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If you've recently switched from Windows to the Linux distribution Ubuntu, you've probably experienced a decrease in spyware -- and malware in general -- on your system. But although Ubuntu is billed as the ultra-secure solution, you should know that even though Ubuntu's default install has its flaws, like every other operating system. To combat these weaknesses, IT Security has prepared a guide to help you close your system's backdoors and protect you from some of the common Ubuntu exploits.

Virtual Bridges and Canonical today announced general availability of a Linux-desktop solution designed to drive significant savings compared with Microsoft-desktop software by amplifying Lotus collaboration software and Ubuntu to a larger user base through virtualization.

There are many reasons why you would want to generate bogus data for your database. Perhaps you’d like to know how well your databases will perform when filled with data, or maybe you just need some data so that you can start creating a front end for the database. I recently ran into the problem of not wanting to generate lots of data manually. I initially thought that I would write a shell script to do this, but figured I might as well look around first. I stumbled across a program called Spawner which is great for generating data for database testing.

The Alfresco Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) whitepaper, based on publicly available pricing from a range of vendors, shows how it is possible to save, in the first year of implementation (based on a 1000 user configuration) up to 89 percent of the cost of SharePoint purchases and up to 96 percent of the cost of other ECM solutions by using Alfresco's open source ECM. The whitepaper aims to demystify some of the complexity around current proprietary ECM pricing and demonstrate how choosing and implementing an open source ECM solution can be a transparent and cost-effective process.

With the end of the year approaching fast, it is easy to look back, but hard to look forward. The question, though, is not what will happen, but what you want to happen in this coming year? What would you like to see happen to Linux in 2009?

Teri Takai, California CIO: "We’re going to be moving away from some of our older mainframe technologies, running on COBOL. We’re moving definitely towards greater use of open source, to either a dot-net of Java environment for development. We’re moving towards many more services as self-service.."

With the JShot screen capture and uploader utility, you can quickly put all or part of your screen on the Web and send a URL to it to a friend. JShot is free for noncommercial use, and is great when you want to show people a screen capture and don't want to have to deal with file names and upload permissions.

You can protect yourself from everybody some of the time and some people all of the time, but you can't protect yourself from mother ;) Today's post is going to be about security on Linux and Unix, since we're building up to doing some work with CAPTCHA in the near future and need to keep ourselves awake and interested ;) To be more specific, today's post is going to deal with site, and user, security on the Internet (although you could apply these examples to various arenas).

With the EXT4 file-system being marked as stable in the forthcoming Linux 2.6.28 kernel, and some Linux distributions potentially switching to it as an interim step until the btrfs file-system is ready, we decided it was time to benchmark this journaled file-system for ourselves. We ran a number of disk-centric Linux benchmarks along with several of our real-world tests from the Phoronix Test Suite to gauge how well the EXT4 file-system performance will be noticed by desktop users and computer gamers. We have compared these EXT4 results to the EXT3, XFS, and ReiserFS file-systems.

If you’ve shied away from Linux because of the hassle of working with removable media, you may want to take another look. Thanks to automation — and with the help of these tips — you may find that removable media is downright user friendly.

Within the next 12 years, 40 percent of IT jobs will be related to open source, and open source-based cloud computing will be solving many problems in the real world, open source advocates have predicted.

How to dual-boot Windows XP and Linux, on a system where you have already installed XP. Easy step-by-step tutorial that doesn't assume prior knowledge of Linux.

The Drupal system, when combined with the PHPTemplate engine, gives you the ability to create logic that will automatically display templates or specific elements in response to the existence of certain conditions. In this two part article we will look at running multiple templates, and at creating dynamic elements and styles. Among the techniques covered in these articles ( Part 1 and Part 2 ) are: using suggestions—naming conventions—to control template display, the use of $body_classes to create dynamic styling, and the implementation of the preprocessor function.

Luc Verhaegen has announced today that the X.Org Foundation will once again have a development room at next year's FOSDEM. The Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting is taking place on the 7th and 8th of February in Brussels, Belgium.

Windows worms and Trojan horses infect the entire US military, it seems, and Carla Schroder wonders why isn't this a huge scandal? Why does Microsoft always get a free pass despite causing billions of dollars of damages? Other musings cover corporate rootkits, security vendors looking the other way, and aren't there any adults in corporate land?

If I play video games they're usually pretty low tech ones. One of the few games I miss from the old days is Duke Nukem, and I'm talking about the Duke before he went 3D. If you have an old DOS game that you'd like to run, or for that matter any old DOS program, check out DOSBox. Even if you don't have any DOS programs that you'd like to run, you might want to try downloading some of the old DOS games that are now available free online.

The Financial Times' Richard Waters wrote an excellent analysis of Sun's open-source strategy on Monday, and in the process reminded me of something that should have been obvious: Open source is the very thing that has crippled Sun, yet Sun is looking to open source, to hobble its competitors and revive its future. We often talk in the technology industry about the need to cannibalize your own business before someone else does it to you. Sun may be a little late off the starting blocks, but it's fascinating to watch its race against time.

New Delhi resident Raj Mathur is living proof that a Free and Open Source Software advocate can earn a decent living working with clients who are using or planning to use FOSS. Raj has also been a member of the Open Source Initiative board of directors and is a leading member of his local Linux users group. He's also contributed to more than a few Free Software projects over the years. Raj is a "heartbeat of GNU/Linux" kind of guy -- not famous, but a stalwart soldier in the worldwide FOSS army. (And a nice person, too.)

We've pretty much reached the point at which it's probably cheaper to buy a laptop computer than it is to purchase a comparable desktop PC with the keyboard, mouse and monitor needed to make it all work. But laptops break. And they're hard to fix. Often really hard. And instructions on how to fix them are either really detailed (like those for Macs from ifixit.com) or, shall we say, "nonexistent."

There are lots of internal rivalries within Microsoft. One of the most constant is the battle between the Windows/Office teams and the open-source team at the company. Microsoft’s open-source team is continuing to try to build bridges with open-source providers — emphasizing Microsoft’s interest in making open and closed source products more interoperable in order to help customers. Microsoft Chief Software Ray Ozzie has made open-source interoperability one of his cornerstone platforms since he joined the company in 2005. At the same time, however, Microsoft’s Windows and Office teams are continuing to use total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) and customer case studies to prove that Linux and Open Office end up costing customers more than free/open-source software.