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Although GNU/Linux has the reputation of being a more secure operating system than Microsoft Windows, you still need to secure the Linux desktop. This tutorial takes you through the steps of installing and configuring antivirus software, creating a backup-restore plan, and making practical use of a firewall.

Adobe Systems has issued a prerelease version of project Alchemy, a small tool that compiles C and C++ code for programs running on ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2). The idea is to expand the capabilities of Web applications running on Adobe Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR 1.5.

It's time for me to wear my special hat again. The Fedora developer community has announced the official release of Fedora 10, a new version of the popular open source Linux distribution. This release is a promising step forward for Fedora and it introduces some important new features and technologies that bring more robustness and usability to the desktop user experience. Fedora 10 is built on Linux kernel version 2.6.27, which was officially released in October. This version comes with improved compatibility for popular webcam devices and also includes the new Atheros ath9k wireless driver.

Silicon Graphics have always made great workstations. I’m not just talking about brutal 3D monsters that could apply video feeds as textures in real time (over a decade ago). The machines are responsive and balanced, and this makes them perfect for general desktop use. Annoyingly, too, as it means when I’m on the road and using my Macbook, I’m constantly frustrated by a gutless machine with a glitzy UI that gets in the way and slows things down. With IRIX officially dead, the Open Source community is the only place any sort of IRIX-related development is happening. The crew over at Nekochan have developed Nekoware, an entire distribution of Open Source apps ported to IRIX, tuned and optimised for MIPS.

Not everyone who uses Linux today has done so because of carefully reasoning that it is a better operating system than the others on offer. People enter the Linux fold due to different reasons and those who stay there go through several stages of growth. This article has nothing to do with the person who takes careful stock of things and the migrates over after weighing carefully the pros and cons. It deals with the others.

With all of the talk these days about the desktop Linux taking on Windows in the enterprise sector, have you ever considered that with some simple compromises, using Linux desktops running different thin clients can work very well within the confines of what most businesses need? The real trick is ensuring that application functionality and familiarity remain intact. I believe there is such a tool that will allow this to happen – indeed, it has worked well for many computing environments already. Enter Thinstation

[Matt on Datamation? What has the world come to? And with picture too! - Sander]

The Linux kernel uses several special capabilities of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) suite. These capabilities range from giving you shortcuts and simplifications to providing the compiler with hints for optimization. Discover some of these special GCC features and learn how to use them in the Linux kernel.

A tutorial for configuring you Fedora 10 Installation with all the basics a user might need. Learn how to configure extra Fedora repositories for video and audio codecs as long as Video card drivers. Instructions for Firefox, JAVA, Flash, KDE4 and many other applications.

TiddlyWiki excels at managing notes and text snippets, but can you tweak it for other uses? If you take a look at some applications based on TiddlyWiki, the answer appears to be a resounding yes. With TiddlyWiki derivatives, you can manage tasks, track projects, keep tabs on contacts, and organize book collections. Like the original TiddlyWiki, each derivative consists of a single HTML file which you have to download to your local hard disk. Open the downloaded file in a browser, and the TiddlyWiki-based tool is ready to go.

Fedora might not be getting a complete makeover or flashy new features in version 10, out today, but some welcome enhancements under-the-hood make this a worthwhile upgrade. If you've never given Fedora a try, now is a great time. The tenth revision slick and stable and it has a rock solid feel to it that, for our money, trumps even Ubuntu's latest release. Fedora 10 has many of the features we loved in Ubuntu - the latest version of GNOME and the new NetworkManager utility, for instance. As a bonus you also get the always excellent RPM package system, the new Empathy instant messenger framework, PackageKit and host of other Fedora-specific tools.

How to figure out if your local filesystem is the thing that's giving you heartburn today ;) Today we're going to take a look at some quick and easy ways to determine if you have a problem with your local filesystem on SUSE Linux (tested on 8.x and 9.x). Of course, we're assuming that you have some sort of an i/o wait issue and the users are blaming it on the local disk.

Increasingly we're seeing big business jump on the Linux bandwagon, as companies wake up to the money that can be made out of a community of developers working for free. Someone has to protect that community from being exploited, and if you're a Fedora contributor, that someone is Max Spevack. Linux Format magazine caught up with Max to ask him about the way the Fedora world is turning.

Although OpenOffice.org comes with a decent online help, it can only get you that far.

The Utah-based SCO Group has been cleared to appeal a court ruling that might lead to a revival of its dispute with IBM over copyright claims to the freely distributed Linux operating system. Utah Federal Judge Dale A. Kimball has signed a final judgment in a case involving Novell, in which he had awarded Novell $2.5 million for some of the revenues The SCO Group obtained in licensing the Unix computer operating system.

Some videos you download might not have such a high audio volume, even with alsamixer set to 100%. There’s a trick for this. Start your video with mplayer -softvol -softvol-max 300 video_file.avi to boost your volume 300%. Substitute 300 with any number ranging from 10 to 10000. Be careful not to break your speakers.

In October, MSI's Director of US Sales delivered an interesting statistic that Linux netbooks were returned four times more often than Windows versions. It didn't seem, perhaps, an unreasonable number, but it was a bit ambiguous what data it was pulled from.

The Fedora Project today will take the wraps off the open development Fedora 10 release, six months and twelve days since Fedora 9 came on the scene and more or less in sync with the six month development cycle that the project has established for the code base that eventually becomes Red Hat Enterprise Linux. According to Paul Frields, Fedora's project leader, the bits comprising Fedora 10, code-named "Cambridge," will be distributed starting at 10am Eastern time today. And while the software has lots of nips and tucks, and lots more people contributing to the project than even a year ago, the release will probably be seen as incremental by most users.

Here's my 10th tip in the "OpenLDAP Quick Tips" series: "You want to stay up to date with the latest version of OpenLDAP to benefit from bug fixes":

How many web browsers do you run? If you're like me, you regularly use Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari. Each of those browsers, of course, has its own underlying rendering engine: Gecko (in Firefox), Trident (in Internet Explorer), and Webkit (in Chrome and Safari). Today, a Japanese startup called Lunascape has released an alpha version of its Lunascape browser.

Thanks to the taglist vim plugin, vim users have access to a decent tag browser. Taglist is built on exuberant ctags so it support a large amount of languages. Unfortunately however, when the exuberant ctags people replaced their old PHP lexer with a brand new regexp-based parser the quality of parsing PHP code decreased dramatically. Ctags suddenly could not distinguish real class and function declarations from mere mentions of the words “class” and “function” in multi-line comments. This is because the ctags regular expression parses is inherently line oriented. In this article I have two patches that greatly improve PHP support in exuberant-ctags. I will also show you how you can apply these patches on a Debian-based system.