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This tutorial describes how you can encrypt an Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) system right during the initial installation.

We love it when Batman defeats the Joker because we love to see the bad guys get their just desserts. But as enjoyable as it is seeing fictional villains lose, it’s far more satisfying when the bad guys get their comeuppance in real life. This is what just happened in a small but hopefully decisive way to the infamous Santa Cruz Operation.

In case you haven't noticed, the economy is collapsing. You can't afford to drive anywhere, and, even if you could, you may not have a GM car to drive there for much longer. Some of you may be losing your houses, and the mortgage companies that gave you that mortgage in the first place? IndyMac went down late last week and now the question of the day is which major national bank will follow it down.

What does it mean to release a network operating system every quarter for 10 years? At the heart of every networking device is an operating system that enables traffic flow. In the case of networking vendor Juniper, that operating system for the past ten years has been JUNOS, a network operating system with its roots in the open source FreeBSD operating system. Juniper has updated JUNOS every 90 days since 1998.

With broadband speeds in South Africa improving at a steady pace (although still pricey) listening to commercial radio on PCs and laptops is becoming a lot easier. The problem is, however, that if you’re a Linux user most of the live streams provided by South Africa’s commercial radio stations are provided in Windows Media Format (.asx).

Even though SCO has suffered another legal defeat, the company looks like it has enough willpower, if not sense, to keep its legal losing streak going. On July 16th, Judge Dale Kimball ruled in favor of Novell in SCO vs. Novell and said that the maverick Unix company owed Novell $2.5-million for its Unix deals, and, oh, by the way, Novell, not SCO, really owns Unix. With no IP rights to Unix, it would appear that SCO's lawsuits against IBM, Novell, and Linux were done. Alas, the experts say "no."

Blind people generally use computers with the help of screen-reader software, but those products can cost more than $1,000, so they're not exactly common on public PCs at libraries or Internet cafes. Now a free new Web-based program for the blind aims to improve the situation.

A vendor of digital check scanners has updated its closed Linux drivers, releasing drivers for recent versions of Red Hat and Ubuntu. Digital Check can also supply custom drivers for device makers and OEMs, it says. Check scanners emerged after events on Sept. 11, 2001 grounded all commercial airplane flights in the U.S. for a week, explained Digital Check's VP of product management, Bruce Rennecker. "All checks in the U.S. stopped moving. The banking system had shut down. The Fed immediately notified banks not to worry, and to keep operating until they got trucks lined up. But that experience incented the government to stop the archaic practice of moving paper physically.

There have been several posts here about Linux in the law office, both as a server environment and as a workstation. My main concern with it on the desktop has always been the lack of native Linux applications that would be needed for lawyers, such as time and billing, financials, and case management.

The XFS filesystem is known to give good performance when storing and accessing large files. The design of XFS is extent-based, meaning that the bytes that comprise a file's contents are stored in one or more contiguous regions called extents. Depending on your usage patterns, some of the files contained in an XFS filesystem can become fragmented. You can use the xfs_fsr utility to defragment these files, thus improving system performance when it accesses them.

Although Mobile Safari is more than adequate at rendering normal Web pages, many Web developers created versions of applications aimed at the iPhone. Here in Part 3 learn what to do when the user reaches the end of the list structure and your application actually needs to display content. Part 1 discusses how to set up your server to detect and serve alternate content to Mobile Safari, and Part 2 explores actual content you might create for an iPhone or iPod touch.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has labeled makers of the OpenBSD operating system a "bunch of masturbating monkeys", as part of a wider critique of what he said was self-centered behavior in the IT security industry. In an e-mail to the Linux kernel developer mailing list, Torvalds said a section of the security industry was dedicated to finding bugs in software only to publicize their findings and gain notoriety. The row erupted in the Gmane mailing list after a developer for the PaX Team, which patches the Linux kernel, accused Torvalds and other top Linux kernel developers of "covering up [the] security impact of bugs" by not clearly labeling them as security flaws.

Is the true open source revolution finally coming to college campuses this fall? Many universities are big users of open source, and Internet resources. But when it comes time to deliver the goods â?? the coursework â?? they order textbooks and throw their students the bill.

Probably an extremely boring statement of our blog's mission and various in-place policies ;)

Nathan Zale Dowlen objects to proprietary software, so when he opened his new law office, he outfitted it with Ubuntu Linux and open source software. Cost was the main factor in his decision at first, but he has since come to appreciate the security found in FOSS and the ease of use found with Ubuntu. Dowlen has used Linux and open source software since 2006, when he attended the Nashville School of Law, and had no trouble with compatibility, since "OpenOffice.org will open almost anything thrown at it." He recorded lectures with Audacity and even found that his "Linux based laptop did a better job of automatically finding printers on the school's wireless network than when it ran Windows."

The cheap answer is “as good as you make it.” The real answer is more complex. As our friend Big Money Matt notes today, open source vendors are not really selling software, just support, and they have an image problem.

[There is a poll attached to this one. -Az]

Whatever your feelings are about Linux (or Windows, or OS X , or ...) you really should check out the Linux Hater's Blog. It's actually farther from all-out-flaming than you'd think and basically challenges the Linux community to do better. I particularly enjoyed this entry: 0.99 bottles of wine on the wall.

Wireless connectivity on any Linux distribution that is not pre-bundled with existing hardware is a bit of a crapshoot. And yet I would be the first to point out that despite much of the nonsense about it being necessary to either compile a driver from source or worse, falling back into a Windows mindset so as to rely on Windows wireless drivers via NDISWrapper is never the only option.

Well, the odds were good, but I know I never actually thought about it. Most people would recognize LAX as the three letter airport identifier for Los Angeles International or CHI for Chicago. So what is one of our (computer geek) favorite TLA (three letter anacronym), why GNU of course. In this case, as an airport identifier GNU is Goodnews Bay, Alaska.

I have been using Linux in one capacity or another since I first downloaded a Red Hat ISO a number of years ago. What finally allowed me to go full-time with my chosen distro was not so much the progression of hardware detection and self-mounting partitions but the applications. Today, I would like to share some of my personal favorites with you.