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Here is my question: Are “cyEma7;IkmH!” or “hot1BA-Bitso69” secure passwords? Yes definitely, but who (the hell) can remember it! YOU WILL - after reading this article! Your passwords play a crucial role in protecting your computing accounts and the personal information that can be accessed through them. One of the problems with passwords is that users forget them. For that reason people use simple password phrases like their dog’s name, their kid’s first name and birthdates, the name of the current month or everything in different combinations.

I’ve been using Fedora (Core and all) on and off for a few years now and its parsimonious attitudes to codecs notwithstanding, the thing that always reduces me to a whimpering, pleading wreck is watching Yum installing a piece of software. I can forgive its tendency to handhold and even to confabulate, but Yum moves with all the speed of a treacle flow at the North Pole. Apt-get has already done its stuff and gone home for tea but Yum is still setting the table and polishing the silver. Once you’ve used Yum for a while you will know why it puts the V in verbose. Find out how to light a fire under Yum. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

The U.S. economy is bleeding jobs, but -- at least, so far -- the high-tech industry is something of a safe haven. That's not to say there haven't been tech losses or that it's easy to find an IT job. However, people with the right skill sets and the savvy to sniff out the particular areas of demand are much better positioned than professionals in some of the more-beleaguered industries.

A Centre for Advanced Training in Free and Open Source Software (CATFOSS) will be opened in Kochi soon. The new centre will be a joint venture of Kerala State IT Mission and Centre for Development of Imaging Technology (C-DIT). It will be opened before 20th of this month, according to officials. The centre is intended to develop a resource pool of trained manpower for inducting free software in the information and communication wings of public sector units as well as various government departments. The absence of trained personnel in the field had been hampering the government move to introduce free software pioneered by Richard Stallmann.

A few server admins had reported Linux crashes right at the New Year's Eve countdown. Linux developers are currently investigating if they had anything to do with the leap second phenomenon.

Watch out Windows and Solaris, says Zemlin With the new year under way and all of the problems in the old year still largely unsolved, people in the IT sector are looking around for a little good news and some prospects for growth. There are a lot of clouds out there right now, and Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, thinks the rain is going to be good, particularly for Linux.…

A typical Linux system comes with all kinds of help documentation built-in, and a lot of users don't even know it's there. Juliet Kemp is your guide to finding man, info, and HTML help pages.

Thanks to contributions of $6.2 million, the financial future of the free encyclopedia Wikipedia in 2009 is secured. The record donations have surpassed the $6 million expectations of the Wikipedia Foundation, the non-profit body behind the free project, with a personal appeal by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales back in December rousing a huge amount of support.

From the 'what's in a name' files: Red Hat's Fedora Linux is currently in the process of developing Fedora Linux 11, but first the new distro will need a name. So in the spirit of openness Fedora has opened up the naming of Fedora 11 to a vote

I would also name this post xen-image-create&debootstrap vs python-vm-builder in regards of pre-building Xen Guests at Ubuntu Intrepid Server.View Bug #311943 at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu for details. Install Intrepid Server Dom0 with Novell’s Xen-ified kernel, enabling Dom0 and DomU support at a time. Tune xen-tools scripts and create Intrepid PV DomU. Actually, images been created via xen-create-image allow to upgrade DomU to real Intrepid Server PV DomU

Free Software Foundation Europe is asking people what they can do in 2009 to improve things for themselves and others in the sphere of software freedoms. The best way is to join the successful Fellowship programme, through which Fellows work to support software freedoms - and have fun doing it! Have a look at the site for more reasons to join!

In 2008, The HeliOS Project built, placed and supported 329 computers where they were needed. Sometimes it was necessary to travel over 100 miles to do it. Admittedly, 329 computers doesn’t sound like much. Not many at all in the scope of things. That is until you take into consideration one relevant fact.

LXer Feature: 04-Jan-2009

Welcome to the first LXer Roundup of 2009, I hope your new year was a good one. ChannelWeb has a list of what they think are the 10 Coolest Open Source products of 2008 and Phoronix has their take on the great Linux innovations of 2008. Bruce Byfield gives us his list of the seven most influential Linux distributions. I like the list overall but I think it should include Damn Small Linux.

Flickr offers a vast collection of photos you can use with your OpenOffice.org documents, but trawling hundreds, if not thousands of photos in order to find the right one can be a rather tedious and time-consuming affair.

As always, KDE will have a presence at next year's FOSDEM in Belgium on 7-8 February 2008. This is earlier in the month than usual. We are looking for people to give talks in the KDE or cross-desktop devroom. FOSDEM is the European meeting of free software developers, with over 4000 visitors, 200 lectures and lots of stalls to visit over a 2 day period. You can come and listen to a plethora of interesting talks about anything related to free software, and meet the people behind the nicknames.

Now that the big 4 are done, we can get on with our lives ;) Ah, finally. Here we are. Regular readers will remember our previous entries in this series for finding your search index ranking on Google, MSN/Live and Yahoo We've finally gotten around to Ask and, with this script, that should be that... until one or any combination of them change their source.

GRUB 2, the next-generation Linux boot loader, has received a new font engine. Version 2 of the GRand Unified Bootloader introduces this new font engine that's written in C and with a font tool in Java. This engine will allow for better internationalization support including non-ASCII character codes and support for multiple fonts.

A file manager is software which provides a user interface to assist in the organisation of files. It helps users with their daily work in managing their files on a hard drive or other storage device. With terabyte hard disks becoming prevalent, file managers represent an essential tool in managing file systems.

It seems that each and every week there are new netbooks that are introduced, but there are not many differences between most models. Some netbooks will have a slightly longer battery life, a different exterior, or a solid-state drive, but there are more similarities than differences. However, one of the latest companies to join the netbook bandwagon here in the United States has been Samsung with the introduction of the NC10. Is there anything special about this 10.2-inch Atom-powered netbook? We will tell you in this Linux review of the Samsung NC10.

Software updates demand an Internet connection, which can make updating nearly impossible for those without reliable net access. There is now a solution: Keryx.