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Every Linux distributor must find its own peace when it comes to the issue of proprietary software. Some distributors will avoid anything non-free to the point of tearing firmware out of the kernel. Others, like Fedora or Debian, will not include any non-free code. Distributors like Ubuntu are rather more willing to facilitate the use of non-free software, but even they are, perhaps, not 100% comfortable with it. And distributions like Xandros positively embrace proprietary code.

The Hacker Underground is dead. Long live the Hacker Underground! In the most recent issue of Phrack Magazine, I read an article titled"The Underground Myth," that makes a number of astute points about the demise of the hacking scene of the last few decades. The author describes a technical landscape in which the technology security industry and a diminishing number of obvious exploits conspired to destroy the scene.

In late September 2008, the OpenVAS developer team released the 2.0-beta1 version of OpenVAS, the Open Vulnerability Assessment System for network security scanning.
The intended audience for this beta release are experienced users interested in upcoming features as well as developers of vulnerability checks.

Web sites that run text squarely around images even when the images don't have even borders look a little lazy. pngslice slices an image into thin vertical images and generates a small chunk of HTML to align these slices so that the original image can be seen in a Web browser. This lets you place non-rectangular floating images on Web pages and align the surrounding text to the uneven borders of the image for a professional-looking layout. While you may be able to achieve a similar effect in other ways, if you want to have your Web site viewable in both a wide variety of browsers and versions of those browsers, using image slices is an effective technique.

Though TiVO's software is open source, any "unsigned" modified code is blocked from running on these devices. Home-brew DVRs act like TiVOs, with a few side benefits. The article mentions, incidentally, that this is not a project for the faint of heart. My MythTV box has been humming in my living room just shy of a year. It's not a project for a new user, but it's a better application, and less complicated to install and maintain than you've been led to believe.

Linux will be a passenger in every seat on Qantas' Airbus A380s airplanes. All of the airline's superjumbos -- the first of which will commence flying next week -- will have their in-flight entertainment systems powered by the operating system. The A380 is the first Qantas aircraft to utilize the Panasonic eX2 Inflight Entertainment System (IFE). All of Panasonic's X Series of IFE systems run on Linux.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Mandriva One 2009.0 desktop (with the GNOME desktop environment) that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

In November, Asus will ship a $400 Windows-based "nettop" that includes an integrated touchscreen and Linux-based "Express Gate" quick boot technology. The "Eee Top" reportedly has a 15-inch display, 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, and a gigabit Ethernet port.

This Linux is so darned small, I can't believe the name ;) Today, we're going to walk though installing it on your bootable hard drive. Sure, sure, it defeats the principal of the whole thing, but you can always just slice up two tiny little partitions and have DSL as a backup for your other OS, which may or may not completely self-destruct at any moment. Plus, it's a great idea when all you've got to work with is an old machine that won't run anything else!

With the games industry apparently enthralled by DRM and committed to criminalising their customers, our upcoming event as part of the London Games Fringe is especially timely. Open Rights Group in conjunction with Own-It will co-host a panel discussion on the role of open source in the games industry and invites all our readers and supporters to join the debate.

Novell has acquired Managed Objects, a software company that mainly targets corporate IT. But the deal gives Novell a potential path to more aggressively target managed service providers. Here’s how, according to MSPmentor.

There has been much discussion of the Vital Wave Consulting total cost of ownership model showing a $2,700 5 Year TCO This report models the cost for a secondary school to install a computer laboratory to support a course in computer literacy (often called ICT). This course consists of classroom lectures based on textbooks with hands-on computer access during scheduled laboratory periods ('students are not permitted in the computer lab without a teacher present').

The head of virtualisation kingpin VMware believes that the current climate - both economic and physical - will force enterprises to put the desktops of employees on USB sticks. While this might not spell good news for the purveyors of fat clients like Dell, HP and Acer, VMware CEO Paul Maritz is adamant that it's a key way to cut costs and save the climate.

The Linux Foundation has released the first public beta of its solution to enable developers to more easily build applications that run on different Linux distributions. The foundation, on Oct. 14, announced the availability of the first beta of Linux Standard Base (LSB) 4.0, which introduces a new application checker, a new shell script checker, and a new multi-version software development kit (SDK) that will enable developers to build applications to earlier LSB specifications without changing SDKs, said Brian Proffitt, community manager for the Linux Foundation.

The good news: Wikipedia seems to be standardizing its servers on Ubuntu. The bad news: Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, doesn't seem to be profiting from the Wikipedia deployment. Details at Works With U, the independent guide to Ubuntu.

It is hard to imagine something more expensive, condescending, inaccurate, frustrating and enraging - nor something better calculated to restrict knowledge and broadcast ignorance. It's almost as if the parties involved actively want to prevent people learning. It certainly feels that way. British Library, are you listening?

The third full OpenOffice suite is out in the wild and attracting plenty of attention. OpenOffice.org 3.0 was released Monday -- and already, demand has been high enough to overwhelm the download servers and cause them to crash. The software suite, designed as an open source alternative to Microsoft Office, offers everything from word processing and spreadsheet creation to presentation and databasing tools.

Ubuntu 8.04 is available in more than 150 translations. How does that compare to Windows? The numbers may surprise you. Details from Works With U, the independent guide to Ubuntu.

flimp is a generic graphical frontend to the many excellent command line image manipulation tools available. It allows you to create pipelines of commands that read from standard input and write to standard output. One can view and compare the result of each stage of the pipeline. flimp leaves the input image file untouched; the pipeline is saved in a text file.

The final version of OpenOffice 3 is out today, and if you're looking to save yourself plenty of money, download it instead of buying Microsoft Office --- you could save yourself hundreds of dollars, and not lose out on many features. I put the Windows version through its paces, and am about to download the Linux version as well. The suite has six full-blown applications: the Writer word processor, Calc spreadsheet, Impress presentations program, Base database program, Math equation editor, and Draw graphics program.