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To write it down clearly: I don't like clones. There are too many distro's out there as it is. Over the last years I have had many people ask me: I have tried Distro X, Y and Z, can you help me? Just a while back a colleague told me, I have upgraded Ubuntu and now my server won't work, can you help me? Or constantly I get people telling me, I have tried Clone of Clone X, Y, Z, it looks nice, but then I upgraded and it hosed my system.

At first glance, Canonical is an operating system company — built around Ubuntu Linux. But take a closer look at Canonical’s moves during the first half of 2009, and you’ll find the company has increasingly bet its revenue stream on cloud, online and consulting/support services. Here’s some perspective.

The SCP protocol, which runs on port 22, is similar to the BSD rcp protocol, however unlike rcp, data is encrypted during transfer, to avoid potential packet sniffers extracting usable information from the data packets. The protocol itself does not provide authentication and security; it relies on the underlying protocol, SSH, to provide these features. You can use scp to copy files between remote hosts using secure a connexion.

By default, Firefox (or Swiftfox) crashes when trying to view a full-screen video on say... YouTube. At least for me it used to crash until I found a fix. If that is the case for you also, you may want to read on.

It goes without saying that nobody wants to be in the hospital. Bland food, no privacy, and gowns that leave nothing to the imagination — not to mention the procedures being performed — don't exactly make ones visit a relaxing trip to the spa. We all know, however, that Linux can make anything better, and now, whether you're recovering from a lung transplant or liposuction, Linux is there to make your life in the infirmary just a little bit sunnier.

Tonight the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit was opened with a party sponsored by Kubuntu's very own Canonical. Stickers, t-shirts and beer were all given out to contributors and users of KDE, Gnome and any other free software environment. Some converts were made from the local Canary island population who were enthused by the spirit of freedom.

Embattled Mac cloner Psystar says it is ready to leave Chapter 11 protection. In a customer newsletter, Psystar officials say the company is ready to emerge from Chapter 11 protection, a provision of US bankruptcy law that allows a company to continue trading while it reorganises its affairs. "Although this [Chapter 11 protection] was critical to our continued daily operations, we are now ready to emerge and again battle Goliath.

Microsoft's, shall we say, cautious engagement with open-source could mean frameworks like Spring and Hibernate are the next projects tuned to Windows. Sam Ramji, director of the open-source development lab, in a recent interview pointed to the rise in what he called "micro frameworks" and their importance. "It's something we have to be a lot closer to," Ramji told The Reg, noting Microsoft had held talks with the SpringSource company and "a couple of their other folks."

Made some improvements and found some new bugs in gnetscan; the tiny C network scanner that could. Cut an interim release; I am using the tradition of odd numbered releases are testing/unstable while even numbered ones are stable. This release has some bug fixes, better input handling and still has some unresolved issues. In any case for those tracking it enjoy.

This tutorial will demonstrate how to set up a Squid Proxy server on Ubuntu 9.04 Server with DansGuardian (for content filtering) and ClamAV (for Virus scanning); in addition, we will set up Web Proxy AutoDetection (WPAD) through DHCP (in this case, the Windows Server 2003 DHCP server) or DNS so that the only configuration necessary on the client side is to check "Auto-detect proxy settings for this network" in Firefox or Internet Explorer. At the end of the tutorial, users will have a fully functional and secure proxy for HTTP access.

Recently on our forums, Frank Earl (who goes by the synonym Svartalf), has been seeking the input of Linux gamers as to what games they would like to see ported to Linux. Frank has been working for Linux Game Publishing for a few years porting various titles to Linux and has done work independently on bringing new software from Windows to Linux. Frank was overwhelmed by the response on our forums and it has even led to new Linux games with many other possible ports being looked into. To get his view as where Linux gaming is currently at, he has answered a few of our questions about Linux game porting, Linux gaming in general, and other questions that may be of interest to gamers and Linux enthusiasts.

According to their entry on GNOME Live, Project Hamster is “time tracking for [the] masses.” It aims to be a tool which enables users to quickly and accurately keep track of the amount of time they spend on their activities over time. Project Hamster is a relatively new module for GNOME, having been brought into GNOME officially for the 2.24 release. Now that GNOME 2.26 is upon us, it is an ideal time to take a closer look at this interesting project.

The elusive *nix. Nobody knows about it yet it is one of the most widely used server operating systems. The wikipedia entry mentions it as the unknown giant of the internet. Huge internet portals like Yahoo! run on it. Why is it that no one knows about this widely used OS?

The PostgreSQL project has released version 8.4 of the open source database management software, with more than 290 additions and changes to features. The most numerous updates are for administrators, with new or tweaked administration and monitoring tools and commands, the PostgreSQL Global Development Group said in its launch statement on Tuesday. The project spent 16 months working on the new version of the database software.

Click here for the joke of the month.

I'm not embarrassed to have ideals, I am proud. Ideals elevate us above situational ethics. Ideals guide us into trying to be better people, and give us strong bases for making difficult decisions. (Such as No, little Bill, it is not OK to do anything in the name of making a buck.)

During some recent trips to retail stores across North America, The VAR Guy spotted five clear examples why Windows will continue to dominate Linux on Netbooks. Here’s the scoop.

According to Mahatma Gandhi: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."* So by that reckoning, it must be pretty much 'job done' for free software. Over the past few months I have experienced the eerie sensation that no one is fighting us any more. Not only are audiences polite, enthusiastic and well informed at conferences, they are almost all using free software already.

In Part 1 of the series we looked at the early X window managers that ran on X display protocol based systems. The scale and range of them was from the very beginning where a user was presented with a menu and windows and little else. In Part 2 of the series we delved into desktop window manager environments, the area in between a full desktop system and a simple window manager; these were window managers which provided things like application bars, icon management of some sort and flexible interfaces to create modules or widgets for the environment but did not include (a lot of...) inherent applications. In the third part of the series we will examine the two main desktops in the X world, a look at the two newer desktop environments that are blurring between application centric/environment centric window managers, some core X technology that can enhance the X experience and finally a look ahead.

Do you really need a top-of-the-line computer, or can you get by with something as cheap as this $90 CPU/motherboard combo?