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A. Lizard takes us on a tour of secure remote graphical Linux administration over the Internet; through firewalls, routers, dynamic home IP addresses, Wake-on-LAN, and other perils. We will learn how to securely administer both Linux and Windows remotely. The journey begins with today's part 1 of three parts.

Kickstart allows you to do automatic Fedora/RedHat/CentOS installations. This is useful and time-saving if you have to deploy tens or hundreds of similar systems (e.g. workstations). Kickstart reads the installation settings from a Kickstart configuration file. The problem with Kickstart is that it usually uses the distribution's packages from the time the distribution was released, i.e., it does not consider updates which means you would have to update each system manually after the Kickstart installation. This guide explains how you can do up-to-date Kickstart installations with the help of a tool called novi.

Open Source desktops are far cheaper to maintain than proprietary desktop configurations, says Rolf Schuster, a diplomat at the German Embassy in Madrid and the former head of IT at the Foreign Ministry. Schuster was one of the participants in a discussion on Open Standards and interoperability that took place last week Tuesday during the Open Source World conference in the city of Malaga, Spain.

Microsoft and Google both announce support for OpenID, except that Google's version has users and advocates up in arms. And Microsoft looks to have got it right.

Many people use SSH to log in to remote machines, copy files around, and perform general system administration. If you want to increase your productivity with SSH, you can try a tool that lets you run commands on more than one remote machine at the same time. Parallel ssh, Cluster SSH, and ClusterIt let you specify commands in a single terminal window and send them to a collection of remote machines where they can be executed.

The final version of OpenOffice.org 3, the open source competitor to Microsoft Office, came out two weeks ago and looks better than ever. I've been using its predecessors for years and, broadly speaking, OO3 is the most useful, widely compatible software ever. You can run it on anything: Macs, PCs, Linux, Unix workstations.

FSlint is a simple yet very easy to use utility to find and clean various forms of lint on a filesystem. i.e., unwanted or problematic cruft in your files or file names. For example, one form of lint it finds is duplicate files. FSlint operates in both GUI and Command Line mode and the GUI is very straight forward to use especially there isn’t much of hidden menu options

HP finally gets its propers in a post about LVM ;) Today's entry is a bit of a quick introduction to HP's Logical Volume Manager and was written specifically for an HP-UX 10.x box. We haven't specifically tested this against 11.x or 11i, but, from our experience working with both, this script should work with little-or-no modification on 11.x. Now that we've got a few HP servers to have fun with (I mean... work really hard on ;), we'll give HP-UX it's due and run through the essentials of LVM.

It's been almost six months since the last issue of the Nouveau Companion, but Pekka Paalanen has rejuvenated these efforts and has put out the 40th issue of this newsletter that updates the open-source community on the status of the Nouveau project, an effort to reverse-engineer NVIDIA's binary driver and provide a fully open-source 2D and 3D implementation. While we have been without the Nouveau Companion for many months, progress on the open-source Nouveau driver has continued. There is now GeForce 8 support with 2D EXA acceleration, work underway in implementing Gallium3D, switching the driver's memory manager from TTM to using a GEM API with TTM internals (similar to the ATI driver), and of course kernel mode-setting.

In January, Hewlett-Packard will introduce a glossy black mini-laptop at retail for a mere $379. When it does, it will become the first major computer maker this decade (besides Apple, of course) to push a non-Windows PC in stores. This Linux-based version of the HP Mini 1000 will not slay Microsoft (MSFT) Windows. But it will add to a growing sense that the iconic operating system’s best days are behind it.

When Lenovo de-emphasized Novell SUSE Linux on ThinkPads, some skeptics thought it was a serious setback for desktop Linux and Novell’s own open source efforts. The VAR Guy knew better. Fact is, Lenovo was bolstering its Novell relationship in two other areas.

Windows 7 is less annoying than Vista but do you wonder why?

Struggling wireless phone maker Motorola will cut more jobs and focus on designing handheld devices that run Google's new open source Android operating system. The company will pare down the number of operating systems for which it currently creates mobile phones to just three: Android, Microsoft's Windows Mobile and Motorola's proprietary P2K platform.

In today's installment of the classic Networking 101 series, Charlie Schluting guides us through the vital innards of OSPF, the Open Shortest Path First routing protocol: LSAs (Link-State Advertisements), packet types, and area types. Knowing these things ensures you will always understand your routing infrastructure, and never make daft mistakes.

Yesterday we took a look at BashDiff, a patch for the bash shell that adds new capabilities. We've already looked at some of the additions that BashDiff makes to bash's commands and string parsing abilities. Today we'll look at modifying positional parameters, parsing XML, talking to ISAM and relational databases, creating GTK+2 GUIs, and a few other tricks and issues.

When Asterisk sponsor Digium, Inc. released AsteriskNOW, early in January 2007, the stated aim was to provide an open-source telephony "appliance." Not appliance as in hardware/software combo, but appliance as in 'all the software you need to get a complete telephony application up and running'—even if you don't know a lot about Linux administration. AsteriskNOW contained all necessary Linux components "built in" (and nothing that was not needed) and came with AsteriskGUI, a simple graphical admin module. The lean, mean offering has been very successful by any standard.

In the video, the new Qt chief Sebastian Nystroem at Nokia answered questions primarily about the whereabouts of the former chief Trolls, why Nokia needs Qt and why it bought the entire company. He talked further about Nokia's Open Source commitment and his own use of Qt.

LXer Feature: 30-Oct-2008

This year was the third installment of the Technical Dutch Open Source Event (T-DOSE). Just as last year it was held at the Fontys University of Applied Science in Eindhoven. Speakers included Arnoud Engelfriet (European patent attorney) and Ywein van den Brande on GPLv3 compliance, Roy Scholten (Drupal), Bas de Lange (Syllable), Jean-Paul Saman (VideoLan), Jörn Engel (logfs), Bert Boerland (Drupal), Tim Hemel (TMTTD) and many, many other speakers. Unfortunately your editor was only able to attend on Sunday, but the talks were great. Read on for more details.

In early September we shared that UVD2 and XvMC is coming to Linux and that two new library files had begun shipping with the ATI Catalyst driver: AMDXvBA and XvBAW. Earlier this month the Unified Video Decoding 2 (UVD2) support was then enabled by default in the Catalyst 8.10 driver. These video acceleration improvements to the ATI Linux driver aren't exactly end-user friendly yet, but today we have information on how those interested can begin using the X-Video Motion Compensation extension with their ATI hardware along with what the XvBA extension will provide users in regards to advanced video acceleration that is very similar to Microsoft's DirectX Video Acceleration.

Google and three IT solutions providers plan to launch a coordinated open source blitz in Australia, The VAR Guy has learned. Here's the scoop.