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Web frontend for changing your Unix or Linux user password

LXer Feature: 14-Dec-2008

Hello everyone, It seems that in the search to bring the infections under control, the USB drive ban I told you about last week has been expanded to the entire military now. AbiWord 2.6.5 just hit the streets and it boasts better compatibility with Word 2007 and OpenOffice Writer and Amarok 2.0 with a host of cool new stuff was released earlier in the week as well.

On the kernel page a few weeks ago, we took a look at KSM, a technique to reduce memory usage by sharing identical pages. Currently proposed for inclusion in the mainline kernel, KSM implements a potentially useful—but not particularly new—mechanism. Unfortunately, before it can be examined on its technical merits, it may run afoul of what is essentially a political problem: software patents. The basic idea behind KSM is to find memory pages that have the same contents, then arrange for one copy to be shared amongst the various users. The kernel does some of this already for things like shared libraries, but there are numerous ways for identical pages to get created that the kernel does not know about directly, thus cannot coalesce. Examples include initialized memory (at startup or in caches) from multiple copies of the same program and virtualized guests that are running the same operating system and application programs.

You want a phone that can do it all? Internet, music, photos, films, documents, texting, instant messaging, diary, contacts and ... err ... phone calls? Then a smartphone is right for you. But as the market for high-end mobiles gets ever more crowded, which should you pick? The global market leader, Symbian, makes the software that runs most of Nokia's smart phones (and a few others).

There seemed to have been little buzz generated by this announcement when it first came about, but Tungsten Graphics has been acquired by VMware. They were acquired in late November for undisclosed terms and their only news mention of this acquisition is below (from their website).

Please sign this petition to help Adam Williamson get his job at Mandriva back, and to give me a reason to go back on my words that I will stop using and recommending Mandriva products.

MystOnline, also known as UruLive, a massively multi-player online (MMO) game, is to be released as open source by Cyan Worlds. MystOnline has had a difficult time, originally launched and then shut down by Ubisoft before leaving three years of beta, then being purchased by GameTap, released in fourteen countries and, after a year, again shut down. This led Cyan Worlds to come to an agreement to reclaim their intellectual property and to announce a plan to relaunch the game.

For a brief moment in time, between October 2007 and April 2008, thanks to the Asus Eee PC it really did seem as if desktop Linux was finally going to have its moment in the sun. Unfortunately for the Linux crowd, however, Asus, Acer and other hardware makers realised they could sell many more netbooks if they did deals with those nasty folks in Redmond.

Viet Nam has officially become a member of Asianux, an organisation dedicated to the development of free software, Deputy Minister of Science and Technology Tran Quoc Thang has announced. He was speaking at a recent symposium on open source software (OSS) in Ha Noi, organised by the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Education and Training, the Viet Nam Chamber of Commerce and Industry and other agencies related to the IT sector.

Put the computer down and come out with your hands up ;)

This guide explains how you can install and use KVM for creating and running virtual machines on an Ubuntu 8.10 server. I will show how to create image-based virtual machines and also virtual machines that use a logical volume (LVM). KVM is short for Kernel-based Virtual Machine and makes use of hardware virtualization, i.e., you need a CPU that supports hardware virtualization, e.g. Intel VT or AMD-V.

Steve Jobs says Apple does not know how to make a $500 computer “that’s not a piece of junk”. Yet this article was written on a small computer that costs less than that—and barely a quarter of the price of the Apple iMac that sits on the desk beside it. Small, cheap mini-notebooks like this, or “netbooks” as they have come to be called, are not as fast or as capable as a big computer like an iMac, and in performance terms they trail behind most laptops. But they are certainly not junk, and for some people they may be the best computers money can buy.

Back in September we looked at the Intel Atom performance on a few Linux distributions using the ASUS Eee PC 901, but now with new stable releases of some of the most popular distributions out in the wild, we've decided to re-conduct these tests. We are using a slightly different Atom-based system this time and we are comparing the performance on Ubuntu 8.10, Fedora 10, Mandriva 2008, and OpenSuSE 11.1.

Don't let Hanukkah sneak up on you. Get your geek the stuff he really wants.

It was just eleven days ago that NVIDIA had released the 180.11 Beta Linux Driver, but in the wee hours of Saturday morning NVIDIA has pushed out a new beta driver. This driver contains a few fixes, support for new GPUs, and an updated implementation of the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix.

Collaboration and interoperability are shaking up enterprise content management from the outside, but forces are also emerging from within that have the potential to reshape the market. Two companies in particular, Alfresco and SpringCM, challenge the dominant deployment model of proprietary, premises-based software. Alfresco and SpringCM attack the two major weaknesses of ECM vendors: cost and time. It's not unusual for a company to drop $1 million on ECM software and services, and Gartner says it can take six to 18 months to deploy.

Before you finish your holiday shopping, consider the following option: If you’re in the market for a low-end PC, put aside about $300 for the ZaReason Breeze, a small desktop computer that runs Ubuntu Linux. Based on our testing, WorksWithU sees some clear market segments where the Breeze is an ideal option for today’s consumers and small businesses. Here's the scoop.

Many sceptics were convinced that as free software spread out beyond hackers into the general computing sector the rigorous GNU GPL licence would gradually be replaced by more accommodating – meaning weaker – forms, since it was “obvious” that its unbending rules were too strict for widespread use. In fact, the GPL has grown in importance, until today it is probably fair to say that it underpins most of the free software world, including enterprise applications. This makes any violation of its terms particularly worrying, because if left unchallenged, it threatens to undermine the entire ecosystem.

I never tell anyone that I'm a writer, because then I get bombarded with requests to edit their manuscripts and find them paying gigs and all kinds of things I would rather not do. Or they bore me with how they have all these ideas that they are really going to write someday, but for now they prefer to bore me with them. For those of you who are serious and not afraid to work hard, it is possible to get paid to write computer howtos. So as long as you promise to not come to my house and pester me, I will share some tips with you.

The Eclipse Plug-in for Generating and Executing Test Cases for Database Objects enables users to automatically generate JUnit or SQLUnit test cases for database objects. By using defined code templates and parameter templates, the repetitive effort of handling the objects is significantly reduced.