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The Linux community had two birthdays to celebrate recently. Debian GNU/Linux turned 17 on August 16 and openSUSE has been providing an excellent desktop Linux for five years.

Is Oracle starting to show its true feelings for open source software? It's taken a few months but the effects of Oracle buying Sun Microsystems are starting to become obvious. And among them are a series of blows for open source software.

After the release of the Ubuntu Multi-Touch stack called UTouch and the X.Org Gesture Extension, the rising question would be the support of everyday applications, as only a few applications in Ubuntu 10.10 will properly support UTouch. Standard applications which are non-multi-touch-aware only recognize events which come from the keyboard and the mouse like key-presses and mouse clicks.

This tutorial describes the installation of an ISPConfig 3 multiserver setup with dedicated web, email, database and two DNS servers all managed trough a single ISPConfig 3 control panel. The setup described below uses five servers and can be extended easily to to a higher number of servers by just adding more servers. E.g. if you want to have two mailservers, do the setup steps from chapter 2 on both of these servers. If you want to set up more web servers, then install ISPConfig on all other web servers in expert mode except of the first one.

In this article, by Martin Brampton author of PHP 5 CMS Framework Development, we get into the detailed questions involved in providing continuity for people using our websites. Almost any framework to support web content needs to handle this issue robustly, and efficiently. In this article, we will look at the need for sessions, and the PHP mechanism that makes them work. There are security issues to be handled, as sessions are a well known source of vulnerabilities. Search engine bots can take an alarmingly large portion of your site bandwidth, and special techniques can be used to minimize their impact on session handling.

Missing file? If so, apt-file, a tool that searches online repositories for a specific file, may be the answer. Occasionally, when building a package from source, disaster strikes and the whole process grinds to a halt due to a missing file. Fortunately, this is increasingly uncommon due to the maturity of Linux package management and the ubiquity of Autoconf configuration scripts. However, some software projects don't use Autoconf, either because the maintainers prefer another solution such as CMake or because the program is too small to make setting up a configure script worthwhile.

If you tried Gnome Shell, you probably noticed how cool it is to quickly add / delete workspaces using the + / - buttons. Deafiant wanted this for Compiz so he wrote a script which can be used to add or delete a workspace on the fly by using a keyboard shortcut (not using buttons like in Gnome Shell, but the result is pretty much the same). Can't wait to try this out? Read on!

Quick – answer me this: How much swap space is in use on your system right now? How big is the cache on your CPU? What kernel modules are currently loaded? How many total drives and partitions are you running? If you’re running Linux, all these questions (and a whole lot more) can be answered one easy way: take a look in /proc. It’s a goldmine of system information, just waiting to be retrieved by users, administrators, and scripts. In this guide we’ll take a trip through /proc to see just what valuable system information you’ve been missing out on.

Plenty of people are worried that the Google/Verizon net neutrality proposal has too many exceptions. The recording industry is worried that it doesn't have enough. In a letter sent today to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the RIAA and other music trade groups expressed their concern that the riddled-with-gaping-loopholes policy framework nevertheless might put a damper on ISP attempts to find and filter piratical material flowing through the Internet's tubes. Failure to allow for this sort of behavior would lead to an Internet of "chaos."

Say you just bought an Amazon Kindle or a Barnes and Noble Nook. You want to convert your eBook collection to .EPUB or .MOBI format. For this, install Calibre. The application not only provides you with a graphical way to manage your eBook collection, but also comes with a set of useful command-line tools. One of these is ebook-convert. This tool can help you convert between tens of standard formats like EPUB, FB2, LIT, LRF, MOBI, OEB, PDB, PDF, PML, RB, RTF, TCR, TXT, HTML and more. Even CBR and CBZ (comic book formats) are supported.

Does Peppermint Ice, the new cloud-oriented desktop distro, have what it takes to do for desktops what Jolicloud and Google Chrome OS are doing for netbooks? Linux User & Developer's Dmitri Popov reveals all...

The Veterans Affairs Department sees advantages in using open-source software to modernize its Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) system, but it anticipates several problems if it takes that step. The VA issued a request for information Aug. 11 asking for industry to deal with anticipated concerns related to open-source development for VistA. The request follows a recommendation from an Industry Advisory Council working group in May 2010 that the VA create an open-source development program to update VistA. VA Chief Information Officer Roger Baker has invited the group to submit advice on modernizing VistA.

The second day of the 2010 Linux Storage and Filesystem Summit was held on August 9 in Boston. Those who have not yet read the coverage from day 1 may want to start there. This day's topics were, in general, more detailed and technical and less amenable to summarization here. Nonetheless, your editor will try his best.

VLC 1.1.3 is released, this is the third bug fix release of the VLC 1.1.x branch, this release introduces small fixes and improvements over VLC 1.1.2.

Tomorrow will be the last day of our huge 50% off sale of Bordeaux for Linux, Mac, FreeBSD, PCBSD and OpenSolaris.

As you've probably heard by now, Oracle has decided to file suit against Google, claiming multiple counts of infringement against Java or JVM patents and copyrights they acquired when they assimilated Sun Microsystems this past year. Since I'm unlikely to keep my mouth shut about even trivial matters, something this big obviously requires at least a couple thousand words.

Adam Leventhal, another one of the three Sun engineers who developed DTrace, is leaving Oracle. Bryan Cantrill, another member of the team, left Oracle in July. This leaves only one of the original DTrace team – Mike Shapiro – still with Oracle. Shapiro is one of the signatories of the leaked memo which announced the closing of the OpenSolaris project.

The OIN's definition of "the Linux System" is controlled only by its six member companies although it also defines the scope of the license agreement between all supporters including licensees (not members) Oracle and Google. I have pointed out the problems with that arbitrary, constantly changing definition (it's simply a web page and the OIN can remove or add whatever it wants, whenever, without any objective criteria for that) in this blog posting. If you want to jump right to my suggestions for how the OIN's definition of "the Linux System" could be improved, you can go right here. If you read those suggestions, think of Oracle vs. Google. Any one of my four alternative suggestions would fix the problem for Dalvik and then Oracle wouldn't be able to sue Google.

Following its decision to end open distribution of source codes for its Solaris enterprise operating system, Oracle now faces backlash from the open source community which is likely to damage its relationship with developers in the long-run, industry watchers noted.

As many learned today, there's been a rather critical bug living within the Linux kernel for several years (as possibly far back as the original Linux 2.6 kernel release) that was finally fixed and this "high priority" bug is now publicly detailed. This issue (CVE-2010-2240), which allows arbitrary code to be executed as root, is easily exploitable by most current Linux desktops via simply running any compromised GUI application that has access to the running X.Org Server.