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Finnix is a live CD distribution designed to assist system administrators in such tasks as system recovery and network monitoring. Based on Debian testing and Linux kernel 2.6, Finnix helps with filesystem and partition manipulation as well as with data recovery, installation of other operating systems, and boot record repair. Finnix works on both x86/AMD64 and PowerPC systems. The latest release, version 92.0, fixes the Debian SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) vulnerability that was present in previous releases.

Reading the Slashdot article about Dave Mitchell from Great Britain, who got a 47 pounds refund from Dell for returning his copy of Windows was an inspiration for me to check, if it is possible in Poland, too. This is my success story.

Many people see Google's new Chrome browser as big trouble for Firefox. Here's why Mozilla needn't be shaking in its boots - and why maybe Microsoft should.

Google Inc. is releasing its own Web browser in a long-anticipated move aimed at countering the dominance of Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer and ensuring easy access to its market-leading search engine.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has kicked off a month-long celebration of the GNU Project's 25th anniversary with a video in which British actor and comedian Stephen Fry expresses his support for free software. The GNU Project, as most free software community members are aware, is a collection of free software projects whose creation is usually taken as marking the start of the free software movement. Today, GNU software makes up slightly less than 15% of the typical GNU/Linux distribution, according to Matt Lee, a campaigns manager at the FSF.

Juliet Kemp uses some Perl examples to demonstrate techniques for keeping all of your scripts, regardless of what language they are written in, understandable and useful. So that when you look at them six months later, you actually understand what you did, and they still work.

The head of South Africa’s government open source working group, the chief technical officer of the State IT Agency (Sita) and The Shuttleworth Foundation, have laid a complaint with the Human Rights Commission (HRC) against the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) for excluding non-Internet Explorer users from it website.

This guide shows how you can install and use incron on a Debian Etch system. Incron is similar to cron, but instead of running commands based on time, it can trigger commands when file or directory events occur (e.g. a file modification, changes of permissions, etc.).

Linux-Magazine author Dmitri Popov is starting a brand new blog titled "Cooking the Productivity Sauce", offering tips for the productive use of open source applications. As a start he introduces the OutWit extension for web scrapping. But even better yet, OutWit allows you to save and export the scrapped data, which makes it a great research tool. The extension has the potential to turn your favorite browser into a powerful tool for extracting and organizing data, so he says.

Well Labor Day is here and gone again, and the footloose, fancy-free days of summer are over for another year. It may warrant the shedding of a small tear or two, but we here in the Linux community are fortunate to have so much uplifting and entertaining news these days to keep our spirits up.

So Psystar has denied Apple's allegations of copyright and other infringements associated with the sale of its Open Computer. Psystar's Open Computer is assembled from generic parts, and offered for sale with Mac OS X preinstalled as one of the operating system options. Is Psystar putting up fallacious arguments in its defence and counterattack or are its arguments justified?

The PSMon utility lets you specify which processes should be running, how much of resources such as CPU or RAM each is allowed to use when it runs, and how many instances are able to be run. PSMon will then ensure that these processes are running and kill off a process if it starts to use too many resources, and possibly restart a process if it has crashed.

With the Open Source Conference (OSCon) and IDG's LinuxWorld show in the rearview mirror of 2008, it is clear that open source is no longer just a trendy conversation. What has happened is a clear evolution of a community that has grown up and produced intelligent, cutting-edge technologies with an eye on making computing faster, smarter and cheaper for corporate users. Companies like Openmoko are challenging the mobile device market with its notion that users should control what applications are installed. Others like XAware and SnapLogic are opening up data integration possibilities, and still more are tangling with virtualization, databases, and trading systems. Along with a company accurately called Untangle, the companies' point is to make computing less complex. The decision is no longer a question of open source, but about what product is best at solving computing problems regardless of how it was built.

State IT organisation representatives from Brazil, South Africa, Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba and Paraguay have signed a declaration expressing their dissatisfaction with the International Standards Organisation (ISO). The countries signed the declaration at the CONSEGI conference in Brazil over the weekend in response to news that the ISO/IEC had rejected the appeals from South Africa, Brazil and Venezuela and India to the ISO process to adopt Microsoft’s OOXML format as an international standard.

Last week I wrote an article for O'Reilly News documenting alleged anti-Israel political bias and the posting of false information at Google Earth. Similar charges had been previously made about Google News. The main point of the article was to question the integrity of the data provided by Google and questioning if, in effect, Google was losing the trust of its wider user community by making decisions which suited a specific political agenda. [...] It appears that Google has made changes which do address the concerns of the company's critics on this issue.

In one of the less likely combinations of talent, Stephen Fry has been called in to be part of the 25th anniversary of the GNU operating system. Fry, a popular humorist, actor and novelist features in a five-minute long film in which he explains the history of free software and its importance in the world. In true style Fry is entertaining and offers one of the best - and most understandable - explanations of free software and the the GNU is not Unix philosophy.

Despite their critics, analysts at their best can bridge a significant gap between vendors and software users. Vendor marketers who create information for prospective customers are understandably sales-driven and rarely grasp how their products are deployed. The result tends to be material strong on superlatives and weak on substance. Certain features are emphasized while the processes involved in implementation are largely ignored, even though these may be more significant and costly than the software itself.

Criticisms of the Ubuntu distribution and Canonical, its corporate sponsor, are not hard to come by. Depending on who is speaking, Ubuntu and Canonical are guilty of profiting from the free software community without giving back to it, forking important projects or distributions, legitimizing the use of binary-only system components, and more. Of all of these gripes, it is the "contributing to the community" complaint which is heard most. If one believes these complaints, Ubuntu is a parasitic operation which does not understand how the community works and which is harmful to the community as a whole.

The creation of an automated article listing on the central column of the OpenSourceToday's home page would have begun by running the called php source specified in the action attribute of the input form. The php scripts would have begun by creating the text of the article summary that contained the publication date, the linked title, the author's name and the capsule summary. The entire string described would be enclosed within a div tag pair when written into a new text file. The next task would have been creating a backup copy of the original listing, then appending its content into the new file that contained only the newest article summary. Finally this completed new listing would be copied over the original. That is the process I describe here, in detail.

Search giant Google has confirmed it will shortly unveil a new Web browser dubbed 'Chrome' and based on code from the Webkit project. After rumors broke out all over the Web about the new software, Google confirmed the plans this morning in a blog post here. Word first surfaced of the plans in a Web comic book introducing Google Chrome, the search giant's long-rumored open source browser project. While the illustrations, created by cartoonist Scott McCloud, were not announced by Google, they do contain the quotes and likenesses of 19 Google developers.