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The other day the beta 2 disks were released to the testers team. Thanks to the wonderful feedback by the testers for beta 1, we were able to get a lot of things fixed. Fabio is back from his vacation and so it took him a bit to get through all the emails. There is still a few known issues and will hopefully get addressed in 5.0 RC1. We plan to move quickly with beta 2 to RC1 and hopefully than we will get a Final 5.0 in two weeks. No date for release set yet, but keep your eyes out for it in couple weeks. Beta two brought us kernel 2.6.31 and drivers, we also hit a delay due to the libxcb upgrade. This made for a lot of packages to be rebuilt. We’ve also updated the packages to latest in repo 5.

Last December we had looked at the Ubuntu 9.04 home encryption performance after this feature appeared in a development snapshot as an alternative to those looking for security some of their data but are not looking for completely encrypting the hard drive due to the performance impact or other reasons. The home encryption feature ended up being disabled in Ubuntu 9.04 unless a special boot parameter was used, but it has now reappeared in Ubuntu 9.10.

We've covered mind-mapping software at OStatic before, and here's another open source option to add to the list. Freeplane is a new mind mapping application forked from FreeMind and already sports some features that the project it's based on doesn't.

A few weeks ago, I switched my development environment from Windows to Linux, on a project which was developed so far on Windows only. In this post, I want to describe the issues that brought me to this switch, a short overview how I did the actual port, and some observations on Linux for developers. This is the first post in a series of at least two, the second post will describe the tools I use on Linux right now.

The KOffice team today announced the second beta of the upcoming 2.1 release. The KOffice community has now switched from adding new features to only fix the remaining bugs, and that is obvious from this release. The first beta of 2.1 was released without any fanfares, but it marked the transition into the bugfixing stage. We now think it's time to let the users start to participate in the process. You can see the progress in the full changelog.

When I began collecting links for the Linux Sound & Music Applications pages I frequented a variety of announcement and news services. Some of those services are no longer with us, some have been superceded by more comprehensive and modern channels, and a few have remained as primary sources for new and updated Linux audio software. SourceForge is one of those long-lived services that have remained relevant to my searches for new and interesting sound and music applications, so I decided to surf the Forge to find recent and maybe some not-so-recent developments in the world of Linux audio. read more

GNOME is a desktop environment and an international project that includes creating software development frameworks, selecting application software for the desktop, and working on the programs which manage application launching, file handling, and window and task management.

While trademarks are often lumped together with copyrights and patents—under the poorly termed "intellectual property" umbrella—trademarks are quite different. One of those differences is that a trademark must be actively enforced, at least under US law, or the mark holder risks losing it. The Fedora community is currently discussing a license to allow community members to use the Fedora trademarks, while still protecting Red Hat's ability to defend the mark against those who would misuse it. But, requiring a signed license agreement in order for a community web site to use Fedora trademarks—on the site or in the domain name—seems heavy-handed to some.

"For us to be able to drive the price points in this market space and the complexity down, these are not IOS-based products," Mark Monday, Cisco's vice president and general manager of small business solutions, told InternetNews.com. "It is a Linux underlying operating system."

The official mythology of FOSS states that it is a meritocracy, and that only the code matters. The reality is not nearly so happy. On September 19th, the GNOME Foundation and the Free Software Foundation will host a mini-summit on women in FOSS. Will it do any good? How much of a problem is it really?

To address rising information technology costs, the government is making a major commitment to cloud computing, a move that aspires not only to cost and labor efficiencies, but also to environmental responsibility and openness to innovation. In a speech at the NASA Ames Research Center in California on Tuesday, federal CIO Vivek Kundra said that the government cannot continue to invest in traditional data centers to support its IT needs, citing a doubling in the energy cost at federal data centers between 2000 and 2006. Cloud computing, said Kundra, can simplify acquisition, budgeting, policy planning, and architecture. And to help that happen, he announced the launch of Apps.gov, a GSA-operated Web site that government agencies can use to buy and deploy cloud computing applications.

Whoever thought that Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora consist solely of free software would be wrong. The new list compiled by the Free Software Foundation showing truly free distributions has a mere nine entries.

The highlights of LinuxCon 2009, a conference organised by the Linux Foundation, will be available as a live video stream using the open CODECs Ogg / Theora, viewed via a Web browser Java applet. Alternatively, they may be viewed via an embedded player such as RealPlayer, MPlayer or the Windows Media Player.

This Nagios Mini-Course shows you how to configure Passive Checks from clients which are sent to a central Nagios Server. Passive checks use the NSCA or Nagios Service Check Adaptor which is an add-on for the Nagios Server. You can write custom scripts to evaluate applications and send the output to a central Nagios Server. Passive Checks are often used when a firewall prevents Nagios from obtaining information from the client.

A key Red Hat partner has developed an iPhone application to monitor JBoss application server performance. Here's the scoop along with some other key JBoss development trends.

We are happy to announce the release of Port Report 1.11. In this release, we have fixed quite a few bugs that were in the previous release. But what we are proud to announce in this release, is the following of EtherChannel aka PortChannel Ports using the Port Agreggation Protocol. Release notes are below....

The GNOME Foundation, which coordinates development of the GNOME platform, has announced the release of its first quarterly reportPDF. The Q2 2009 Quarterly report spans June, July and August and covers several topics, including the projects migration to the Git version control systems (VCS).

Not so long ago we discovered a simplified version of Nautilus which seems to miss Ubuntu Karmic after all so the only way to get it is through it's PPA. But still, one of the most requested features in Nautilus must be the dual-panel view, which gives you the ability to work in two directories at one. Sure, you can use tabs, but a dual panel Nautilus would be really useful. KDE has Dolphin which has this feature but for Gnome users, there is only Gnome Commander but I for one would like to see this in Nautilus. Holger Berndt's implemented this into Nautilus so everyone can enjoy the dual panel view. Here is a video with this modified Nautilus, but please note that some image polishing took place since this screencast was recorded:

Now Linux is the easiest of all operating systems to use, and yet anguish abounds in the land. Too hard! Too hard! Make it easier! What the heck happened?

This document describes how to install a PureFTPd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota and upload/download bandwidth limits with this setup. Passwords will be stored encrypted as MD5 strings in the database.