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"Cause for concern? Yes, but there's no reason to believe that kernel sources were compromised; such a change would be easily detected with diff," said Hyperlogos blogger Martin Espinoza. "I'd sure like someone to show me a 100 percent secure, internet-connected computer... ."

You can argue about which specific date is Linux's official birthday. Heck, even Linus Torvalds thinks there are four different dates in 1991 that might deserve the honor of being the operating system's birthday. Be that as it may, Linux is twenty years so let's take a walk though time with Linux at some of its high, and low, points.

LXer Feature: 11-Sept-2011

Welcome to this week's collection of big stories from the LXer Newswire. Enjoy!

Vim mastery is not something that you acquire all at once. In fact, it's more something that you slowly sneak up on. Bits at a time, you learn something new about Vim you didn't know it could do. Or you'll figure out an easier way to do something. Such is the case with using the system clipboard on Linux, at least for me.

When you think of “Ubuntu Linux,” you probably think of the community Linux distribution and the Linux desktop. That’s great, but Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, also wants you to think of Ubuntu as a server and cloud operating system platform. To that end, Canonical has been working with IBM to get Ubuntu certified on IBM’s high-end System P Power hardware line and System z mainframes.

This article summarizes when the U.S. federal government or its contractors may publicly release, as open source software (OSS), software developed with government funds. This section is intended for non-lawyers, to help them understand the basic rules they must follow.

The software RAID code now supports bad block management and dm-crypt can notify SSDs about freed storage areas. The iSCSI target framework LIO has been updated to Version 4.1 and the default Ext3 settings make the filesystem more robust, but a bit slower.

Different Linux distros build in favorite cleaning products. For instance, Ubuntu has Computer Janitor. CentOS, Fedora and Red Hat Linux use Yum Clean to remove cached package data. But BleachBit goes beyond such distro-specific cleaning services to accomplish a more complete spit-and-polish session to Linux's file structure in any distro.

LibreOffice Logo Michael Meeks, a LibreOffice developer at Novell, compared the codebase of LibreOffice with the OpenOffice.org sources hosted at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). As he writes in a blog post, the differences are already so great that it will now be hard to exchange new code between the two projects. In light of the several million lines of source code by which the two products now differ, he says users should not assume that code committed to Apache OpenOffice.org will "inevitably and automatically appear in LibreOffice". "Instead I suspect we will end up cherry-picking and porting only those things that justify the effort, as/when/if there is any such thing," added Meeks.

Next Tuesday during XDC2011 Chicago at the Illinois Institute of Technology I am hosting a panel about contributing to Linux and open-source projects, in particular, X.Org, Mesa, and the Linux kernel, but the information should be largely relevant to any free software project. This discussion panel is largely targeted towards university students and others that aren't yet contributing to upstream projects, with most of the panel participants having begun their Linux contributions prior to graduating from university and then most of them being poached by major open-source companies.

It looks like with Qt 5.0, V8 will become the JavaScript Engine for the Qt tool-kit as well as for Qt Script and Qt Quick.

Get a comprehensive intro to working with Linux through the command console. Ideally suited to serious users of Linux -- including Linux system administrators, developers, and power users -- this knowledge path also prepares you for the Linux Professional Institute LPIC-1 certification exam.

andLinux is a Linux distro with a difference. It’s based on a port of the the Linux kernel to Windows coupled with an X server and other software. In short, it allows you to run Linux software seamlessly on the Windows desktop without recompiling it or using a virtual machine.

Amazon's Android tablet is a seven-inch, Kindle-branded device that will feature a customized operating system and sell for $250, according to a TechCrunch reporter who claims to have spent an hour with the device. In other Android tablet news, Samsung pulled its freshly announced Galaxy Tab 7.7 from the IFA show in Berlin after Apple won a preliminary injunction against the tablet from a German court.

In case you are still not aware, Canonical (the team behind Ubuntu) has released the first beta of Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric. There are several new additions to the family, notably the revamp of the Ubuntu Software Center and the replacement of the Evolution with Thunderbird. Follow us for the full review and screenshots tour of the Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Beta 1.

Some of us take keyboard and mouse input for granted: You type a character on the keyboard, and it appears in your window, or you type a string of characters, press Return, and some action happens—either locally or at a networked distance. What else is there to expect? But what if you don't have or cannot use a keyboard or mouse, or you want to put a keystroke into one window and have it do something in a different window on a different desktop? Or, perhaps, you want to create a window, resize it, pull up a browser in that window, navigate to a URL, then tab through a number of links in the web page and click one—all without a keyboard or mouse, using your voice through a speech recognizer. This approach calls for keyboard and mouse emulation.

The BackBox development team has released version 2.0 of its penetration testing distribution. According to the developers, the latest release has a new look and feel, as well as a significant performance boost over previous versions.

Roccat, the European manufacturer of various gaming peripherals like keyboards and mice, actually has rather good Linux support for their hardware.

HP evidently sees a brighter future for its webOS platform after moving the team into the Office of Strategy and Technology (OS&T) as it figures out what to do with the software. The other half of the business HP acquired from Palm – the hardware element – will continue to reside in its Personal Systems Group that will likely be spun out once the globocorp has considered all the options on the table.

With his characteristically dry British humor, Matthew Garrett outlined the current situation with x86 platform drivers at LinuxCon. These drivers are needed to handle various "extra" hardware devices, like special keys, backlight control, extended battery information, fans, and so on. There are a wide range of control mechanisms that hardware vendors use for these devices, and, even when the controller hardware is the same, different vendors will choose different mechanisms to talk to the devices. It is a complicated situation that seems to require humor—and perhaps alcohol—to master.