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The IBM AIX operating system has kept to what's important: stability, functionality, robustness. And it has done it by keeping a strong command-line interface (CLI). If you never learned to use the CLI or need a refresher on its basics, read on.

A look at various ways to secure the root account against system users and some in-use methods that seem to cause more harm than good.

IRC is one of the most used protocols for text chatting and most major projects and distributions have several IRC channels to offer help or discuss development or any other issues. XChat is a very powerful IRC client written in GTK who has been around for years and is now feature complete, low on resources, with a powerful scripting interface and support for C plugins.

AMD has released faster new ATI Catalyst drivers for Linux customers of its ATI FireGL professional graphics cards. The 8.49.7 Linux driver provides 33 percent faster OpenGL performance than the previous driver, claims the company.

Linspire is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Xandros. The companies had been talking about a deal for some time, and they became more serious toward the end of last year, according to Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos. The acquisition, he said, will help Xandros expand in both the mobile and enterprise Linux spaces.

For Louis Landry, a member of the core team for the Joomla! management system, free and open source software (FOSS) is not just a hobby, nor just the technology behind Jxtended, the consulting business in which he is a partner. For Landry, FOSS is also the movement that gave him direction in life, and provides both the rationale and the outlet for his diverse interests. In fact, he is so enthusiastic about FOSS that he sounds like an evangelist for the community whenever it is mentioned.

Apple Inc.'s operating system market share has increased by nearly 32% in the last year, according to data collected by an Internet metrics company. Last month, Apple's Mac OS X accounted for 7.94% of the operating systems powering computers that accessed the 40,000 Web sites Net Applications monitors for its clients, the company reported yesterday. A year ago, Mac OS X's usage share stood at 6.03%. Also showing gains in June were Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Vista and Linux, which climbed 8% and 18%, respectively, to end the month accounting for 16.14% and 0.88% of the online operating system market.

The "I have a dream" release.

Sam Ramji who runs Microsoft's Open Source Lab has now confirmed on his blog that Sandcastle is now set to re-appear on CodePlex as a fully compliant open source project.This is a positive turn of events in my view. Certainly there are many within Microsoft who couldn't care less about open source, fortunately Sam Ramji isn't one of them.

OpenMoko will start selling its Linux-based Neo FreeRunner phone online on July 4th, says the company. Billed as a completely open source, hackable hardware platform, the Neo FreeRunner will receive updated software with new location-based applications in August, says OpenMoko.

Anti-Linux evangelists try to level many claims against the free open source operating system Linux. Arguments against the base cost (nothing!) or about the turnaround time to repair security exploits don’t work. But there is one item in the anti-Linux arsenal which often hits hard: lack of support. Here's why it makes good Linux techies groan when they see it.

The already vicious lawsuit involving Barracuda Networks and Trend Micro that is currently in discovery in front of the American International Trade Commission (ITC) just turned nastier. Barracuda has filed its own patent infringement claim against Trend Micro, based upon three recently acquired patents. The suit is in response to Trend Micro's allegation that its patent is being infringed by Barracuda shipping Clam Antivirus (ClamAV), the popular free software application, and appears designed to pressure Trend Micro to reach a negotiated settlement. "It's unfortunate that we have to spend time and energy and money doing this BS legal stuff when we could be spending that time and money and energy making the Internet a safer place," says Dean Drako, Barracuda's president and CEO. "It makes you sad."

I just noticed the folks over at CodeWeavers are having a get the word out campaign. If your a proud customer of theirs and would like to help them spread the word about the great products that they have, this would be a good time to do it.

Adrian, you dumb arse! At least that was my initial reaction when I read his “Linux’s dirty little secret” column about his struggles with installing applications onto a Linux distro. It was either the Linux Geek rage originating from the knowing that he didn’t Read the Fine Manual (RTFM) or the sheer jealousy of not getting 300+ Talkbacks whenever I post something on ZDNet like the fine Mr. Kingsley-Hughes. But I digress.

Microsoft Corp. will begin selling its Office programs to consumers on a subscription basis starting mid-July, in a bid to reach thrifty PC buyers who would otherwise pass on productivity software. The software bundle, which also includes Microsoft's Live OneCare computer security software, will be sold at nearly 700 Circuit City stores for $70 per year.

I've been waiting ... and waiting ... for Debian to come to its senses and re-add the sound chip -- the ESS 1988 Allegro -- in my Gateway Solo 1450 back into the Lenny kernel. Sound had been fine in Debian Etch (Stable) and in the first two kernels in Debian Lenny (Testing), but once the 2.6.24 kernel was added, I lost sound on the $0 Laptop. Reverting back to the 2.6.22 kernel restored my sound, and I eventually hunted down the bug report, which -- in grand Debian tradition -- didn't solve the bug but instead provided a work-around.

A commercial RTOS and tools provider will host an event for embedded Linux developers on August 6th, during the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco. "Wind River Developer Day" will offer sessions on the mobile device market and Carrier Grade virtualization, along with Wind River product tutorials and demos.

This tutorial explains how you can run your own web server on CentOS 5 with the help of Apache and the BIND name server.

Yesterday I discussed the Bonnie++ tool, which can be used to benchmark filesystem performance. When you are tweaking a RAID and filesystem combination, you generally want to see whether your changes work in a positive manner across the board, and by how much. I created a utility called bonnie-to-chart to show the results of multiple Bonnie++ runs in either absolute or relative performance terms. It's primarily a Perl script that can be used together with the Open Flash Chart component.

After the recent release KDE 4.1 beta 2 and openSUSE 11 with KDE 4.0.4, some critics have been especially vocal in expressing their displeasure with the KDE 4 user interface paradigms. The debate has grown increasingly caustic as critics and supporters engage in a war of words over the technology. The controversy has escalated to the point where some users are now advocating a fork in order to move forward the old KDE 3.5 UI paradigms. As an observer who has closely studied each new release of KDE 4, I'm convinced that the fork rhetoric is an absurdly unproductive direction for this debate.