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I just read Louis Gray’s post titled “On the Web, If You’re Not Growing, You’re Dying.” It gave me a chilling realization about web services. Like everything else, what goes up must come down. This must apply to Linux distributions too, right? So, what’s happening with Linux? Which distributions are growing? Like Louis Gray, I’m going to use data from Google Trends. People searching the name of Linux distributions on Google can be considered new users. After all, wouldn’t experienced Linux users already know where the websites of the big Linux distributions are?

Today's IT managers face tough choices. PCs that run fine today have an uncertain upgrade path, now that Microsoft has chosen to discontinue Windows XP. Upgrade costs associated with Vista, coupled with the ever-escalating cost of application licenses, make switching to desktop Linux an increasingly attractive option.

Easy PDF editing is coming to OpenOffice.org, but you'll have to be patient for a few months. Recently posted to the OpenOffice.org Extensions site, the Sun PDF Import extension (SPI) is only in beta, and only works with recent developer builds of OpenOffice.org 3.0, which is scheduled for September release. Right now, the quality of the final release is anybody's guess, but the beta's capabilities fall squarely in the middle of the available PDF import tools.

Garmin has posted Linux source code for its Nuvi 8xx and Nuvi 5xxx-series GPS navigation devices. The Nuvi 8xx offers a 4.3-inch, 480x272 display, and appears to be based on a Marvell PXA-3xx processor, Gnome Mobile Linux, and GeoClue location technology.

Home Automation is anything that your home does for you automatically to make living there more enjoyable or productive. It covers many areas, including remote and timed control of lights and electrical home appliances, distributed media services, and communication. Over the last 10 years, many hardware manufacturers have presented their own proprietary solutions to these problems. Unbeknownst to them, a groundswell of developers from around the world has been providing similar solutions to the free and open source community.

Microsoft is preparing a new bid for Yahoo's search business and has approached other media companies about joining it in a deal that would effectively lead to Yahoo's breakup, The Wall Street Journal said. Microsoft has already held talks with Time Warner and News Corp. among others, the paper quoted people familiar with the talks as saying.

Up to now I reviewed SMPlayer and 11 video players for Linux, and in this article I'll take a look at Kaffeine 0.8.6, the last version for KDE 3.x, and also a well-known video player for KDE. When it comes to video players, Kaffeine is my favourite, several reasons for it being that it plays anything I feed it with, it has good subtitle support and the interface it provides is clean and simple to use. Well, the interface is more a matter of taste, since most of the video players have it the same, no matter if they are for KDE or GNOME. But I prefer the players which only use a single window over the the ones who come with a main window for controls and menus and another one for playing the movie itself. As I said, only a matter of taste.

Kismet is a wireless "detector, sniffer, and intrusion detection system," and one of the growing list of essential open source tools for computer network security professionals. Kismet runs on any POSIX-compliant platform, including Windows, Mac OS X, and BSD, but Linux is the preferred platform because it has more unencumbered RFMON-capable drivers than any of the others. Monitor mode ability is critical to fully utilizing Kismet, because it allows Kismet to examine all the packets it can hear, not just those of whatever access point (AP) -- if any -- you are currently associated with. Almost as important to police, intelligence agencies, and black hat hackers is the fact that it allows Kismet to work passively, intercepting and collecting packets without leaving any fingerprints of its own behind.

This document describes how to install a Proftpd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota with this setup.

Google has released for free one of its internal tools used for testing the security of Web-based applications. Ratproxy, released under an Apache 2.0 software license, looks for a variety of coding problems in Web applications, such as errors that could allow a cross-site scripting attack or cause caching problems.

Linux can be configured to log dmesg output to another system via network using syslog. It is done using kernel level networking stuff ia UDP port 514. There is module called netconsole which logs kernel printk messages over udp allowing debugging of problem where disk logging fails and serial consoles are impractical. Most modern distro has this netconsole as a built-in module. netconsole initializes immediately after NIC cards.

A week ago we looked at the brand-new ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card under Linux. This graphics card launch was unlike any in ATI's history where with the introduction of a brand new product generation, Linux users were greeted by same-day Linux support -- both through their proprietary fglrx driver and with the open-source xf86-video-ati driver. In addition, some of the board partners are opting to put Tux on their product packaging and shipping the Linux drivers on their product CDs. As we had also exclusively shared, AMD will soon be approaching a feature parity between the Windows and Linux drivers. Today we're publishing our complete review of the new ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB as well as delivering additional benchmarks from the Radeon HD 4850 under Linux, of course.

IOzone lets you benchmark your filesystem performance, seeing how well record IO occurs for files of various sizes. With IOzone you can see more detailed information than the read, write, and rewrite figures that Bonnie++ reports. IOzone is great at detecting areas where file IO might not be performing as well as expected. IOzone is available for openSUSE 10.3 as a 1-Click install, in multiverse for Ubuntu Hardy, and is in the standard Fedora 9 repositories.

Guinness World Records has validated Mozilla's attempt to set a record for the number of software downloads in a 24 hour period. The official count of Firefox 3 downloads was 8,002,530.

Do you remember the massive press orgy a year ago when One Laptop Per Nigerian Child debuted at L.E.A. Primary School Galadima in Abuja Model Village? How the great Foreign God held high his gift of knowledge to the poor dark-skinned children of Africa, and OLPC proclaimed: "All of a sudden, School Galadima has gone from the age-old chalk-and-board teaching technology to the avant-garde one-laptop-per-child XO technology with cutting-edge features." Well let us take a look at the lessons a year of Nigeria has taught One Laptop Per Child.

Last week, Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems, stated in an interview that much of the current animosity from the open source community toward Sun has its origins in the way Sun used to treat the community. Phipps, being his usual straightforward self, phrased it as Sun "screwed up," a quote guaranteed to make headlines, which it did.

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.