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Before I get into describing basic Linux authentication, the recent discussions made it abundantly clear that I need to first define what I mean by security. I also have to answer the most basic question which is why we need to bother with security at all. Some DWW readers claim to have all but ignored security without a single problem for many years. Those claims are undoubtedly true. That doesn't mean the potential for real problems isn't present. Kurt Seifried, in his Linux Administrator's Security Guide, writes: "You only need to make one mistake or leave one flaw available for an attacker to get in. This, of course, means that most sites will eventually be broken into." He adds: "All technical security measures will eventually fail or be vulnerable to an attacker. This is why you must have multiple layers of protection."

I’ve been really silent lately and I haven’t communicated much with the community on what I was working on and what was happening. I was in France this summer on a 3 months unpaid leave. This gave me the opportunity to see how my life would be affected if I was to leave my job and I’m happy to say the experiment was a total success. So more on that later, but I just wanted to apologize for being absent, as a lot of things are happening around here and they’ve kept me away from this blog.

A group of developers at the Digital Technology Group (DTG), formerly the Laboratory for Communication Engineering (LCE), at the University of Cambridge have released two Android applications that allow users to browse the web anonymously using The Onion Router. The Onion Router, commonly referred to as Tor, is free software designed to provide internet anonymity to users while browsing online. It does this by bouncing the communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers from all around the world, preventing visited sites from learning a users physical location.

After some delay it’s finally time for me to write up my thoughts about SAM Linux 2009, a distro I must confess I hadn’t really heard of until someone asked me to review it. It’s a German distribution based on the very popular PCLinuxOS. So how would I get on with this unknown quantity (to me at least), read on to find out…

More than 600 people registered to attend Atlanta Linux Fest, which was held Sept. 19. Many of the standing-room-only sessions focused on Canonical and Ubuntu. Here are nine Ubuntu-oriented highlights from the event.

There are a bunch of closet Linux users and enthusiasts that work at Best Buy...even the Geek Squad has been known to demonstrate Linux after swearing the customer to secrecy. Ahem...allegedly.

At the Atlanta Linux Fest, Mark Shuttleworth announced that Ubuntu 10.04, the next major release of Ubuntu after version 9.10 Karmic Koala, will be code-named Lucid Lynx. Ubuntu 10.04 will also be a Long Term Support (LTS) version of the Debian-derived Linux distribution.

The Enterprise LAMP Summit for CTOs (Nov. 5-6) will feature a case study about the use of several parts of the LAMP software stack in a sophisticated and highly effective patient white board developed by the Vanderbilt University Medical Center Informatics Center. The Enterprise LAMP Summit (Nov. 5-6) and Big LAMP Camp for developers (Nov. 7), featuring global leaders in open source software, will focus on the business value, security and enterprise readiness of the LAMP software stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Python and Perl).

Despite an already crowded browser market Midori promises to be a lightweight alternative to browser bloat

Cherokee is a very fast, flexible and easy to configure Web Server. It supports the widespread technologies nowadays: FastCGI, SCGI, PHP, CGI, TLS and SSL encrypted connections, virtual hosts, authentication, on the fly encoding, load balancing, Apache compatible log files, and much more. This tutorial shows how you can install Cherokee on a Fedora 11 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

Firebird 2.1.3 is a recommended update, packages for ubuntu , karmic ,intrepid , jaunty and hardy are ready and uploaded

Remuco is a duplex remote control system for Linux media players and mobile devices equipped with Bluetooth or WiFi. To put it simple you could actually use your mobile phone with bluetooth or Wifi as a remote control for linux media players like Amarok, Banshee, Totem, VLC and more.

We already wrote about a wallpaper application for Linux which displays the current weather, moon phases and time of day based on your current location, in real time. This time, I'm going to tell you about a script created by Claudio Novais @ Ubuntued which displays a picture of the Earth, in real time. The script needs a permanent internet connections and uses just ~400kb of memory so don't worry about it eating system resources. Also, please note the the script tries to update every hour but if it fails, it tries to get the image from 5 to 5 seconds, for 5 minutes and if it still fails, it tries again in an hour. That's especially useful for when running the script at system start-up, because it takes some time until the internet connection is set up, or for when the internet connection goes down, etc.

If you've been using operating systems that are not Windows (but come to think of it, I've had plenty of networking problems in Windows as well), you know that getting both wired and WiFi network adapters to work in Linux, the BSDs and even Mac OS X is a crapshoot at best and prelude to weeks of often-futile hackery at worst. The smart thing to do is figure out what works the easiest and best BEFORE you buy anything to add to your computers, especially when it comes to WiFi adapters.

A web browser is the quintessential desktop application. Everyone needs one, and there is not a desktop Linux distribution around that does not make a web browser available.

In my spare time I like to do graphics work. During my GNU/Linux journey I have designed themes for XMMS, gKRELLm, icons, splash screens, GNOME Display Manager, Metacity, GTK2, fluxbox, openbox, desktop wallpapers, logo's, PmWiki, and HTML templates. Nothing makes a person more proud than having their artwork featured by a major open-source project.

Recently, I stumbled upon a new Linux distribution aimed at the x86, general use, desktop microcomputer. Naturally, I had a bit of an urge to groan, moan, and otherwise throw a temper tantrum. The predisposition to loathe new Linux distributions is not based in a dislike of Linux distribution plurality, but more of a dislike for redundancy.

The last few years has seen the company formerly known as Trolltech open their arms to one of the largest parts of their supporting community, KDE, in a new way: By offering a few members of the KDE community free admittance to the Qt Developer Days conference. This year is no different, and they have invited a number of people to attend this year's conferences. Yes, that's plural: There are two conferences. One from the 12th to 14th of October in Munich, Germany and one from the 2nd to the 4th of November in San Francisco, USA.

The free software community has produced a wealth of tools for the manipulation of image data. For simple changes, such as cropping, resizing, or basic contrast tweaking, any of a number of programs can be used. More complex changes will require falling back to tools like the GIMP, krita, or cinepaint. Anybody who has tried to join together two or more independent images in those tools will have discovered, however, that certain manipulations fall into a class of their own. For that kind of work, hugin would appear to be the only choice. Your editor has long intended to play with hugin; the threat of having some real work to do finally provided the necessary motivation.

Why is it that Linux distros divide and multiply? And do we have a better name for how and why that's done than, say, "forking"? That question goes through my mind when I look at the ever-changing Top 100 list at DistroWatch, and when I look, for example, at the many children of Debian, including grandchildren through Ubuntu.