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I recently ran into trouble trying to play copy-protected DVDs on my new installation of Kubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron beta). Initially it seemed that there was a problem with the installation of libdvdcss2, because Kaffeine kept offering to re-install it. However, after a re-start of Kaffeine from Konsole with wizard mode (kaffeine -w), I got this error...

The Debian GNU / Linux distribution has announced the eighth and final update to the Debian 3.1 Sarge release. Time sure does fly. It seems like just yesterday that I was complaining about the delayed Sarge release (it was actually 2004), and wondering what impact the upstart Ubuntu distribution would have on Debian.

Via Technologies has laid out a new initiative to improve support for the open source development community. The chip maker will launch an official Via Linux website this month as a first step in the programme.

In about 100 days, the United States Federal Government will be required to be running large portions of their systems on IPv6. Now, for the few non-technical in the crowd, it means that the address your PC uses to connect to the Internet, in most cases, is IPv4.

UNIX, Novell, Red Hat and Ubuntu Linux were the most reliable server operating systems. Linux distributions experienced 1-2 hours per server per annum downtime, an average decrease of 75% since 2006. Surprisingly, downtime increased by 25% to nearly 9 hours per server, per year for Windows Server 2003.

The International Organization for Standardization has called for "personal attacks" to cease in the debate surrounding Microsoft's Office Open XML standard. The move came as an ISO committee meeting in Norway attracted protesters, who gathered to call for the retraction of Open Office XML (OOXML) from the ISO standardization process.

Microsoft Corp.'s operating systems run most personal computers around the globe and are a cash cow for the world's largest software maker. But you'd never confuse a Windows user with the passionate fans of Mac OS X or even the free Linux operating system. Unless it's someone running Windows XP, a version Microsoft wants to retire.

Learn what's involved when introducing a Linux client pilot in your organization, including planning for business and IT requirements, architecture decisions, risks, and understanding how IBM's open collaboration client is used to implement this desktop of the future, today.

Several PAM modules exist which incur loss of information whenever the password is no longer available. The problem is presented and a possible solution is suggested.

Jeremiah Gray wants to provide an interesting way to learn about Linux, so he's created a new comic strip, called Hackett and Bankwell, about the open source operating system. The strip will be published as a series of comic books that Gray hopes will appeal to new Linux users, but he says it is "more than just a comic book version of a Linux training guide."

If you click this link, you can see my house. That vehicle in the driveway is my 1991 Ford Ranger. I give you that link without hesitation, because with the current state of technology, it's a simple point and click to get my address, and a copy/paste after that to get a map. I'm not so naive that I consider an unlisted phone number viable protection from the prying eyes of the world. Does that mean privacy is dead? Well, I'd argue yes and no.

Attention computer animators -- if you've ever felt limited by working in three dimensions with tools like Blender, check out Pencil, an open source, cross-platform animation app that lets you create in glorious 2-D. Pencil mimics hand-drawn animation techniques, but it's easy to use and produces high-quality output. You can download source code packages as well as pre-built binaries for Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. The latest release is 0.4.4b for Macs and Windows boxes, and 0.4.3b for Linux. The differences between the two versions are minor, but include a change to the file format, so if you run Pencil on multiple platforms, you may want to stick with 0.4.3b until the Linux build is updated.

Keeping the files on multiple machines synchronized seems to be a recurring problem for many computer users. Until I discovered Unison (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/) I never really had a completely satisfactory solution. What we'd like to be able to do is efficiently keep two or more servers completely synchronized with each other no matter what gets changed on any of the servers. In the simplest case, we have a production server and a backup server that we need to keep in sync. We might have a cluster of servers used in a load balancing configuration. In the worst case, we might have a group of computers where changes are occurring on any or all of the devices. Consider the case where we have a computer at the office, a laptop, and a work computer at home. We want to be able to work from any computer at any time.

Linux is not just good for programming and system administration. PolishLinux.org has an article listing top 27 educational tools for you and your kids to learn maths, chemistry, geography, astronomy and languages and type-writing.

Many Web forms these days feature a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) as an effort to stop people from setting up computers to automatically fill in Web forms. A typical CAPTCHA is an image with some numbers and letters in it with distortion and/or background noise, and a Web form input field where you are to enter the numbers and letters from the image. This article investigates three CAPTCHA applications that you can use on a PHP Web site.

The Debian GNU/Linux project will be led by Steve McIntyre from April 17 onwards after he was declared elected on Saturday US time in the 2008 elections.

Last month we had looked at the Radeon HD 3200, which is part of the AMD 780G Chipset. In that Linux-based review we had found the performance to be admirable for being an integrated graphics processor (IGP) and it was quickly supported by the proprietary fglrx driver, aside from AMD not yet introducing the CrossFire/Hybrid Graphics Linux support. To deliver those Radeon HD 3200 benchmarks we had used the ECS A780GM-A Black and today we're publishing our full run-down on this AMD 780G motherboard that's paired with the AMD SB700 Southbridge. The A780GM-A boasts support for AMD Phenom processors, DDR2-1066 memory, PCI Express 2.0, and an HDMI port in addition to one VGA output.

Years ago, Florida Hospital in Orlando faced problems with its IT system, much of which relied on proprietary software. Innovative projects were abandoned due to high costs, and disaster recovery time was unacceptably long. So the hospital turned to open source. It was difficult at first, but officials say things are becoming easier as OSS goes more mainstream.

Xfce isn't for everyone, but for servers or minimal desktop systems, it's just what the doctor ordered. Rather lightweight in Window Manager terms--weighing in at around 63MB--Xfce arrives with a full complement of applications from Abiword, gnumeric, and pidgin to CD/DVD burning software (Brasero), Thunar File Manager, and a host of administrative applications. For this article, I am reviewing the Xfce Fedora Spin based on Fedora 8 and Xfce4.

If you like to customize your applications' appearance, then Firefox themes probably haven't impressed you. Although there are hundreds of themes available, typically all they allow users to do is change the icons and background color of your browser -- not too exciting. Personas for Firefox offers a new way to customize the browser. Though the project was quietly introduced last year, it recently moved into Mozilla Labs, where work has begun in earnest to give users more than just a way to change icons from blue to green. While right now Personas aren't much more than fancy skins, they're easy to change on the fly, and the prototype shows that Mozilla plans to give Firefox users more customization options than ever