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Sixteen years ago today, Ian Murdock announced the "imminent completion of a brand-new Linux release". The release was to be called the Debian Linux Release and was the start of one of the most popular community based distributions of Linux. It also became the basis for the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Debian GNU/Linux is renowned for its community's commitment to a free software philosophy.

What do all these licenses do for you? That's the 64 license question. Today I'm pondering if the current open source model is still valid or if it's outdated. Do we need licensing for open source software? Do we need the GPL, LGPL, APL and all the other licenses that plague...er, grace us? If your software is free and open source, why bother with a license at all? The software writer owns the copyright so why put users or potential users through the paces of licensing? What exactly is to be gained by creating and enforcing a license for this kind of software?

CentOS must seem like a dream distribution to many. Its users get the benefit of the massive team of developers that Red Hat has working on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux product without having to pay for any of it. CentOS offers a level of stability that cannot be found in any of the more community-oriented distributions; even Debian Stable requires its users to upgrade more often than CentOS does. Hosting providers have a solid, supported platform to sell to many thousands of customers, and it does not cost them even a single devalued US dollar. Many, many sites depend on CentOS, so anything which threatens the stability of that foundation is certain to raise a number of eyebrows. Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened at the end of July.

How would you like to be able to customize the layout of the Google homepage? How about add better video controls and a download button to YouTube? Or set a profanity filter that works across all websites? Maybe remove all the “What type of leafy vegetable are you?” quizzes from Facebook? These are very few of the things that can be done with Greasemonkey. By itself, Greasemonkey does essentially nothing. At least, nothing that you as a user would notice. To really use it, you download Greasemonkey scripts which all have some special purpose. For example, right now I’m writing this from a browser with Greasemonkey installed, and I’m using scripts to enhance YouTube, Facebook, and Google Images.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Kubuntu 9.04 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. Kubuntu 9.04 is derived from Ubuntu 9.04 and uses the KDE desktop instead of the GNOME desktop.

Shipping data quickly using intermodal transport (van, jet, boat, etc) opens up pipelining of workflows across cloud providers, with real-time marketplace-based routing to the best providers.

Want to back up files and documents on your laptop or desktop PC to a server? Assuming both machines run Linux, you can do that with just one command.

One of the things I like about Linux is the command line. I have used nautilus, konqueror, and thunar to manage files in Linux and these file managers are great for what they do. But there are times when one simply wants to find a file when working on the command line without having to open a GUI application.

In my last project at work, I had to replace NFS with GFS2 and Clustering. So in this tutorial I will show you how to create a Red Hat cluster with GFS2. I will also show you how to optimize GFS2 performance in the next HowTo, because you will quickly notice some loss of performance until you do a little optimization first.I will 1st show you how do build a Cluster with GFS2 on the Command Line and in the next tutorial I will show you how to do the same thing using Conga. In this tutorial I am using 3 CentOS Virtual Machines in VMware ESX 3.5. For the GFS2 File System I am using a vmdk built with the thick option, that is shared among all the Virtual Machines. You also can use iscsi or fiber... This option is up to you.

I've been setting up some Ubuntu Jaunty systems for relatives as an excuse to get rid of a lot of old hardware including some SCSI scanners. I encountered an HP scanner that was supported by sane but not recognized by Ubuntu. The device ended up with the wrong permissions preventing anyone except root from scanning. This is an explanation of how to create a udev rule to automatically fix this type of problem.

In an effort to expand its Linux offerings, Dell is researching new netbook-type devices and will soon offer netbook Linux OS upgrades, a company official said on Wednesday. The company is researching the possibility of offering new Linux-based mobile devices called smartbooks, said Todd Finch, senior product marketing manager for Linux clients, at the OpenSourceWorld conference in San Francisco. The company will also upgrade its Ubuntu Linux OS for netbooks to the latest version in the next few weeks, he said.

LXer Feature: 15-Aug-2009

A month or so ago I purchased a TomTom One map/navigation device, only to discover there is no Linux client for TomTom home, and as a consequence i am unable to update the maps on the device, or indeed, any other useful information that is made available for the device.

Boxee is a cross-platform freeware media center software with promising new social networking features. Boxee is based on XBMC media center, an award winning open source project. Since i had already tested the latest XBMC 9.04, i was not expecting anything dramatic from an alpha release of Boxee. I was way wrong.

Canadian director Ron Mann is testing a new method of movie distribution, releasing his documentary Know Your Mushrooms on a customized USB stick.

[This made my day -- a movie director that encourages sharing -- major coolness. Barbara]

Many Linux distributions ship with the heartbeat suite of software for setting up High Availability Linux. The Linux HA project has details and downloads for those who do not have it available for their system. This text addresses setting up a very simple HA Linux configuration using the configuration files versus a GUI or the XML definition files. The example setup will have two servers that serve up an apache webserver. One can have many other services assigned as well and shared data over NFS for example. Similarly a common mysql db backend could be available or even more exotic tiered mysql dbs - basically whatever the needs are. What Linux HA can do is using a shared IP it can host the same IP from any server in the cluster list. For demonstration purposes, however, the apache servers root will have an index file with the actual hostname of the system - what should be observed is the index file contents will change after a failover but still be accessible via the shared IP.

This may be a category in which the proprietary tools win out over open source. Unless you tell me otherwise...

Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (known by the acronym ALSA) is a Linux kernel component intended to replace the original Open Sound System (OSS) for providing device drivers for sound cards. If you are experiencing sound issues on Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 or just want the latest version, you may want to upgrade to ALSA 1.0.20 (Ubuntu Jaunty comes with Alsa version 1.0.18rc3 - you can check this by typing this in a terminal: cat /proc/asound/version). Read on!

The amount of time a given release of a Linux distribution is support is of paramount interest to its users. After all, large-scale deployments depend on stability, and stability means support. Some users of openSUSE are liable to be feeling a bit shaken this week, after the project announced that the support period for its releases has been cut by a fourth.

A Linux kernel bug in network socket initialization could allow an attacker to acquire root privileges to inflict damages. The security hole applies to all kernels of the 2.4 and 2.5 series and has been around possibly since 2001.

If you like the reliability of Debian Stable, buy yearn for some newer packages from Testing or Unstable, you can have it all. Juliet Kemp shows us how to run a mixed Debian installation and pull packages from whatever version we desire.