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Yesterday afternoon I was really bored at work and had eventually navigated to a website dedicated to Easter Eggs that could be found on an operating system, software application and more. Naturally I went to the list of operating systems and started looking up the operating systems which were accessible to me. As I read through the Linux and UNIX related ones, I had already known some but there were a few that I was interested in trying.

This tutorial explains how you can install and configure APF - an interface to IPTables which lets you easily configure a full featured firewall to secure servers and workstations connected to a network. This guide describes an example installation on a server with cPanel but it's only a matter of port numbers which must be open for everything to work. APF can be used on any system.

Flickr is, without doubt, an excellent service for shutterbugs and professional photographers alike, but if you are looking for a more streamlined interface that makes it easier for you to view and manage your precious shots, you might want give Flogr a try.

Just over a year ago I reported on the work of Dr. Andre Oboler for O'Reilly News, who had written a report on how Google Earth was delivering overtly politically biased information. A combination of negative publicity and a libel suit filed against Google resulted in changes to Google Earth which resolved the issue. Dr. Oboler published a new report on Tuesday and this time he has targeted Facebook and with good reason. Despite a prohibition in the popular social networking website's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, it's terms of service, Facebook has remained a happy home for Holocaust denial and racist "white pride" groups.

Nero AG announced a new version of its Linux CD burning software. Nero Linux 4 now offers a wizard-style UI and support for Musepack and AIFF audio formats, and a "Nero Linux 4 Essentials" application is available separately for OEM partners, says the Karlsbad, Germany-based company.

Google has given Microsoft a virtual bear hug, lauding the Redmond software giant for finally joining the push for a new-age HTML. In early August, Internet Explorer product manager Adrian Bateman suddenly appeared on a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) mailing list dedicated to the still-gestating HTML 5 standard, and this simple gesture has sparked a rare moment of Redmond love inside the Mountain View Chocolate Factory.

After a year's development, a new, stable version 3.0 of Google's open source Chrome browser is now available. Developers promise "significant speed improvements," although current beneficiaries are Windows Vista and XP users only.

Perhaps they are concerned about staying in Microsoft’s good graces, they have been slow about adopting Linux as an alternative on the computers that they sell to the public. But their has been some progress.

Linux on one side. Windows on the other. Draw your swords and CHARGE!

Today Nokia employee Thomas Zander announced in his blog that Nokia will be using KOffice as a base for the office file viewer in Maemo 5. He also sent an email to the KOffice mailing list giving some more details about how this came to be.

A few minutes ago, the Ubuntu development team unleashed the sixth and last alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) operating system, due for release in late October this year.

Developer Matthew Dillon has announced the release of version 2.4 of DragonFly BSD, originally created as a fork from FreeBSD 4.x. The major release includes several bug fixes, performance improvements and a new 64-bit port.

While I've known about the free, open-source desktop publishing application Scribus, until I happened across this article today I didn't know that Scribus is a cross-platform program that runs not just in Linux/Unix but also on computers using the Macintosh OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems. That raises my opinion of Scribus immediately. I strive to use as many cross-platform applications as possible because of the flexibility they afford me across the many operating systems I run.

Quarterly reports are the stuff of business. In most people's minds, they are as far from the spirit of free and open source software (FOSS) as anyone can imagine. All the same, as non-profit organizations, many FOSS projects issue them. And while your first reaction may be to avoid quarterly reports, they can give some insights into projects, especially if you read between the lines.

A group of SUSE Linux users put plans in motion last week to create a free, community-managed server distribution that maintains compatibility with Novell's enterprise offerings, but guarantees the long-term-support not provided by openSUSE. The result, said organizers, would be similar to the relationship between CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and would ultimately be beneficial to Novell. There are numerous practical difficulties to be overcome in the creation of this distribution, though, and the form that this distribution might take is not yet clear.

The OSGi Alliance has released version 4.2 of the OSGi (Open Service Gateway initiative) specification. OSGi is a Java component technology which serves as a basis for development environments like Eclipse. The OSGi components, called bundles, export code and services to others. They can be installed and exchanged individually at runtime. As a result, OSGi allows software modules to be dynamically discovered at runtime. The platform requires a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and provides a JVM-based OSGi framework.

If you're a Vonage user and you'd like to keep tabs on your bill as the month progresses, the script described here can help. The script uses curl to login to your Vonage account and download the web page with your current balance. The balance is then extracted using grep and sed.

But it has some quirks that some days make me want to slap Firefox silly, like when it crashes and there are multiple Firefox windows open, all of them vanish. This is the sort of thing that makes me wonder if Firefox isn't just a little too Windows-happy.

In part one of this series we looked at the basic building blocks needed to put together your very own high-end Linux workstation. This time Paul Ferrill finishes the actual hardware assembly, encounters Windows-required-for-BIOS-update follies, and starts to gaze towards putting some software on this beast.

Now this is good tech news in its purest form: After eight years of development, a new operating system called Haiku has been released in alpha form. It’s an open-source reconstruction of BeOS, the mean, lean, multimedia-savvy OS which I really liked when I reviewed it for PC World, um, eleven years ago. (If I recall correctly, I compared it with Windows 98 and an early version of Red Hat Linux.) It’s certainly a happier development than we’re accustomed to hearing about BeOS, a product which failed to become the next-generation Mac OS back in the 1990s and was then sold to Palm for a measly $11 million, whereupon it pretty much vanished except for the occasional legal aftershock.