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Myah OS creator Jeremiah Cheatham has issued the first preliminary release of Myah OS 3.0. The gaming- and multimedia-oriented live CD Linux offering is built with an "efficient" Xfce 4.4.1 desktop, and bundles Internet, office, graphics, development tools, and numerous other applications.

The Essential Blender from No Starch Press is both a reference and instructional guide to Blender, the open source 3-D modeling, rendering, and animation tool. It walks readers through Blender's capabilities by alternating hands-on tutorials with broader, topical chapters that discuss the key concepts and how Blender implements them. Despite a few flaws, it's a good resource for those struggling with the software.

After the descriptions in the previous sections it is clear that there are many, many opportunities for programmers to influence a program's performance, positively or negatively. And this is for memory-related operations only. We will proceed in covering the opportunities from the ground up, starting with the lowest levels of physical RAM access and L1 caches, up to and including OS functionality which influences memory handling.

There is security, and then there is Security. HP, with its new multi-level security services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is now offering Common Criteria certified level security for this Linux on its server and desktops. Common Criteria is an ISO security framework standard. It is frequently required in government computing contracts. It is also, historically, difficult for open-source software to obtain, as described briefly in "Free-Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) and Software Assurance" (PDF link) by David A. Wheeler, an author and software developer.

Recently I've been working with the transport synchronization capabilities of the JACK audio server. This article is a report on those capabilities as tested with a variety of Linux audio applications under the JAD and 64 Studio distributions.JACK: The 1-minute Profileread more

Making periodic backups is a common task. Synbak can help to simplify it. Synbak brings together several different backup methods and provides a powerful reports system that provides details about all the work it does. Synbak can use rsync over Secure Shell (SSH), Server Message Block (SMB), or Common Internet File System (CIFS) and either create tar archives or burn CDs and DVDs (quaintly called laserdiscs in a throwback to old times). It can also access and back up MySQL and Oracle databases and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) servers. Finally, it can send you an email message with the backup details and create an HTML plus RSS Web page with the same information.

Mandriva CEO François Bancilhon has asked Steve Ballmer what it feels like to look at himself in the mirror. In an open letter to the Microsoft head honcho, posted to the web late last night, Bancilhon claims that the Nigerian government has somehow decided to install Windows on 17,000 brand new PCs already equipped with Mandriva Linux. And he questions whether Ballmer and company used dirty tricks to make it happen.

Guardian Digital reinforces their dedication to web security with completely redesigned and updated version of their popular Web and Content Filtering solution, SurfSecure.

Everyone knows they should make regular backups of their data. But hardly anyone is as diligent with backups as they should be. So in this two-part series we're going to learn some nice simple methods for making regular backups on single PCs or small networks. Part 1 covers external backup media, and bendingudev to your will so that your backup devices will have persistent names.

As we all know, Linux distributions are freely available over the Internet. However, prohibitive bandwidth costs, thanks mainly to Telkom's stranglehold, mean that downloading distros of several hundred megabytes or even several gigabytes can be prohibitive. It is much easier and cheaper to just get a CD burned, either at cost or for a small premium.

If you are running a blog (or any Web publishing system, for that matter) that relies on a database back end, you will sooner or later face the problem of backing up the content stored in the database. One way to go about it is to build a backup tool using OpenOffice.org Base. Since Base can pull data from a MySQL or any ODBC-compliant data source, you can create a simple database that connects to the blog's back end and extracts content from it, which you can then export in different formats.

LinuxSecurity.com: Security is at the forefront of everyone's mind and a firewall can be an integral part of your Linux defense. But is Michael's Rush's "Linux Firewalls," the newest release from NoStarchPress, up for the challenge? Eckie S. here at Linuxsecurity.com gives you the low-down on this newest addition to the Linux security resource library and how it's one of the best ways to crack down on attacks to your Linux network.

KDE4 edged closer to final release this week with the development team announcing the KDE4 beta 4 release, the last step before final release candidates are built. Although intended primarily as a bugfix release, beta 4 has enough cool features to impress.

What could make the Free Software Foundation (FSF), proprietary software companies, and at least one venture capitalist into allies? The End Software Patents (ESP) coalition, a new organization poised to swing into action next month under the leadership of Ben Klemens. The campaign currently has seed funding of a quarter million dollars from sources those associated with the group won't disclose, and hopes to augment that with donations from individuals and companies for a struggle that, to judge by the usual amount of time it takes to push major changes through the US Supreme Court, could take five years or more to complete.

In public health, harm reduction is a practice that, rather than trying to eradicate potentially dangerous choices like prostitution, tries to minimize their effects. Often, the practice involves a limited condoning of the practice, such as safe injection sites for addicts. Harm reduction is the path that Fedora 8 has chosen on the issue of MP3 and other non-free codecs in the form of Codec Buddy, a Codeina-based program that tries to educate users about free software while giving them easy legal access to codecs by linking to the commercial Fluendo site. It's a decision about which the Fedora Board and community leaders feel considerable ambivalence.

China, which has long wished to develop its own computer industry, has chosen to go with Linux on the software side. Loongson is its hope for the hardware side. The Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), a department of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), has been developing the Loongson processor since 2002. Rather than use the x86 instruction set used in chips from Intel and AMD, Loongson uses MIPS, an instruction set patented by MIPS Technologies. This means that Loongson chips are unable to run the full version of Microsoft Windows, so they run Linux instead.

Pundits say it is simply impossible to count all of the Linux servers in the market today. The Linux community is questioning research that suggests the open-source operating system is losing market share to Windows on preinstalled x86 servers, saying that Linux is undercounted in those kinds of studies. An analysis of IDC Quarterly Server Tracker figures for the past six quarters showed that Linux growth started to falter and reverse its positive course relative to both Windows Server and the market as a whole over that period.

The KDE Community is happy to release the fourth Beta for KDE 4.0. This Beta aimed at further polishing of the KDE codebase and we would love to start receiving feedback from testers. At the same time, a Release Candidate for the KDE 4.0 Development Platform is released. This Development Platform contains the bits and pieces needed to run and build applications using KDE 4 technology. The purpose of this Development Platform is to make it easier for third parties to port their applications to KDE 4, without having to wait until the full desktop is polished enough for the final 4.0 release.

Network administrators frequently use the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) to implement a centralized directory server. You can use LDAP to authenticate users in Apache. Two popular open source LDAP solutions are OpenLDAP and Red Hat Directory Server. According to the Apache documentation, Novell LDAP and iPlanet Directory Server are also supported. This article focuses on OpenLDAP, but the concepts and examples should be applicable to the others.

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and Monsoon Multimedia announced yesterday that an agreement was reached to dismiss the GNU General Public License (GPL) enforcement lawsuit filed by SFLC on behalf of two principal developers of BusyBox. As this settlement prevents the case from going to court, the SFLC's defence of the GPL remains untested in a US courtroom.