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I am not a coder, nor do I fancy myself as any kind of security expert. If I can figure out that secure boot will barely be a speed bump for the bad guys, but will be a killer for the casual computer enthusiast, wouldn’t it be safe to figure that the geniuses at Microsoft understood this long before the decision was made to require the feature’s full use by OEMs who want one of those nifty “certified Windows 8? stickers on their boxes?

Following a series of embarrassing intrusions that hit the servers used to maintain and distribute the Linux operating system, project elders have advised all developers to check their Linux machines for signs of compromise. Emails sent Friday by Linux kernel lead developers Greg Kroah-Hartman and H Peter Anvin arrived as volunteers with the open-source project worked to bring LinuxFoundation.org, Linux.com, and Kernel.org back online following attacks that gained root access to the multiple servers that host the sites.

IBM presented an update on Linux on its mainframe line of computers. It was refreshing to learn about the success Linux has been having outside of the realm of industry standard X86-based systems. Here’s a quick summary of the session.

Every Linux user, after a while, starts creating a toolbox that he/she takes with him/her everywhere. However, that depends on the task at hand. You might need to install a distribution, you might just need a livecd, doing security-related work or just backup. And so the toolbox gets bigger and bigger, thus becoming less and less convenient. The subject of today's article is NetbootCD. NetbootCD is not a supplement for a live Linux environment, but rather it is designed to help you to install multiple Linux distributions using a single multiboot disk as oppose to requirement of 7 Linux installation disks.

After a little wait (Alex went on holiday!) Alexander "motorsep" joined me for question time this week at Gaming On Linux. He is responsible for the Steel Storm series of games!

Canonical introduced this weekend the new wallpapers that will be part of the final release of the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system.

Xubuntu 11.04 is a fast, stable operating system for older systems or systems that could use the performance boost. It is beautifully well put together and easy to use.

If you are a Linux protagonist who has been around as long, or longer, that I have, you have seen responses like these over and over as to why Linux distributions will never go mainstream on the PC desktop:

Amazon is rumored to be negotiating with HP to buy its Palm division, including its WebOS assets -- either to create an update to the Kindle Fire tablet, or just to gain patents. Meanwhile, an IHD iSuppli analysis suggests Amazon is selling each Quanta-manufactured Fire for $10 less than it costs to build....

Becoming a hacker is a worthwhile pursuit. Do you have what it takes to become a hacker? It takes dedication, intelligence and an analytic mind. You must have a desire to solve problems, a knack for verbal and written communication and a persistence to try new approaches when solutions don’t come easily.

Linux is, by design, a very secure operating system, but so what? You can have the best security system in the world on your house, but if you leave your front-door open anyone can still walk in. Even people who know better, like Linux kernel developers, blow it sometimes. That’s what happened to the Linux Foundation’s constellation of sites. Multiple important Linux sites were down for weeks and as of October 3rd, kernel.org is still down. This doesn’t have to happen to you. Here are a few simple suggestions from me, and some more advanced ones from Greg Kroah-Hartman, one of Linux’s lead developers.

I recently did some work with an ELO Touchsystems 1515L 15? LCD Desktop Touchmonitor. I was pleased with the touchmonitor’s hardware and performance, but in order to make it work properly in Linux I had to find a suitable calibration program. Out of the box on several distributions this touchscreen exhibits Y-axis inversion, where touching the top of the screen moves the cursor to the bottom and vice versa. xinput-calibrator is a freedesktop.org project that worked well for calibration, fixing the Y-axis inversion issue, and as a bonus it works for any standard Xorg touchscreen driver.

A review of Sabayon 6 LXDE, a solid and underrated distribution. Sabayon is based on Gentoo, but lacks Gentoo's steep learning curve. It's an intriguing alternative for users looking to try a seemingly-stable rolling release.

This article is about how to tether your Android smartphone with Linux Mint 11 and similar operating systems via USB, meaning how to use your smartphone's network to access the Internet on your computer by linking them with a USB cable.

Gnome 3.2 has been released. This time around, the developers have focused on a large number of small improvements rather than big, headline features. That said, there are a couple of interesting new additions in the areas of web integration and personal data management.

Running a Live Linux CD or USB is a convenient way to perform a number of tasks when an installed OS is not necessary.

I never go anywhere without a bootable Linux flashdrive. The fact that Linux is so portable is one of my favorite things about it.

Welcome to my first native Linux game comparison! Let's take a look to this free Mario Kart clone game: SuperTuxKart!

Rock Computing have released their new text editor for UNIX like systems, with a next generation interface that alludes to simplicity and power rather than hundreds of features X2 is neither just a text editor or a fully fledged IDE but something in the middle.

While trying to optimize the elementary OS performance, Sergey Davidoff stumbled upon a project called compcache that creates a RAM based block device which acts as a swap disk, but is compressed and stored in memory instead of swap disk (which is slow), allowing very fast I/O and increasing the amount of memory available before the system starts swapping to disk.