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The biggest botnet to date is being virtualized using a network of one million Linux kernels. The virtual machines form an experiment in studying the origins of the malware.

You gotta know when to say "when." It's hard to convince Joe and Mary User to convert to Linux when the first things you hear from them are: "Where's my ?" "Why can't I just have ?" or the ever-popular "This doesn't work like ?" Honestly, it's enough to make me want to tell them to "just buy a Mac and stop calling me." Linux, after all, is for smart people and I really don't find any reason to "dumb it down" for the general population.

Canonical is offering a dedicated, local version of its Landscape systems management and monitoring server for Ubuntu, rather than insist you access the service through the company's own systems. Canonical will next month launch the Landscape Dedicated Server, which is a local copy of the current Landscape service. It will run inside the data center, giving IT managers some piece of mind about security.

The common wisdom is to have a shared home directory in a multiboot setup, but this has its own set of potential problems because it mixes data files and configuration files. So when you're trying out different distributions, your desktop settings may not translate gracefully across all of them. So what's the answer?

Linux system management comes in from the cloud, but it's still not entirely open source. While there is a mad rush toward putting more IT resources into the cloud, not everything belongs in the cloud - Just ask Ubuntu Linux vendor Canonical. The Canonical Landscape Ubuntu systems management server is now moving in from the cloud with a new dedicated on site offering. Previously the Landscape service was only available as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud based model. The new Canonical Landscape Dedicated Server expands the commercial support offerings available for Ubuntu Linux as Canonical ramps up its efforts to gain market share against rivals.

Back in March we shared that the open-source ATI driver had gained support for the unreleased ATI RS880 IGP. Well, the RS880 ended up being turned into the 785G due to some problems on AMD's side, but today this new, much more powerful IGP has launched. With that said, another commit made to the xf86-video-ati driver today finishes off the support. The RS880 / 785G IGPs are now properly recognized and the 2D acceleration support is complete.

Learn basic Git concepts and compare Git with Subversion. Distributed version control systems (DVCSs) offer a number of advantages over centralized VCSs, and for Subversion users looking to explore this model, Git is a great place to start. Using Subversion as a baseline, this first of two articles shows how to install Git, set up a remote repository, and begin using basic Git commands.

KDE 4.3.0 is out, and it is a great release. It is unlikely that any one specific thing will strike the user as the most noticeable improvement; rather, the overall user experience of KDE has improved greatly in KDE 4.3.0. The release's codename, Caizen, is a Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life. That has been the goal of the KDE team for 4.3.0: polish, polish, polish. The statistics from the bug tracker speak for themselves: 10,000 bugs have been fixed. In addition, close to 63,000 changes were checked in by a little under 700 contributors. That is not to say that the KDE team did not add a large number of new features: 2000 feature requests were implemented in the past 6 months, meaning that any user's pet feature might well be among the improvements KDE 4.3.0 brings.

Novell's new SUSE Studio web-based service for creating software appliances on SUSE Linux has been favorably reviewed by eWEEK. While SUSE Studio does not offer the breadth of features of rPath's rBuilder, Novell's product is much easier at appliance creation, says the review.

So you have heard of all the advantages and geeky babble about how Linux is better and you have finally decided to try it? Just one thing, you don’t know an awful lot about Linux to get you started. How about some free downloadable ebooks to teach yourself Linux, that you can download today? Would that help?

Juliet Kemp is a Mutt (powerful text email client) user, even in these modern times, and shows us how to use old-school Mutt + SSH for security on the newfangled Android G1.

In this article by Christer Edwards, we will learn how to create, maintain and make available a local Ubuntu repository mirror, allowing you to save bandwidth and improve network efficiency with each machine you add to your network.

The idea behind operating different services at different runlevels essentially revolves around the fact that different systems can be used in a different ways. Some services cannot be used until the system is in a particular state, or mode, such as ready for more than one user or has networking available.

Your editor recently "celebrated" yet another birthday; one asks "which birthday?" at the risk of making him grumpy indeed. During that celebration, a surprising present turned up, in the form of an Amazon Kindle book reader. That presents an opportunity to play with a new toy, something your editor is not known for turning down, even when the toy is as problematic as the Kindle. In the process, your editor turned up some free software which helps to make the device rather more useful.

The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 1.8 for FreeBSD today. Bordeaux 1.8.2 adds support for Apple's QuickTime 6.5.2 Player, IrfanView 4.25 the extreamly popular image viewer and editor. This release aslo bundles in Cabextract, Wget and Unzip to remove external dependencies. Our winetricks script has been synced to the latest official release, Steam should now install and run once again, There has also been many small bug fixes and tweaks.

The Open Invention Network (OIN) today announced that it was starting a new programme to acquire patents from "entrepreneurial inventors". The Distinguished Inventors Patent Acquisition programme offers cash for accepted patents while allowing the inventor to patent enhancements to the accepted patent. The OIN believe the programme will help independent inventors turn their patents into money, without them selling their patents to patent trolls, or companies seeking to "impede innovation".

The Debian project is planning a whole series of enhancements for Debian 5.0 "Squeeze." A few results of the currently running Google Summer of Code are beginning to creep into it.

The myTouch 3G, T-Mobile's second Android-powered smartphone in a year, nixes the slide-out keyboard of the G1 in favor of a touchscreen-only keypad. Battery life, camera, software and Microsoft Exchange compatibility are among the new handset's improvements. However, the touchscreen keyboard and the lack of a dedicated headphone jack were annoying.

Sugar is the desktop environment that is used for the "One Laptop per Child" (OLPC) netbooks. It can also be installed on normal computers and even run off of a USB stick (which should have at least 1GB of size). This guide shows how you can install Sugar (the Strawberry release which is based on Fedora 11) on a USB stick.

What is it that makes Microsoft's products sell? Why is it that Microsoft seems to reign supreme in our microcomputer industry? Sure, we all know that IBM and Linux are strong in the research field, and we know that Solaris had a strong following in some areas as well, but niches aren't what dominate markets. Niches are just small pockets that concentrate on specific things. We all have a tendency to think that Scientific Linux is a niche distribution, or that tomstrbt is a niche distribution... in reality Linux is a niche operating system. The same can be said about the BSDs, and Solaris, and AIX, and HPUX, and V7x86 (ad inifitum). When we look at Macintosh, there is a tendency to think that Microsoft isn't impenetrable. Why does Macintosh do well when Linux does not? After all, Linux offers more hardware support than any other OS. Well, the answers are blazingly obvious and simple.