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Five years after it was first launched, South Africa's Impi Linux distribution no longer exists. The distribution, which began life as a Debian-derivative and later became an Ubuntu-variant when Mark Shuttleworth invested in the company, finally reached the end of its life under the ownership of Business Connection (BCX). The company says that it no longer makes sense to maintain an open source specialist division and has re-assigned open source staff to new roles in the company.

Automatic Command-line Ripper (acripper) is a free opensource tool for ripping and encoding CD tracks on the fly. It also tries to get the CD information from feeddb.org, a CDDB website and writes it to the encoded files. If no information from freedb.org is available, it then tries to read CD information (CD title, artist name, tracks names) from a text file names “titles.txt” in the working directory.

Mean spirited? No. Funny and, perhaps, cruel. Of course. Today I'm speeding around, working my arse off so that I can work all weekend (When does it end? ...oh yeah; with the worms ;) and I wrote this little shell script (in Solaris' /bin/sh) to lighten the mood a little. It's another in a string of a thousand fake error messages, but it worked pretty well for my purposes. I made sure to install it up front in the /etc/rc2.d directory (from JumpStart) so that any admin watching a new installation come up for the first time (to verify its integrity) would be guaranteed to see it. Man, it was fun until I had to fix the problem and pretend I had no idea what happened ;)

It's more than a bit ironic that the Linux Foundation, an organisation that drips with bizspeak, has chosen as the winner of its Linux promotional campaign an ad that espouses the virtues of freedom.

On Monday March 30, Intel announced the availability of their much anticipated new line of processors, the Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 series–nicknamed Nehalem. Red Hat, a long-time partner of the market-leading chip maker , collaborated on the chip’s debut, testing and optimizing the recently released Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 5.3 on the new processor. Changes include a new processor architecture, platform architecture, memory subsystem, I/O subsystem, and options (including SSD and 10GbE). So what’s the big deal? Why all the fuss? Here’s just a few of the improvements wrought by the combination of Intel’s processing power and Red Hat advancements in performance and efficiency.

Some time ago, I introduced a package for Smolt in Mandriva Cooker. Smolt is a tool developed for Fedora which collects information about all your hardware and submits it to a central database. On the smolts.org website, people can view all hardware entries and indicate which one is working OK for them. The database is also coupled with a wiki, where extra instructions can be written to get the hardware working. Smolt is used by default already for some time in Fedora and also in OpenSUSE.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) is perhaps best known as the distro whose owner Novell, in 2005, signed an extremely unpopular patent-protection deal with Microsoft. From that moment on, Novell was essentially dead to those that prize the free software aspects of Linux. Given SLED's $120 price tag, individuals unconcerned by Novell's ideological stance will likely not be interested in this distro, especially when Ubuntu, Fedora and dozens of other Linux distros are "free".

A Bulgarian open source project has released a Live CD compilation of five popular boot-and-run Linux distributions. Just released in version 3.0, "Ultilex" can be booted from CD/DVD and USB flash devices, and offers Slax, Puppy Linux, Clonezilla, Parted Magic, and the System Rescue CD, says the Ultilex project.

Long, highly-technical, and animated discussion threads are certainly not unheard of on the linux-kernel mailing list. Even by linux-kernel standards, though, the thread that followed the 2.6.29 announcement was impressive. Over the course of hundreds of messages, kernel developers argued about several aspects of how filesystems and block I/O work on contemporary Linux systems. In the end (your editor will be optimistic and say that it has mostly ended), we had a lot of heat - and some useful, concrete results.

Johnny Long has launched his new site and initiative Hackers for Charity. Johnny is the author of security books (including Google Hacking for Penetration Testers), security conference presenter (including my personal favorites "Hacking Hollywood" and "No-Tech Hacking"), creator and maintainer of the Google Hacking Database (GHDB) and an all around great guy.

I will tip my hat to the obvious influence of the powerful Microsoft Lobby. They have been there and gone, and their impact on State software purchases is obvious. I am curious to know if the dollar amounts we taxpayers spend on Microsoft software is available for public consumption. Again, Microsoft has lobbied you successfully. Entire nations, states and municipalities across the globe have switched to GNU/Linux and open source software, yet the US remains the last bastion of Microsoft strength.

Today my computer broke. Which is not a showstopping catastrophe because I have computers all over the place. Kind of like the Mad Tea Party-- no need to wash the crockery, just move to a new place setting. But eventually you run out of clean place settings, and eventually I'll run out of computers, so I suppose I better fix it.

As well as 84 percent of businesses across the world saying they have no plans to adopt Windows 7 within a year, Microsoft should perhaps be more worried by the 50 percent who said they were considering jumping ship to a different OS such as Linux.

The next version of Ubuntu, ‘Jaunty Jackalope’, offers several new features in the server edition. Below, WorksWithU takes a look at what the latest release of Ubuntu, set to become stable on April 23, will mean for server users. Here are the details.

In the official announcement, Wine growers reveal a slew of enhancements for 1.1.19. These include improved Direct3D support and Esound driver. Winemaker, which makes Windows programs Wine-compatible, now also supports Visual C++ projects.

The Psyb0t worm infects Linux-based routers, including consumer-level broadband routers, and turns them into botnet nodes. Psyb0t finds easy entry because they are misconfigured. Eric Geier tells how to find out if you are infected and what to do about it, and gives sound advice that is pertinent to all routers.

Sabayon Linux is a very full featured DVD-sized distribution that is really catching on in the Linux community as of late. The most recent release, Sabayon 4.1 Gnome, includes some very impressive features, and applications. I installed Sabayon 4.1 Gnome this morning and found some great stuff, I really have nothing but good things to say about this up and coming Linux distro.

Let's face it, databases are only minimally human-readable. Or, at least, that's the case in OpenOffice.org Base, regardless of whether you view a database's tables directly or filter them through a query or form. In fact, to anybody who's not an accountant or a computer geek, reading databases can be downright intimidating. Reports are an effort to manipulate database records into a more friendly form, including preparing them for printing or for insertion into a larger document.

The publication of the final draft JavaScript standard, ECMA-262, ECMAScript fifth edition, marks the final stage of revision for the ECMAScript standard, which was last updated in 1999. The redevelopment of the standard has been an acrimonious affair.

In this article we'll look at PHP's "magic" features: Magic methods are class methods with specific names, are used to perform various specialized tasks. They are grouped into two: overloading methods and non-overloading methods. Overloading magic methods are used when your code attempts to access a method or a property which does not exist. Non-overloading methods perform other tasks. Magic functions are similar to magic methods, but are just plain functions outside any class. Currently there is only one magic function in PHP. Magic constants are similar to constants in notation, but act more like "dynamic" constants - their value depends on where you use them. We'll also look at some practical examples of using some of these, and lastly we'll check out what new features PHP 5.3 is going to add.