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It's not everyday that there is a public security exploit published for the Linux kernel, yet that is what happened in early July. Though the flaw itself was patched in the mainline Linux kernel several weeks prior to the public exploit code being published, not all users may have patched. It could have been a lot worse. The issue of patching aside, the public exploit could easily have been a zero day exploit on the Linux kernel itself, were it not for the fact that the bug that enables the exploit was caught by a scan from code scanning vendor Coverity. The Linux kernel has been actively scanned by Coverity since at least 2004 in an effort to find bugs and improve code quality

Experience Linux support on the front lines. I recently upgraded a friend of mine to Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop for his five-year-old Acer laptop with 512 MB of RAM. I removed Windows 2000 after backing up his precious documents, pictures and browser favorites. I installed the latest stable version of Ubuntu, restored all of his settings, Internet connection and documents. He immediately fell in love with the GNOME interface, the speed at which the system booted and how snappy it responded to his barrage of clicking. He was in heaven.

First of all, I like the sax on the cover. I like jazz music and especially tenor sax, so a little cool jazz on a hot summer's day works for me, and keeps me calm as I'm commuting to work, but I digress. The Passionate Programmer isn't exactly about programming. It's about the career of programming. Most Pragmatic books I review in this area, teach some programming language, how to program in general, or "tips and tricks" of some programming method. Chad Fowler's book addresses the larger context of entering into a programming career. More than that, the context can be applied to many other creative careers where the creative person conceptualizes their "product" within his or her thoughts and imagination, and then generates the result. How do you proceed into such a career path? Keep reading and find out.

Celtx is a media pre-production editor that allows you to easily create screenplays and storyboards for your next movie. You can use it to create a whole assortment of media, including theater, comics, advertising, and video games.

Today's Report of the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission, "A Healthier Future For All Australians: Final Report," makes the e-health system a central plank in the future of health management in Australia.

Microsoft's original proposal to the European Commission, that it drop the web browser entirely from Windows 7, has been superseded with a new proposal that users be offered a "ballot box" of browser options. According to analysis by Glyn Moody of the presented documentation, it also appears to go much further.

Had been doubtful this would work and upon initial searches, didn't think it should. But I found a way today to manage your iPhone photos with your linux machine without any tricks or hacks. Read on for the super easy and quick way.

Back in 2005 we had reviewed the SilverStone Sugo SG01 and found this innovative small form factor chassis with its unique design to be very impressive and a wonderful case for gamers and computer enthusiasts. There were a few areas with the case's design that was not perfect, but SilverStone had then introduced the SG01W Evolution model complete with a case window and a few internal improvements. Pushing forward to 2007, there was then the Sugo SG03 that had the same basic layout as the SG01 but was rotated so that it would stand vertically. This was, yet another, excellent SilverStone chassis to work with and was wonderful in almost every aspect. A year later, after initially only being available in the Asian countries, we got our hands on the Sugo SG02-F, which was a budget version of the SG01. Last year we then reviewed the Sugo SG04, which built upon the SG03 and was still another great chassis. What though do we have to look at from SilerStone this year when it comes to the Sugo series? You guessed it, the SG05. The SG05 (and the already launched SG06) are radically different from the earlier Sugo enclosures in that they are for micro ITX systems rather than micro ATX.

On Monday, I took part in the first Wine Bug Day (one of hopefully many). It was a great success, I managed to rope in some support from some friends specifically Sean and Yorik both of whom are Wine users, not Wine developers (yet!).

And it wasn't just us, there was of course Scott Ritchie who organized the thing, but also several users popped up in #winehackers asking for others to change the status of their bugs. It was all quite exciting in a weird kind of way.

Microsoft Corp.'s unprecedented release last week of more than 20,000 lines of driver code to the Linux community could put pressure on several top suppliers of closed-source drivers to make similar moves. Observers note that virtualization vendor VMware Inc., Wi-Fi chip maker Broadcom Corp. and graphics chip maker Nvidia Inc. still decline to offer their Linux drivers under the General Public License, a free software license widely used in the open-source community.

Local developers are helping to drum up market buzz to boost interest and expertise in open source technology across the country. Development in the mobile arena is particularly hot at the moment, among both individuals and software houses, according to Linux user groups in Singapore.

First there were the "granny" articles, where someone's grandmother presented the simplicity of Linux and emphatically denied being coached by her son into using Linux. Albeit rather a quirky form of humor, they made their points, because the KDE Desktop had indeed matured and was easy to use. I was also tolerant when people started writing about Linux for their children, because I know...

BackerUpper is a tool similar to Apple's TimeMachine. It is intended to create snapshot-backups of selected directories or even your full hard drive. From the BackerUpper project page: "Backerupper is a simple program for backing up selected directories over a local network. Its main intended purpose is backing up a user's personal data." This article shows how to install and use BackerUpper on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope).

OpenSSH is the implementation of the SSH protocol. OpenSSH is recommended for remote login, making backups, remote file transfer via scp or sftp, and much more. SSH is perfect to keep confidentiality and integrity for data exchanged between two networks and systems. However, the main advantage is server authentication, through the use of public key cryptography. From time to time there are rumors about OpenSSH zero day exploit. Here are a few things you need to tweak in order to improve OpenSSH server security.

The Coding Studio is pleased to announce that they are now inviting the open source community to become the primary content providers for their Linux screenshots directory. This is an opportunity to promote your Linux distribution of choice, and/or show off your customized installation. They invite both owners and users to participate.

So Google reckons that it can provide the perfect operating system in Chrome, even to the point where according to Google's Engineering Director, Linus Upson, it will herald "the end of malware". That's what he went on the record to say during an interview with New Scientist magazine, in what could end up being one of those 'why did I say that' moments that go down in software development folklore.

We had Microsoft releasing some 20,000 LOC of Linux drivers so that Linux can run faster on their Hyper-V solution. A lot of MS PR saying how they love interoperability and how cool they are. I will be the first to say that I was in shock (and I bet I wasn't the only one). After all, we are talking about a license that their managers explicitly hate so why release code under that license then? I just couldn't help seeing a little hypocrisy involved.... to say the least. It's always cool to say that they had to eat their own words anyway so I didn't take it as a bad thing, after all, as Linus says, we are all developing scratching our own itches.

Liferea developers have announced the availability of the first stable version of the 1.6.x series. Liferea (Linux Feed Reader) is an aggregator for online news feeds. There are many other news readers available, but these others are not available for Linux or require many extra libraries to be installed. Liferea tries to fill this gap by creating a fast, easy to use, easy to install news aggregator for Gtk/Gnome.

You can make MPlayer play h264-encoded video files a lot faster on multicore machines if you graft some libraries from the ffmpeg-mt project into the resulting mplayer binary. We need to recompile for this. First, use Subversion to download the code for MPlayer: svn co svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer Then the code for ff-mpeg svn co svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk ffmpeg-mt Remove the old libavcodec, libavformat and libavutil code from MPlayer

I am in the middle of CentOS and Ubuntu comparison frenzy. It started with an attempt to assert quality of Linux distributions made for busy people. Today I am considering packaging. When comparing Ubuntu and CentOS packaging systems, first thing that crosses my mind is that, well, size matters. Ubuntu has nearly 70000 packages. CentOS has around 6000.