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Nagios is a monitoring software designed to let you know about problems on your hosts and networks quickly. You can configure it to be used on any network. Setting up a Nagios server on any Linux distribution is a very quick process however to make it a secure setup it takes some work. This article will not show you how to install Nagios since there are tons of them out there but it will show you in detail ways to improve your Nagios security.

We all know AROS, the Free software re-implentation of the Amiga operating system. While AROS is mostly feature complete, it's not yet ready for prime time, and it of course lacks in applications. The whole vibe around AROS is one of, excuse my wording, flipping the finger to the legal bickering and tangled web of intrigue surrounding Amiga. No schedule and rocking, is AROS' motto. While that might still be the case, a few AROS developers have defected from the motherland, and have started an operating system project of their own, called Anubis.

The hotspot is the new laptop like ASUS EeePC, it include one 800M-933Mhz Loongson 2F CPU, 512MB memory, 160GB SATA disk or 4GB SSD, 8’ LCD and WiFi. Its weight is less than 1KG. The Debian Linux Operation system is installed in it.

Microsoft has announced they will be launching an online version of Microsoft Office. While their intention is certainly not to port Office to Linux, that will likely be the effect of putting it online. The question is: what effect will this have on Linux?

Is nothing sacred? A look at a few AIX commands that can make your life simpler. Today's topic, and accompanying script, have to do with a more specific function already described in our series on working with AIX LVM (Actually, that link points to the last entry in the series. It's a strange thing about serialized content; the only way I can hook you up with a link that will get you links from part 4 to parts 3, 2 and 1 is to give you the last link.

One of the main complaints about the open source OpenOffice.org suite of productivity applications is that the applications are slow compared to the comparable Microsoft Office apps. If you've run into this problem, and if you use OpenOffice but occasionally run into compatibility problems in sharing files with the Microsoft Office applications, try Go-oo. Even if you don't use Go-oo all of the time, it is good to use in conjunction with OpenOffice for several reasons. Here they are.

What's wrong with people that they won't use Linux? Is it them or is it Linux or both? About a month ago, research firm IDC released a report summarizing personal computer (PC) sales and their projected growth over the next few years. Included in the report are Desktop computers, Server computers, and Laptops. The boost in sales and projected growth are due to the upsurge in consumers purchasing low cost portable computers (Netbooks) like the Asus Eee PC and others.

I feel like I'm booting children off a train. Sure I've had my times when I installed a GNU/Linux distribution, used it for a couple of hours and then pulled it. But for the past year or so, I've stuck with Debian, first with Etch and then Lenny since Etch went stable in April 2007. And when Ubuntu rolled out its new LTS distro in April of this year, I installed it and have been using it since. My older Compaq laptop has been running OpenBSD 4.2 for over a year, and I've done two very satisfactory Etch installs in the past month or so. But on my main machine, a 2002-era Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, there's been trouble in GNU/Linux paradise.

Adobe cautions in an advisory against a whole series of flaws in Adobe Reader 8.1.2. Most of them also affect Linux.

Japanese embedded Linux house Lineo has announced a quick-start technology that it claims can boot Linux in 2.97 seconds on a low-powered system. The technology appears similar to but much faster than Linux's existing "suspend-to-disk" capability. Warp 2 comprises a bootloader, Linux kernel, and a "hibernation driver," says the company. The driver takes a snapshot of RAM when hibernation is launched, saving the contents into flash memory, optionally compressing the data. On start-up, the contents are quickly returned to RAM, so that the system resumes its previous running state.

Still skeptical about open source ERP and POS (point of sale) software? Openbravo says it has exceeded 1 million downloads and has nearly 100 channel partners. Is the channel shifting to open source business applications? The VAR Guy takes a look.

The last two articles that I wrote for Linuxjournal.com were about the steps that GCC goes through during the compilation process and were based on a software development class I taught a few years ago. I hadn't intended for this to be a three part series, but it's been pointed out that I didn't cover the make utility and I think it's almost negligent to discuss software development and not discuss make. Since I don't like to think of myself as negligent, I decided to extend the series to one more article.

Last month, the open source community was buzzing over a report released by the Linux Foundation that placed the value of the Linux ecosystem at around $25 billion. Now that the dust has settled somewhat, we caught up with Amanda McPherson, the foundation's VP of marketing & developer programs, to get her thoughts on the study, what the results mean for the community, and what the take-away message ought to be.

With inexpensive storage and lot's of features will Open Storage be a game changer for Sun? And does the fact that it is built on open source software make a difference?

Longtime LWN readers will be aware of your editor's tendency toward the publishing of wild predictions at the beginning of each year. The 2007 predictions irritated some Debian developers and users by suggesting that, after getting the Etch release out the door, the project would go back to arguing about firmware issues. At the end of the year, it became necessary to acknowledge that this prediction, like so many others, had failed to come to pass. In retrospect, the error in this prediction was obvious: the Debian Project traditionally saves the firmware argument for the end of the release process. After all, they need to find some way to delay a release once it's looking close to ready.

At the 6th Annual OpenOffice.org Convention in Peking November 5-7, the project could celebrate a new milestone in their 3.0 release: downloads of their office package have reached 10 million.

Last week, during Ubuntu's OpenWeek, Mark Shuttleworth joined in for a two hour Q&A session, where he answered a wide range of questions regarding Ubuntu and its parent company, Canonical. They ranged from questions regarding Canonical's relationship with Dell, all the way up to Shuttleworth's response to Greg Kroah-Hartman's criticism of Canonical.

Proprietary virtualization player VMWare has just announced its VMWare Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) designed to bring virtualization to mobile phones. It's due to ship in 2009, and is a lightweight software layer that can run even on memory-constrained phones. For several reasons, this virtualization platform could have an impact on mobile phones running open source operating systems, and on application development for mobile open source operating systems.

Red Hat has found a way to link open source with Star Wars. Sci-Fi Geeks across the galaxy must be celebrating as Red Hat seeks to conquer the digital entertainment universe. Here’s the scoop.

I've been nonplussed the last few weeks as ordinarily sane compu-journalists opine that Windows 7 will somehow kill Linux on netbooks. This weekend, I had a chance to actually see XP running on an EEE 900, and I can tell you, Linux has nothing to fear from Redmond.