint based on Debian. This time I looked at another distro based on Debian, called aptosid. Aptosid, for those who aren’t familiar with it, is actually made by the same developers that created the popular distro Sidux. There was apparently some conflict and controversy within the Sidux e.V association that resulted in Sidux morphing into Aptosid.

Engineers and product managers from device and computer manufacturers and designers will meet in Taipei, Taiwan for a free day-long session hosted by Canonical Ltd. on Sept 24, 2010.

Many times we face a situation when our Ubuntu Netbook becomes pretty slow. And when we check out our RAM, we find that only half of our RAM is used and the SWAP memory usage is gone upto 25% or 50% or even more. Confused?? Swap memory is used as an alternative to RAM. It is a small partition in the hard disk, that is used to give your system extra memory when your RAM is full. However, it is not as efficient as RAM and quite slow.

We seem to be seeing a rise again in the discussions surrounding free and open source software licensing complexity, and the fear that open source may "infect" or "taint" your software. Just yesterday I received email from a marketing department of yet another company with source scanning tools that ensure against open source “contamination” and “unclean IP”. Let’s get a few things out of the way. This is not an open source problem. If you program in C++ and have third-party ISV library code available, then someone could inadvertently copy source code. Or remove a copyright notice. On top of that, managing a complex sourcing of software is not that difficult.

The endless rebuilding of data mappers, logging code, object resolution mechanisms, messaging systems and web frameworks adds up to a massive waste of time, effort and potential. I’m not talking about public collaborative efforts, I’m talking about in house “Not invented here” syndrome. This is what happens when you have a community cut off from the world. A community that doesn’t talk to each other and work together. This is what the .net community is.

Ryan Cartwright has written an article on how to backup Gmail with Getmail. It is an excellent piece, but Getmail is a command line program, and while most readers of FSM will doubtless be at home there and in configuring XML files, we also like to behave like electric currents and take the course of least resistance to get from A to B. Besides, using the Thunderbird (or Evolution) e-mail clients to backup Gmail has other advantages too. Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

There’s a certain movement these days in the world of GNU/Linux distributions. I think we are experiencing one of these moments that starts with a question that has been asked and heard many times -should distros differentiate themselves in order to survive? & aren’t there too many distros out there?- and ends with a much more serious question: Innovating in the world of GNU/Linux. Rest assured this is not going to be that sort of rant where we conclude that “Linux is the copycat of other OSes” just like we will not, in fact answer the question of the pretendly too many distributions or their differentiation. That is, I will not really answer these questions; and the reason I won’t is that I think these are all bad questions that either miss the point or show a certain lack of understanding of FOSS and GNU/Linux in general.

The Mozilla Foundation announced that it has joined the Open Invention Network as a Licensee. A bold move for the usually patent-averse company, Mozilla touted the OIN's defensive patent use and its free catalog as reasons for joining.

Have an old PC sitting around with nothing to do? Just add VortexBox and you can have a Linux-based streaming jukebox in no time.

Have you ever experienced the situation where you open one particular application (such as Firefox) and it brings the whole system to a standstill? If you are running a web server, the last thing that you want to see is to have an application crashes the whole system and bring all the websites down.

Mandriva is the pan European and BRIC Linux distribution for all: enterprises and individuals, beginners or most advanced users. Mandriva recovered from a difficult situation. The recovery was done through restructuring the debts, a simplification of the organization, a new investor and a new strategic focus. The Mandriva Community will be autonomous and governance structures will be created to ensure freedom. The Mandriva enterprise is just an element of this independent community.

Freescale Semiconductor announced a Home Energy Gateway (HEG) "smart grid" reference platform that can be based on three existing ARM processors or a yet-to-be-announced mystery SoC (system-on-chip). Supported with Linux and Windows BSPs by Adeneo Embedded, the HEG offers features for collecting power consumption data over ZigBee networks from Home Area Network (HAN) appliances, controlling power activation, and communicating with utility networks.

This howto describes one way to build a scalable, secure, full-featured mail platform. It offers virtual hosting of mailboxes in maildir format with support for quotas and server-side filtering, domain aliasing, address aliasing, address forwarding, catchall addresses. Relaying is secured with STARTTLS and SMTP-AUTH. Incoming mails are checked for viruses, spam, and checked against SPF policy and DNSBL.