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This week's feature story takes a first look at VectorLinux 6.0 beta 2. Following up on last week's feature story about the impact of the global financial crisis on Linux distributions, Mandriva CEO Hervé Yahi responds to the community regarding the recent dismissals at the Paris-based distribution while Novell posts mixed sales results for SUSE Linux. In other news, Phoronix publishes the results of benchmark tests comparing the performance of the newly released OpenSolaris 2008.11 with the previous version, 2008.05, Ars Technica names Foresight Linux and openSUSE as its distributions of the year, and DragonFly BSD gets a closer look. Finally, we get progress updates on Linux Mint 6 and a preview release of Fedora-based Omega 10 Desktop.

Encryption is standard in a lot of applications these days, such as email, Web sites, VPNs, and wireless networking. There is a lot of snake oil and ineffective technology that lies in wait for the unwary; Paul Rubens gives a clear and understandable explanation of the power and benefits of Public Key Encryption (PKE), and why it revolutionized securing communications over untrusted networks.

Stories of a struggling U.S. economy are on everyone's lips these days but some open source companies are doing what they can to help combat the pain. One vendor has decided to forgo a lavish holiday party this year and donate money to a local charity instead, while another is collecting canned food for the needy.

Free software advocacy is something I do — both for a living and as a hobby. Over the years I’ve gleaned a few best practice tips and I thought I’d pass them on. They may not all work or even be applicable in your case, but I have found then all useful at some time or other. They are in no particular order and in my opinion carry equal amounts of weight. Read Ryan Cartwright's article in full at Freesoftware Magazine.

Learning VirtualDub, the only professional book available for the leading open source video capture and processing tool, has today been released as a free download by Packt Publishing. First released in May 2005, the book is designed to get users started and then quickly learn the advanced features of VirtualDub.

Could it be a coincidence that he has “strong ties to Democrats”? Until recently, Microsoft, Gates and even Ballmer (at a personal capacity) invested heavily in some Republicans.

Archmbox lets you list, move, and copy messages from one mbox mail file to another, primarily for archiving messages. This tool lets you easily move all messages that are older than a given date into another (possibly compressed) mbox file, and you can also grab or delete messages by matching regular expressions against message headers.

There's plenty of ways to convert Microsoft Office 2007 file formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) to OpenOffice.org. Now OpenOffice.org 3.0 imports these Office OpenXML files natively, but natively doesn't mean a fluent translation. You can wait for OpenOffice 3 to mature, but there's another way for the impatient.

On Tuesday a consortium of technology companies, including IBM (IBM), will launch a new initiative designed to help shield the open-source software community from threats posed by companies or individuals holding dubious software patents and seeking payment for alleged infringements by open-source software products. The most novel feature of the new program, to be known as Linux Defenders, will be its call to independent open-source software developers all over the world to start submitting their new software inventions to Linux Defenders (Web site due to be operational Tuesday) so that the group’s attorneys and engineers can, for no charge, help shape, structure, and document the invention in the form of a “defensive publication.” Linux Defenders will then also see to it that the publication, duly attributing authorship of the invention to the developer who submitted it, is filed on the IP.com Web site, a database used by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and other patent examiners throughout the world when they are trying to determine whether a proposed patent is truly novel, as any patentable invention is supposed to be.

Tom Berquist, former managing director of financial powerhouses Citigroup and Goldman Sachs and now CFO of open source database firm Ingres, made the prediction last week. Ingres, the second largest open source company, counts the likes of BAE Systems, Cathay Pacific and Lufthansa among its customers. Berquist said the cloud computing model--of companies' serving applications over the Internet--requires vendors to spend large amounts of cash buying and maintaining servers, telecoms infrastructure and software such as operating systems, Web, application and database servers to support their software as a service (SaaS) operation.

Suppose you need to chart some demographical or geographical data. Using OpenOffice.org's chart module you can present the data as a bar, pie, or even exploded donut chart. What you can't do, though, is to create a map chart that shows data distribution by continent, country, or region. To do this, you need the EuroOffice Map Chart Professional (EOMCP) extension. Unlike many other OpenOffice.org extensions, EOMCP is not free, but the price is right (it costs 9.90 EUR or about 12 USD), and there is a free trial version available.

For this Howto I use Debian Lenny (still testing and not "stable" for the simple reason as - contrary to Debian Etch and/or Ubuntu 8.04/8.10 - the install routine does setup the initrd correctly so that you can set up encrypted swap and also an encrypted raid1 lvm during install). This Howto will be heavy on screen shots again - a lot of them are repetitive as I set up multiple partitions at once. Basically I will set up the system in a way that (a) everything [except for /boot] will be encrypted, (b) everything will be on a raid1 and (c) have an LVM for your data partition so that this one can be easily expanded.

A little help for those of you who may not be allowed to edit the .swatchrc directly. Since I'm coming down from a week of getting kicked in the teeth (I mean, being 24x7 primary on call ;) this week's Monday Unix and/or Linux script is veering from the direction they mostly go in. My next idea was to create a CLI book reader to compliment out previous script to find free online books.

LXer Feature: 07-Dec-2008

Ok so first some numbers, Tech Republic has a nice list of 10 mistakes new Linux administrators should look out for. Steve Emms gives a review of 6 Lean Linux Desktop Environments of which I had only heard of two before. I also came across Cynthia Harvey's big list of 40 Open Source Tools to help you protect your privacy online that has working links to each of their SourceForge webpages, very cool.

During installation phase we would have to drop to shell and undertake some special actions to prepare runtime profile.Pygrub won’t be able to load DomU utilizing ZFS based image. In particular, ZFS-ID of boot environment will be obtained to compose extra line in runtime profile.

Back in October Ryan Gordon surprised the Linux community by releasing a Linux game demo of Prey two-years after the game began shipping on Windows. He was contracted to port the Prey server to Linux but this was the first time we were seeing any client. A month later an updated Prey demo for Linux was released. This afternoon Ryan has now released the binaries that allow the retail game to be used on Linux.

Registration for Linux Expo opens. Speaker positions still available. Due to the holidays the Calls For Proposals for SCALE 7x have been extended until December 10th, 2008. The Beginner and Developer tracks are almost full; there are still available spots in the three general audience speaker tracks. But if you're considering submitting a proposal, don't delay; the window of opportunity is closing!

Here is a scenario you can think about. An administrator of a company has been accused of hoarding illegal material of questionable moral content on his company network system. You have been called upon to examine the suspect server and unearth evidence related to the said illegal material. Your boss have told you that you are not allowed to shutdown the server. Unfortunately no additional money is available to buy forensic tools or equipment. In this workshop we will explain, how to use free forensic tools to investigate such cases.

Thanks to a Ubuntu Developer named "Teapot", the newest version of Ubuntu (8.10) is now optimized for the XO laptop. Teapot designed this release to be reliable and consistent with many modifications.

Wouldn't it be great if you could just click your way to a custom distro? After all, most of the packages you will need are sitting on a well-connected web server somewhere, so it makes sense to build ISO images and repositories directly on that server. And since that server has a HTTP interface, why not make the distro building software into a web application? This is the principle behind http://www.instalinux.com, created by Chris Slater. It's based on the SystemDesigner CGI scripts from the Linux Common Operating Environment project, originally developed as a tool for internal use at HP, and now released under the GNU GPL.