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When they hear the word PAM, most people think of a certain blonde Canadian Playmate, but readers of this Web site surely will recognize the basic element of Linux security: the Pluggable Authentication Modules. So let's talk about how this PAM works, and look at some examples of how it is used. If each Linux program had to include its own authentication logic, we'd go crazy. How could you trust that all your applications implemented the same checks? And how could you implement extra controls?

This Howto covers the installation of XenServer Express 5.0.0 and the creation of virtual machines with the XenCenter administrator console. XenServer Express is the free virtualization platform from Citrix, the company behind the well known Xen virtualization engine. XenServer Express makes it easy to create, run and manage Xen virtual machines with the XenCenter administrator console. The XenServer Express installation CD contains a full Linux distribution which is customized to run XenServer Express.

Not another of our grab-the-web script, but an actual GNU project :) Well, it's been a long time since we came out with our bash script for command line language translation, and we've finally gotten our head's out of the figurative bowl of spaghetti and found a great online project that already handles this sort of thing. No problem there, of course. If there really is more than one way to skin a cat, you need to know all those different ways or you'll end up skinning your cat the same way over and over ;)

Cisco Systems announced on Tuesday the extension of its Application Extension Platform as well as a contest for developers to provide new applications. The Cisco AXP is an open, Linux-based hardware module for the Cisco Integrated Services Router. Its Linux-based integration environment comes with a downloadable software development kit. Cisco also announced two new AXP solution partners.

Operating systems drive devices. Linux is driven by open-source imperatives. So, naturally, Linux's kernel developers have a problem with closed-source kernel modules. And, just as naturally, they've hacked up a statement they hope will discourage the closed and encourage the open.

Recently Anne Gentle and I organised the 3rd FLOSS Manuals Book Sprint, which was the first for OLPC and Sugar. We had recently been approached by David Farning from Sugar Labs to host the Sugar documentation and there followed a frenzy of discussion on multiple mailing-lists about who would manage, write, and host the documentation for both OLPC and Sugar.

Although computers get bigger, run faster and accomplish more amazing feats all the time, they still store data in a 1970s-era file system. But that may be about to change. Speaking at the Linux Foundation End User Collaboration Summit this week, Ted Ts'o, a Linux Foundation fellow, and Chris Mason, Oracle's director of kernel engineering, will provide a sneak peak of the file systems of the future at the New York City brainstorming session, whose purpose is to foster interaction between leading Linux developers and the most advanced users and, in turn, to accelerate development of the Linux platform.

Years ago one of Linux's finest audio software developers suggested that I should keep a watchful eye on the Windows/Mac music software scene. I took that suggestion to heart and joined a variety of Windows/Mac-centric lists and forums. I've been able to run many Windows/Mac music programs under the Wine emulator, so my participation has gone beyond mere lurking.

Another fairly new Linux Distro to review. First thing I have to say is that this distro is based off of Gentoo Linux and it is one of the faster LiveDVD distros that I have loaded up2date. Every application loaded up extremely fast. The icons made this distro very nice on the eyes. The extremely quick responsiveness for a live distro was amazing! This Linux OS is perfect for Windows users who want the online accessibility of the MAC. This distro is not for experienced Linux admins what soever!!!! You do not have root access if you install the OS, since it is locked down. You will have to add options to the GRUB boot loader to get root access.

Video and audio support will soon be built directly into Firefox, by way of the free Vorbis and Theora codecs, and Mozilla is using the opportunity to advance multimedia accessibility for hearing-impaired and seeing-impaired users. Although HTML 5 does not officially include Ogg Vorbis and Theora as baseline codecs for the new VIDEO and AUDIO tags, Mozilla has adopted them for its own implementation. Researcher Silvia Pfeiffer is leading a Mozilla Foundation-funded effort to integrate support for closed captioning and other multimedia accessibility features into the Ogg formats and their implementation in Firefox.

The videos show James Bottomley talking about Linux and other Open Source operating systems, calling OS X a luxury jail. Jonathan Corbet presented details on the newly released Kernel 2.6.27 and Intel-CTO Dirk Hohndel gave the closing speech.

With no end in sight to the economic malaise and a good chance that this could be lasting a while, it's time to find ways to cut your IT budget. Just today OpenOffice.org announced that the Release Version of OpenOffice 3.0 is available on its web site, and it's proving so popular, that the servers are having trouble keeping up with demand. With this in mind, it might be a good time to think about moving some licenses from pay to free.

QVideoConverter is a simple video converter to convert Video files or DVDs to Divx Videos. QVideoConverter is a simple frontend GUI for mencoder which converts the videos to DivX format. QVideoConverter can auto detect the the Real Video Area and can Normalize video. QVideoConverter allows you to set the Bitrate, file size (MB), Framerate and Video resolution.

CyberLink Corp. announced that its DVD and media players are now available for Linux, targeting OEM bundles on netbooks and nettops. CyberLink PowerDVD Linux supports DVD playback with navigation, subtitles, and rewind/fast forward, while CyberLink PowerCinema Linux is an all-around media player, says CyberLink.

SourceForge has announced the launch of Hosted Apps, a new service for developers that provides instant, virtualized access to popular open source applications. SourceForge will centrally manage the infrastructure and security of Hosted Apps, allowing developers to innovate freely without being distracted by the maintenance of their project's infrastructure. The inaugural application lineup contains three of the most widely used applications within the SourceForge community: phpBB (forum software), MediaWiki (the wiki platform that powers Wikipedia), and LimeSurvey (an online survey tool). Because the Hosted Apps platform allows SourceForge.net to easily add support for a wide variety of third-party open source applications, more applications are scheduled for deployment over the coming months.

Learn how to use Perl, xev, and algorithms to monitor who is currently at the keyboard. This article presents tools and code allowing you to move beyond a single application of keystroke dynamics, and monitor your entire X Window System environment continuously for characteristic patterns of the typist.

Buntfu.com announces the addition of multiple feeds and marketing of the GNU/Linux PCs listed on its site. Now listing your computer on buntfu will also submit it to GoogleBase, Froogle, BidFind, Vast.com and over 50 RSS/Ping services automatically

The last release of the xf86-video-radeonhd driver was version 1.2.1 and that happened back in April. Since then we have seen a plethora of new work go into this open-source ATI driver for the Radeon R500 series and later. We've seen the driver add support for AMD's 780G Chipset and most notably it has adopted AtomBIOS to be used on the Radeon HD 4800 series and newer. There have also been numerous other improvements to this driver that currently competes with the xf86-video-ati driver. With much of this work now being settled, the Novell development team has released the RadeonHD 1.2.2 driver. In addition, they pushed out the RadeonHD 1.2.3 driver just moments later, which introduces their Command Submission infrastructure.

While OStatic is dedicated to open source, one of the big attractions with open source applications for many users is that they're free. That's why when we see really outstanding freeware applications--even though they're not open source--we still call them out. In this post, I'll discuss four really outstanding freeware options. Windows and Mac users will find tools to like here, and the price is right.

Microsoft is courting open-source developers with Silverlight 2.0, as it strives for cross-platform uptake of the browser-based media plug in. Microsoft is delivering funds, architectural and technical guidance, and project management to help Soyatec, a team of former Java developers building an open-source rich-internet application (RIA) development environment for Eclipse - Eclipse4SL. An alpha technology preview was released today here, with plans for a "feature complete" offering in December and final release in Spring 2009.