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Umit is a user-friendly graphical interface to Nmap that lets you perform network port scanning. The utility's most useful features are its stored scan profiles and the ability to search and compare saved network scans. A profile lets you configure how a network scan is performed, change the source information for the scan, and explicitly nominate hosts to include or exclude from the scan, as well as various more advanced options. Umit is packaged for Ubuntu Intrepid but not for Hardy, and not for Fedora or openSUSE. I built version 0.9.5 of Umit from source on a 64-bit Fedora 9 machine on which version 4.53 of Nmap was installed.

IBM today announced its adoption of a new corporate policy that will govern its global participation in the standards development process. It also revealed a list of standards reform recommendations generated through a discussion among 70 standards experts from around the world.

Microsoft Monday said it would ship Windows HPC Server 2008 on Nov. 1 with designs on challenging Linux for supplying high-performance computers and specifically taking aim at ailing Wall Street customers. Windows High Performance Computing (HPC) Server 2008 is Microsoft’s entry into the battle with Linux to provide platforms for research and other compute intensive workloads.

A handset-based network-penetration tool that runs on a Linux phone has been announced in the United States. The NeoPwn tool is based on a modified Linux 2.6.24 kernel, and will let IT professionals toggle between two modes--'phone' and 'pwn'. The software stack runs on the Openmoko Neo FreeRunner Linux handset, which offers USB WLAN support, a GPS modem, a GPRS modem for cellular connectivity, and a CSR Bluetooth module.

How to boot RedHat Linux Rescue with USB Support Enabled. This post is for any Linux admin out there, who uses RedHat (or any similar distro, really - the differences are generally minor) and works in a shop outfitted with the latest and greatest hardware to "drive the network." I'm not sure what that expression means, but I heard it in a meeting once and it seemed vaguely motivating ;) It's also the first post on using grub since our post on using grub to change the root password.

Open source project Panda provides Software to create your own do-it-yourself video platforms -- provided you also pay for the Amazon Web Services.

We use the most recent Xen 3.3 port to CentOS 5.2 via http://www.gitco.de/repo/xen3.3.0. Prepare grub's /boot/grub/menu.lst at DomU side for pv-grub booting.

Representatives of big browser makers Microsoft, Mozilla and Google talk about the future of browsers, as developers decry browser incompatibility and ask what browser makers plan to do about it. The panel of experts talked about HTML 5, Canvas, Silverlight, IE 8, Google Chrome and Firefox at the Web 2.0 Expo.

The first phone using Google's Android operating system will debut Tuesday, a model from T-Mobile, and more are set come. But some Android partners say the software will use more broadly than just phones. "We're starting to see Android get designed in on devices that extend way beyond the phone--things that might go in the automobile or things that might go in the home," said John Bruggeman, chief marketing officer at Wind River Systems, a Google ally that helps phone makers build and customize Android for their phone hardware.

The openSUSE Project recently announced the availability of openSUSE 11.1 Beta 1 for wide scale testing and bug squashing. This development release is available in x86, x86-64 and PPC architectures as a DVD disk image (liveCDs are not available for the current beta). The 11.1 beta provides a decently solid look at where the final release is heading. As with any development release, there are known bugs that vary in severity and new or updated features that the development team is encouraging users try out, in order to find and resolve any bugs and suggest changes and improvements.

KStars and XEphem can answer pretty much any question about what's where and when in the night sky. But they don't really give you the feeling of being there like a couple of newer entries on the Linux astronomy scene: Stellarium and Celestia. Grab your red-blue 3D glasses, and follow Akkana Peck on a celestial tour.

Open Source companies have been granted official permission to supply software to the UK public sector for the first time in British history. At least two Open Source software suppliers have been awarded places on the £80 million Software for Educational Institutions Framework, making them official suppliers to UK schools and scoring a victory in what has been a long and frustrating battle against favouritism shown to conventional commercial software companies in UK politics and procurement.

After a decade of converting every piece of music I've purchased into digital formats and (lately) buying digital music directly and skipping the CD step altogether, managing my music library has gotten to be a big chore. It's easy enough to organize my music library on a single computer, but it's been years since I had just a single computer. My music files are more or less together on my home file server, but then there's my wife's collection on her iMac. There's also the fact that I don't use my file server as an everyday desktop machine. My laptop is the machine you can usually find me behind while at home. The reason my music is on the fileserver is because of space, it has the room to keep it all together. The issue then is to make my large and growing audio collection available to all of the computers I use. At home this is easy thanks to a protocol called DAAP.

Sun has released the first update to its recently purchased desktop virtualization program, now called Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.0. While not a major update, it does bring improved performance and 64-bit operating system support to the popular open source virtualization program. VirtualBox, now part of Sun's xVM series, runs on a wide variety of host operating systems, including 32- and 64-bit versions of Linux, Mac OS X, OpenSolaris, Solaris, and Windows. However, while the manual claims that it supports 64-bit Mac OS X, the program doesn't actually support it yet. That said, VirtualBox runs a remarkable number of operating systems on any of these platforms, from MS-DOS and Windows 98 to OpenBSD and OS/2.

Saudi Arabia is building a supercomputer that could rank among the 10 most powerful systems in the world. And the country isn't stopping there. It has plans to turn this marquee system for the Middle East into a petascale system in two years, and, beyond that, an exascale system. The move represents a big leap for Saudi Arabia and the region generally, which, despite massive oil wealth, has not had much of an impact on information technology, except as consumers.

After announcing its first event for "end users," the Linux Foundation has begun to promote "individual memberships." Available now for $50 a year, memberships include a T-shirt, quarterly newsletter, and the "ability to run for and vote for a Linux Foundation board seat," says the organization.

So Ubuntu is taking a little heat for not being the world's largest contributor to the kernel.org community. BUT they are about to finally join a major effort to improve Linux kernel quality for all. Ubuntu is on the verge of fully participating in the Kernel Oops project run by Intel's Arjan van de Ven

In a move reminiscent of its “Get the Facts” anti-Linux campaign, Microsoft is waging war on VMware with a customer-focused Web site that provides the Redmondian spin on how its products stack up against the competition. Microsoft refers to its anti-Linux playbook to attack VMwareThe Burton Group Data Center Strategies blog highlighted Microsoft’s new virtualization site, with the URL

We’ve covered many tips and tricks about working between OpenOffice.org (OOo) and Microsoft (MS) Office, however now we’ll address the formatting issues experienced when converting between the two formats. We’ll give you a few ways to make your documents convert better, so you can share your work with those who only use MS Office. You’ll also discover the Navigator in this tutorial. This window in OOo can help you jump from here to there in your document and gives you a quick way to modify the structure. Lets get started!

Having given in to gravity, America's elite graduate schools are taking on open source. In recent research published in Production and Operations Management, Deishin Lee (Harvard Business School) and Haim Mendelson (Stanford Graduate School of Business) teach would-be business executives how to "Divide and Conquer: Competing with Free Technology Under Network Effects."