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Recently I wrote an article about the creation of a new free (AGPL) web service called Libre.fm, aimed at replacing Last.fm and even going beyond that to develop an identity of it's own. Things have progressed very quickly since, so I thought I'd better follow up with more information...

The VAR Guy is enjoying some healthy industry debate. By now, you likely know that SpringSource acquired Hyperic, an open source systems management company. But the real fun started when a rival CEO offered his opinion on the deal. Here's the scoop.

Code has been released for the open-source version of Silverlight that closes the gap on the as-yet-unfinished next version of Microsoft's browser-based media player. Moonlight 2.0 has been delivered for preview featuring APIs from Microsoft's Silverlight 3.0 that the project's organizers said it made sense to add. Moonlight puts Microsoft's Silverlight on Linux and Unix. Moonlight 2.0 is modeled on Silverlight 2.0 but since work began on the second version of Moonlight, Microsoft released a beta for the third edition of Silverlight with final code expected later this year.

Question: Hyper-V, VMware, Citrix — do any of them have it right? Answer: Only if you could combine all three into a single product.

I've written (and before that observed/suffered) about the Xfce flavor of Ubuntu — Xubuntu — not offering much of a speed advantage over plain ol' GNOME-based Ubuntu and certainly not comparing well to the default Xfce setups of Debian and Slackware. The speed of Xubuntu was covered in last week's Distrowatch, which I also blogged about. In the latest Distrowatch, we learn how to strip down the distro and run "minimal" Xubuntu.

Steve Ballmer not only chose the day that Windows 7 RC hit the public download stream to announce swathing jobs cuts at Microsoft, but also admitted that more may be to come.

The trap statement in bash causes your script to execute one or more commands when a signal is received. One of the useful things you can use this for is to clean up temporary files when your script exits.

Photo gallery: This CNet CWD-854 USB Wi-Fi adapter cost only $22.40 at Amazon.com, and is automatically detected in both the Ubuntu 8.04 Linux and OpenBSD 4.4 operating systems — no small feat for those looking for compatible Wi-Fi adapters for FOSS OSes.

François Vogelweith is the author of zgegblog, a site that maintains a collection of great GNOME themes. Balanzan (translated: Balance) is one of its most popular creations, a very comprehensive theme based on Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope, which contains a wallpaper, logon theme, Emerald theme, controls and icons.

I am pleased to announce that the Phoronix Test Suite has just incorporated its 100th test profile. With now having 100 different tests and over 50 test suites, there are plenty of tests to suit your needs whether you are interested in graphics / video, server, CPU, memory, disk, or system benchmarking. This also raises the count for the number of compatible tests in our GPLv3-licensed automated testing software that is compatible with Mac OS X, OpenSolaris, and *BSD operating systems.

Six months ago I noted that the European Patent Office had embarked upon a fairly abstruse process:

a referral of a “point of law” concerning software patents by the President of the European Patent Office (EPO) to the EPO “Enlarged Board of Appeal”, something that seems to happen quite rarely. Now, you do not have to be a genius to see the problem with this; essentially, the EPO is asking itself whether it wants to widen its own jurisdiction, increase its power and boost its income by allowing software patents. Unless the Enlarged Board of Appeal consists entirely of self-denying, altruistic masochists, I think we can all guess what the answer will be.

A vulnerability in udev, the user-space tool that manages the Linux /dev tree, has left unpatched systems vulnerable to a local root privilege escalation. Exploits are already circulating on the full-disclosure mailing list, so it is rather important for users and administrators to update their systems. The problem was caused by the way udev processes the messages it receives—certain kinds of messages, which could be generated by user processes, were not considered. That oversight led to the vulnerability.

You can find out a lot about your network by using a variety of different tools. I you want to understand the layout of your network, where packets are going, and what people are doing, then you need to use a variety of different tools that can help you to build up a picture of your network and what is going on. This tutorial examines techniques for monitoring the traffic and content of your UNIX® network and how to read and diagnose problems on your network.

Linux cracks 1% of the OS client market. But does this 1% represent the path forward, or the beginning of the end?

Most Netbooks aren't suitable to run "heavy" Operating Systems like Windows Vista, or XP. That's the reason why many users are installing a Linux distro onto their Netbook & some manufacturers like ASUS & Acer do offer their Netbooks with Linux pre-installed.

The Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa and the Germany-based InWent project have launched a programme to develop trainers in East and Southern Africa capable of teaching others to build free software-based businesses.

The Free and Open Source software world has responded enthusiastically to the introduction of netbooks and created or modified dozens of applications and drivers for netbooks. Cynthia Harvey introduces us to a sampling of 24 FOSS applications for netbooks.

When Apple censored an application from the band, Nine Inch Nails, yesterday it subjected itself to a firestorm of criticism. Apple needs to stop being the App Store morality police and let the market decide if an app is appropriate or not.

Even as the global economy tanks, open-source companies continue to soar. A range of open-source companies reported sales and community growth this past week, including..

According to RFC2821 the lowest-numbered records are the most preferred MX for domain. So a target Postfix backup server is used to keep the messages in a queue waiting for the primary server to become available. This ensures that if my primary MX goes down you do not loss any emails. However, spammers are connects to backup MX to avoid anti spam filters that are running on the primary MX server. This also hides their real IP from my primary MX. This tutorial shows how to configure anti-spam and anti-virus for Red Hat / CentOS Linux ver5.3 based Postfix mx server.