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Almost nine months after Slackware Linux 13 was released, the Slackware developers have announced the availability of the first point update for version 13 of their popular Linux distribution. Discussing the new release, the developers say that, "We've done our best to bring the latest technology to Slackware while still maintaining the stability and security that you have come to expect".

Can't bring yourself to love logs? You should take a second look. The lowly and lonely log files sit there day after day gathering dust and events as your system purrs along without issue. That is, until something bad happens. Then you scramble to find out why the system rebooted or had a memory problem. Maybe it was a network denial of service attack. Or was it a runaway process? Or worse still, a hacker after your MP3 collection. How will you know? If you said, “Look at the logs”, then you’re halfway to a resolution. In most cases, those lowly log files are your best friends. Disasters, system anomalies, user error and careless hackers all leaves tracks in the logs. If you know where to look and what to look for, you’re that much better off.

The announcement last week at Google IO of the creation of the WebM project and the release of the VP8 codec was a positive and welcome development, finally offering an alternative for online media to the royalty-liable H.264 and to Theora. WebM arises from Google's purchase of ON2 last year and had been widely anticipated. Google did their homework, securing endorsements from competing browser vendors Opera and Mozilla and even from Adobe (possibly in exchange for Google's endorsement of Flash on their TV platform) and, weakly, from Microsoft. The parade is now in full swing, and we can expect many more announcements of support like the one from the Miro Project. Only Apple was painfully absent, pushing the Google-Apple tension further into the spotlight

A board member with the Open Source Initiative (OSI) — the organization that approves open source licenses — has warned that there are "some serious questions" surrounding Google's swashbuckling efforts to create an open and royalty-free codec for web video. Hoping to defend the VP8 codec against patent attack, Google has open sourced the technology under a new license that includes some patent-centric language, but it has yet to submit the license for OSI approval. With a Monday blog post, OSI director Simon Phipps questioned whether there's a hole in the license that could expose users to third-party patent holders, and he urged Google to join hands with the OSI on the project, saying that before it does so, the codec cannot be considered open source.

Microsoft appears to be serious about making Outlook more accessible to open source developers. On May 24, the Redmond, Wash software giant announced two new open source projects designed to complement its recently released technical documentation for Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders (.pst). The two open source projects — dubbed .pst Data Structure View Tool and .pst File Format Software Development Kit — will make it easier for developers to access data stored in digital formats created by Microsoft Outlook and use that data in cross platform solutions.

Apple Macs are secure because they don't get computer viruses, and because OS X, the operating system they run, is based on the rock-solid and highly secure BSD UNIX. These are two popular misconceptions which make many Mac users underestimate the security risk of allowing their computers onto a corporate network. In a presentation at the EICAR conference in Paris this month David Harley, Research Fellow & Director of Malware Intelligence at anti-virus company ESET, his colleague Pierre-Marc Bureau and Andrew Lee of security outfit K7 Computing pointed out that underestimating the risks presented by Macs can make them less secure than Windows machines.

One of the most interesting things to happen in the past couple of years, is Microsoft's embrace of Open Source. This means different things to various people I've spoken with at Microsoft. Some seem genuinely sincere. Some seem less so. What hasn't changed is Microsoft's behavior to the Open Source community at large.

Things in my personal world of Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 are starting to work themselves out, but it hasn't exactly been a smooth ride on my main laptop. If you read to the bottom, you'll find that the hacky-as-hell solution to a bug that has plagued my own desktop is followed by my thoughts (not all good) on what exactly Canonical was thinking about when deciding what goes into a long-term-support release.

HylaFAX on CentOS allows you to send and receive faxes from your server. This tutorial will help you set up so that you can receive faxes and have them converted to a PDF upon delivery to the user.

I summarize in this blog post the questions, challenges and objections that were mentioned during a conference about open source/FLOSS that I gave to about 20 IT directors of Small Businesses (100-500 employees).

I recently came acrossexpect (the expect package in Debian and Ubuntu): a powerful utility that can script interactive operations. If you're not familiar with TCL syntax, you can get autoexpect from Wi-Fizzle.com. This spawns a shell, and then records everything you do in that shell. Hit Ctrl-C when you're done, and then either run the generated expect script as-is, or edit it to tidy it up a bit. In particular, autoexpect records keystrokes one by one, whereas you can put them all in at once. It records the full prompt, where the $ at the end may suffice.

Do you need an extra computer in your family, business or nonprofit organization? You can set up a spare computer with a 23-inch LCD monitor for less than $200.

A full review of Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.04. I’ve been reviewing various Ubuntu derivatives and this week I thought it would be fun to take a look at the netbook version of Ubuntu. Ubuntu Netbook Edition used to be called Ubuntu Netbook Remix, but Canonical changed the name once this distro became an official edition of Ubuntu.

With the recent trend toward its adoption in a wide variety of companies, business intelligence (BI) software is no longer the enigma it once was. Jaspersoft is one of the BI vendors we regularly cover here at OStatic, on part because of its strong open source business model. We recently caught up with Jaspersoft's President and CEO, Brian Gentile, to get a reading on what's going on in the BI niche and where open source software fits into the mix.

Back in 2008 there was the announcement from the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Texas that VIA had joined the open-source driver bandwagon after having abandoned previous open-source attempts. However, for the past two years, this has largely been a media bluff. VIA Technologies did things like appoint an open-source liaison (Harald Welte, who is actually no longer contracted by VIA and didn't even do much for their efforts), launch a VIA Linux web-site (that is ill-maintained and two years later there are still portions of the site "under construction"), but they have done some things like put out some code and republishing old documentation. We're almost half-way through 2010 and it doesn't look like VIA will be doing much this year for their open-source graphics drivers.

Android continues its march towards the top of the smartphone market. We’re in the new economy where every two years we get a new phone, whether we need one or not. And every few months we get a new Android release. Android 2.1 is barely a few months old and it is already time for a new one. Last week at Google I/O the Android team unveiled the much-anticipated Froyo rendition of Android — now officially known as the 2.2 release

Chad Derwent sat alone in his office in Silicon Valley. Outside his open door, rows of empty, silent  It wasn't supposed to end like this.

Google has announced that it has released the source code for its My Tracks GPS application for Android powered devices. The My Tracks app allows users to record GPS coordinates and visualise the routes they take when, for example, hiking, running or biking. The app also features several live statistics, such as time, speed, distance and elevation, and data can be exported to other Google services like Google Spreadsheets or Google Maps.

Landscape 1.5 is being officially announced this week, providing users of Ubuntu Linux with new management and deployment capabilities. The new Landscape follows the debut of Ubuntu's most recent Long-Term Support (LTS) release, the latest edition of the open source Linux distro aimed at providing enterprises with the ability to maintain and upgrade their deployed Ubuntu distributions. Now with the Landscape 1.5 release, Canonical, the lead commercial sponsor behind the Ubuntu Linux operating system, is extending its management platform as it looks to further grow its enterprise business.

The Puppy Linux project has released version 5.0 of its fast, small-footprint Linux distro, based for the first time on Ubuntu. Puppy Linux 5.0 is built from Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx binary packages, and debuts a "Quickpet" application suite, choice of browsers, and a boot-to-desktop feature.