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Zeroshell Linux is a compact, fully-featured distribution for providing a wide range of secure network services. Eric Geier wraps up this excellent series with building a captive wireless portal, and using Zeroshell as an Internet gateway and LAN router.

I took a Computer Logic Design class in college, so when I stumbled upon the Ksimus Circuit Simulator, I was intrigued. At the risk of waxing nostalgic, I remember what it was like to build circuits in school. We'd spend hours the night before the lab designing our circuit, being careful to list each interconnection. We had to keep track of which pin numbers on each chip were to be connected.

Universal Serial Bus (USB) is becoming true to its name by providing universal access to monitors, this time for Linux.

Conventional wisdom says Linux application developers are most cozy with distribution specialists like Red Hat, Novell and Canonical. But the folks at Cisco Systems seem to be getting tighter with the Linux developer community, thanks to the so-called AXP (Application eXtension Platform) developer contest. Here’s the scoop.

Educational games are games designed to teach people, typically children, about a certain subject or help them learn a skill as they play. Sometimes this type of software is known as games edutainment because they combine education and entertainment.

Should the Linux faithful go on the wagon and give up Wine entirely? Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth seemed to imply as much when he said in a recent Q&A that "the free software ecosystem needs to thrive on its own rules." Yet he also said that both Wine and native Linux ports "play an important role." Linux bloggers have been hashing out the issue from every conceivable angle.

The OWASP LiveCD is a collection of open-source security software for web developers as well as external and internal testers/auditors, that does very much the same job as the BackTrack LiveCD does for network and system penetration tests. Matt Tesauro is the project's new maintainer and new versions have appeared since its redesign in the autumn of 2008.

The first openSUSE Community Week took place on the 11-17 May 2009 and as an important part of the distribution, the geeko-loving KDE community were actively involved. Throughout the week we were busy packaging, triaging bugs and introducing new community members to these skills. The releases of KDE 4.3 Beta 1 and Amarok 2.1 Beta 2 kept the team busy fixing last minute compilation errors and replacing 4.2.3 in the KDE:KDE4:Factory:Desktop repository with 4.3 Beta 1 as we move towards openSUSE 11.2. KDE 4.2 continues to be available in the KDE:42 repository so if you haven't switched yet, we expect you want to help make 4.3 excellent!

After last week's tip on how to upgrade a stable Mandriva Linux to the distribution's development branch (Cooker), we'll continue the series with a tutorial on running Slackware "Current", the development branch of the world's oldest surviving Linux distro. In the news section, Fedora presents a tentative look at a possible feature set for its next version; Ubuntu announces a new service for cloud computing amid controversy over its proprietary nature; the Debian-Desktop project launches new KDE 4 packages for "Lenny", and PC-BSD continues to expand its desktop options with Xfce and GNOME. Also in this week's issue - a roadmap for Sabayon Linux covering the rest of 2009 and a new security oriented live CD with OWASP.

Linux Unified Kernel claims to allow you to run Windows application native under Linux (I haven't tested it yet though). The installation is quite simple from what I saw, simply download the version called "Linux Unified Kernel 0.2.3 with wine and linux kernel" and then all you have to do is run this (make it executable and double click it):

Last week we published Ubuntu 9.04 vs. Mac OS X 10.5.6 benchmarks where we compared the performance of these two popular operating systems on a Mac Mini. With the OS X kernel currently being 32-bit but with support for 64-bit applications, we had used the 32-bit version of Ubuntu 9.04. In a majority of the Leopard operating system from Apple outperformed Canonical's Jaunty Jackalope, but today we are adding in the results from an Ubuntu 64-bit installation. As you can see from the results, the x86_64 version of Ubuntu Linux is more competitive against Mac OS X 10.5.6.

Red Hat's going up against business-rules giants IBM and Oracle with a management system that builds on its popular JBoss application server. The company is today expected to announce the JBoss Enterprise Business Rules Management System to separate code from business rules in a system. The idea is to let you build and maintain business processes without needing to re-code the applications.

Nagios Enterprises founder and Nagios maintainer Ethan Galstad has admitted to development bottlenecks in his project and recognizes that Nagios developers want a stronger participation in the Icinga fork project. Nevertheless, he's disappointed that Icinga didn't engage with him before they struck off on their own.

The DisplayLink USB display system, which allows Windows and Mac systems to drive multiple displays connected via USB 2.0 using custom lossless compression technology, is coming to Linux. The release, by DisplayLink, of libdlo, an LGPL 2.1 licensed library, will allow Linux developers to discover and connect to DisplayLink devices. This is the first step in developing application level support, such as X servers and other graphic platforms.

LXer Feature: 18-May-2009

The Mozilla Foundation has released version 1.0 beta of its Prism software. Danijel Orsolic puts a new take on the semantics of whether Linux is an OS or not. Paul Rubens shows us how to optimize hard drives for maximum speed in Linux and Pogoplug, which is a little device that can connect to a USB 2.0 hard drive and an Ethernet connection, and then instantly makes the drive an Internet-accessible storage device promises to publish the source-code if the product fails.

Using ModSecurity is not easy. The complexity of your site, your use of PHP, MySQL and other scripting languages will make it more difficult to configure correctly. Basically, the more complex your site, the more time you will need to work out issues with rules. This tutorial will provide you with several important tips to get started with ModSecurity.

On the hunt for Linux in Las Vegas. InterOp has it all but will it have Linux?

Super Ubuntu, now referred to as Super OS, started with a simple need: having a Live CD that worked out-of-the-box. "A long time ago" I used Live CDs a lot (now I use mainly Live USBs) , and one thing that frustrated me was having to install flash and MP3 codecs on the Live CD everytime I needed those features! I also know MP3 and flash (and all that restricted/"non-free" stuff) are probably the first things many people install on their Ubuntu systems, so I decided to make their life easier and at the same time promote ubuntu and open-source software. But that only gives him a jumping off point for his real innovation.

A quick walk-through on setting up org-signed SSL certificates for JBoss, Tomcat, etc. Specific notes on using your own company's CA as the signing authority.

Most of you may already be aware of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems. If not, here is an article stating just that from Sun’s website. I read the news as soon as it was published on the net along with the reactions of Sun users for Sun products. What will be the future of mySQL or OpenOffice? It just dawned on me yesterday: What will be the future of ZFS and Btrfs, seeing how Chris Mason, the lead developer to Btrfs works for Oracle?