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genisoimage is a pre-mastering program for creating ISO-9660 CD-ROM filesystem images, which can then be written to CD or DVD media using the wodim program. genisoimage includes support for making bootable “El Torito” CDs, as well as CDs with support for the Macintosh HFS filesystem.

The Government has been far from forthcoming when it comes to revealing any details behind the New South Wales (NSW) laptop tender choices. There are unanswered questions from Linux buffs, taxpayers, students and parents, and transparent Government advocates alike.

Recently I was asked a very simple question that I'm pretty sure I've never addressed in this blog over the mass of posts already churned out. Shell scripting has been addressed, to a great degree, on this blog, but (even the beginner stuff) has included a presumption of certain knowledge. It's easy to forget what it was like back when I started working on Linux and Unix, so I often make the cardinal sin of assuming everyone has already asked this question and had it answered.

While Intel has long backed an open-source graphics driver for their integrated graphics driver, it was not up until last year when Intel released the i965/G35 documentation that there was public, NDA-free documentation concerning their newer IGPs. Later that year they then released the GMA X4500HD series and since then we have been waiting for them to push out public documentation concerning their G45 chipset. Well, Intel has finally come to the table with this documentation and it is very extensive. This documentation drop today is split into several volumes and makes up well over 1,000 pages of Intel hardware documentation and register descriptions that are available under the Creative Common Attribution, No Derivative Works license.

CMus (also called C* Music Player) is a ncurses-based audio player which can be run in a shell, with no need for an X server. CMus is very powerful and highly configurable, and it features Vi-like keyboard shortcuts, which can be bound to other keys if needed. It supports various audio formats, including Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3 (with libmad), WAV, AAC or WMA. CMus is lightweight and I must say that it was a delight testing it, and although by default it lacks support for one of the features I consider a must-have, the Last.fm song submission, this can be accomplished by applying a patch and recompiling it.

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. and provider of Services Oriented Storage Solutions, today announced the immediate availability of the second generation of Hitachi Storage Replication Adapter for VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager. Today’s announcement adds support for the midrange Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage family, providing customers continuous, real time local and remote replication and automatic failover capabilities to ensure resilient data protection, high availability and disaster recovery for VMware environments.

"In a world where distinctions between open source and proprietary software are becoming increasingly irrelevant, what role can IP [Intellectual Property] play in facilitating greater collaboration with the industry for the benefit of business and customers alike?" While this quote appears near the end of Marshall Phelps and David Kline’s new book Burning the Ships: Intellectual Property and the Transformation of Microsoft, it does sum up nicely the thread that weaves through the book, a case study of how Microsoft reinvented itself and began leveraging its Intellectual Property for good (collaboration) instead of evil (punishment).

Sitting inside of every networking device is an operating system. In the case of Alcatel-Lucent, that operating system is the Alcatel-Lucent Operating System (AOS), which today is getting a significant new upgrade -- even though it could be one of the last AOS releases before the company moves it to Linux.

It is not often that you fail to find half a dozen free software programs to fill a particular niche -browsers, e-mail clients or file managers to name a few; so it was with both surprise and disappointment that I nearly drew a blank in my search for an Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) for GNU/Linux. Yes, Freevo and MythTV have this feature built in, but installing and configuring them just to get your mitts on an EPG looks like overkill. I wanted a simple, stand-alone EPG programme. I got TV-Browser and I got a hell of a lot more than I bargained for. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

If you build your own GNOME packages from source or use GARNOME to help in the process, get ready as GNOME 2.26.1 has just been released. GNOME 2.26.1 incorporates bug fixes, translation updates, and documentation changes since the release of GNOME 2.26 just one month ago.

All major development efforts are now being focused on GNOME 2.28 and planning for GNOME 3.0, but another point release for the 2.26 series will come next month...

According to a number of Linux distributors, a bug in the udev service under Linux can be exploited to obtain root privileges. The kernel uses udev to dynamically create device-specific files and folders (/dev/) for input and output, so that only devices which are actually connected appear in /dev. udev is not a direct component of the Linux kernel, but is included and activated by default in almost all Linux distributions which use 2.6 series kernels.

SSL acceleration is a technique that off-loads the processor intensive public key encryption algorithms used in SSL transactions to a hardware accelerator. These solutions often involve a considerable up front investment as the specialized equipment is rather costly. This article though looks at using off the shelf server hardware and open source software to build a cost effective SSL accelerator.

As we have outlined before and shared benchmarks of in the past, the Intel graphics driver stack has been going through some significant changes. The Intel graphics driver now has a proper memory manager in the form of the Graphics Execution Manager, there is upstream kernel mode-setting support, and a new 3D component is coming soon in the form of Gallium3D. With all of this invasive work going on, regressions are currently prevalent from stability problems to graphical corruption to slower 2D performance. While these are problems users will face with the new distribution updates in H1'09, some have been trying out different driver configurations in order to circumvent the situation. Canonical, for example, had been toying with the idea of enabling greedy migration heuristics by default.

The Pupeee Linux developers have released version 4.2 of their Asus Eee PC optimised open source netbook distribution. Version 4.2 of Pupeee is based on Puppy Linux, which was recently updated. The focus of Pupeee is speed, ease of use and Eee PC compatability.

Six months ago we pointed out the best Android apps to boost your mobile productivity, but since then more free applications have appeared in the Market that offer useful features you don't want to miss. Let's take a look at a few notable free apps that make getting things done with your Android handset easier and more fun.

Synchronizing two machines (such as a laptop and a desktop computer) is easier and faster when you use rsync, which boasts an efficient algorithm and options for just about everything you might need. And if a command-line operation isn't your thing, several graphic tools make using rsync easier still.

This article is an overview of 4 most popular IM clients available on Linux, and particularly in the upcoming release of Ubuntu, Jaunty Jackalope. I included only graphical applications here, but I'm sure I'll make a review of several command-line clients in the near future too. I also decided not to include Sim and KMess, since currently they only offer versions for KDE3.

What the heck is going on in Boston? Apologies to any Bostonians in the audience, but something is in the water, at least in the education and law enforcement districts. Once again, the "Cradle of Liberty" is in the news as the Defenders of the Fourth are forced to rush in to defend the baby against the hand that rocks the cradle.

As with most things in OpenBSD, adding Xfce to the operating system isn't as easy as it is in Debian, Ubuntu or many other Linux distros. There is no "meta package" in OpenBSD for Xfce. I believe that with GNOME and KDE, it's possible to add one or two packages from the OpenBSD repository that call in most of what you need for the desktop environment. To install Xfce, however, you must use pkg_add to bring down more than asome three dozen individual Xfce packages.

Besides seeing 3D acceleration for their hardware in an open-source driver, one of the other leading requests from ATI Radeon customers has been to see improved power management within the ATI X.Org driver stack. There is Dynamic Clocks support and some other power management capabilities, along with some more innovative ways, but ATI's PowerPlay is not fully implemented in the open-source stack. Today though committed to the xf86-video-ati driver is support for two new power management features. The two new power options in this open-source driver are ForceLowPowerMode and DynamicPM, both of which are xorg.conf options.