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As Ubuntu popularity grows, more and more students are recognizing the added features and potential savings offered by an Ubuntu laptop. Netbooks and laptops are the students solution to computing because of obvious portability reasons. One thing many students find frustrating is the higher cost of laptops and netbooks compared to desktops with similar specs. The biggest reason that Ubuntu laptops can save you money over Windows laptops is that companies like Dell are able to lower the price of Ubuntu-installed laptops because they don’t have to pay for the operating system. Ubuntu can be added to almost any computer by creating and booting to an installation disk however for compatibility reasons buying pre-installed Ubuntu laptop may be the best choice for newbies.

Any application needs time to be used and tested enough time in order to make it stable. One of the greatest goals of Debian is stability. It's released when it's ready and applications included in the repositories have enough time to be tested through.

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player supporting most audio and video formats (H.264, Ogg, DivX, MKV, TS, MPEG-2, mp3, MPEG-4, aac, ...) from files, physical media (DVDs, VCD, Audio-CD), TV capture cards and many network streaming protocols. It can also convert media files, transcode and act as a streaming server over unicast or multicast and IPv4 or IPv6. It doesn't need any external codec, program or codec pack to work. Today will show you how to costumise the look of your vlc by changing the skins

A while ago I posted some fixed ffmpeg and x264 packages for Ubuntu Jaunty (.deb) but you may want to upgrade to the latest version of ffmpeg and x264 (whichever the latest version is). So this how-to will explain how to install the latest FFmpeg and x264 and then how to always update those packages. Read on!

If you have been following my postings over the last year, you will have read about my attempts to migrate to Linux. Some have been partially successful, others have been unmitigated disasters. I have heard comments from Linux is for smart people to You are right when I comment that the installation process should not be as hard as it sometimes is.

Last night we performed an update on Filmaster.com bring one big new feature and many minor bug fixes. The big new one is obviously Facebook Connect integration. In order to make this integration happen we used the Facebook API for Facebook Connect (mostly JavaScript with FbSQL queries). This allowed us to fetch the Facebook avatars, name and surname (used for generating new Filmaster username) and handle all the authentication.

Most people welcomed the news that the Sony PlayStation 3 was slimming down, both in physical size and in terms of off the shelf pricing. The Linux crowd are not so impressed however.

ChatZilla is an IRC client built as a Firefox add-on and providing enough features to use it just like any other standalone IRC client. ChatZilla will fit best as an IRC client when you don't want to use a separate application for getting on IRC.

Back in the early part of 2008 we decided that we wanted to take a fresh look at Linux on the desktop. To do so we would start with a “switcher” article, giving us the chance to start anew and talk about some important topics while gauging the usability of Linux.

This guide explains how to set up software RAID1 on an already running Debian Lenny system. The GRUB bootloader will be configured in such a way that the system will still be able to boot if one of the hard drives fails (no matter which one).

I was showing a friend how to be more productive while working in a terminal and she asked me about the keys I was pressing during the demonstration. I explained some of the keyboard shortcuts I use and she asked if I could write them down for her.Since this was the third person to ask me for a copy of the keyboard shortcuts I use, I thought I'd post them here in the hopes that they can help others too.

Now that I am done with the implementation of RHE Cluster with GFS2, I now need to setup monitoring. As you all know, monitoring is a vital part of any environment. Even though we have a cluster of nodes setup, we still need to be aware of what is happening. I created two new commands. The first command is to emulate clustat, but through python and SNMP. The second command is to monitor the cluster using snmp and python ( Nagios/Zenoss Comapatible ).

The name Ruben Unteregger may well become more newsworthy in the next few days. Unteregger has been working at the Swiss ERA IT Solutions company to develop the trojans MegaPanzer and MiniPanzer and has released the code under GPL.

Recently I started using Google's browser Chrome (well technically chromium) on Linux for my browsing needs. It is very fast, low on CPU and Memory, I quite like it. I am now also sure Flash plugin is teh CPU hog pig :) Anyway, one really cool feature I missed from Firefox was the ability to set multiple pages as the homepage. In firefox, I'd just click the Home button, and it would open all of the pages I regularly follow, I could not find this functionality out of the box with Chrome. What is a geek to do ? Well of course write some javascript :)

By default, the root account password is locked in Ubuntu - Canonical neither supports nor advocates enabling the root account. This means that you cannot login as root directly or use the su command to become the root user. However, since the root account physically exists it is still possible to run programs with root-level privileges. This is where sudo comes in - it allows authorized users (normally "Administrative" users) to run certain programs as root without having to know the root password.

The Apache.org web-site is currently displaying a message that the service is off line. The Infrastructure team at the Apache Software Foundation have taken the systems off line while investigating a compromise on one of their servers. According to the message, the problem relates to a compromised SSH key and "not due to any software exploits in Apache itself".

While most open-source games still lack the graphics quality and features that the latest proprietary game engines support within retail games that are backed by the large studios, their quality has been improving as with their artwork and other characteristics. As an example of this, Warsow 0.5 made it out this week with a horde of new features and improvements.

SCO Owns Unix--Alert the Media! SCO owns all rights and ownership of the core UNIX operating system source code originally developed by AT&T/Bell Labs. SCO’s ownership includes system source code, including all versions and copies, SCO OpenServer, and substantial copyrights and source code to UnixWare. SCO is the exclusive licensor to UNIX-based system software providers.

At work I'm tied to a windows machine, however I have been able to use GNU/Linux which is where I'm most productive. First, I tried working with Portable Ubuntu. It works pretty well, however the latency can be a little high sometimes (Firefox being the most obvious case that I noticed). About a week ago I started working on a clustering experiment and wanted to give it a shot inside Portable Ubuntu. However, I discovered it wasn't possible because its kernel doesn't support bridging (I was going to use some qemu virtual machines for the experiment).

Tuxera, the Finnish company behind the NTFS-3G open source driver, on its own initiative entered into an agreement with Microsoft over exFAT drivers.