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This is a detailed description about how to set up a Mandriva 2008 Spring Free (Mandriva 2008.1) server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. This tutorial is written for the 32-bit version of Mandriva 2008.1, but should apply to the 64-bit version with very little modifications as well.

Open source advocates have long pointed to Asterisk's ascendancy as one of the movement's great success stories. But for the founder of the open source PBX (define) solution, Asterisk's success is just the beginning.

Software teams must act to protect systems and development projects from revenge attacks by disgruntled current and former employees. So says Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute's CERT, which is advising organizations take basic steps including code encryption, enforcement of code-change and access controls, reading their log monitors and denying access to non-project staff, such as systems administrators.

If you're looking for a GNOME desktop for the popular PCLinuxOS (PCLOS), then newly released PCLinuxOS Gnome might be for you. PCLinuxOS Gnome is a community-developed Linux distribution built on the official PCLinuxOS MiniMe 2008 distribution, which is a minimized system containing the bare-bones necessities for a running system, a skeletal window manager, and a remastering tool. PCLinuxOS itself, known for its ease of use, beauty, and functionality, is loosely based on Mandriva Linux. It retains the RPM package format, ports the Mandriva Control Center and live installer, and focuses primarily upon KDE. It also contains components from Gentoo, openSUSE, Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu. The distro's developers tend to adapt the best elements of some of the best distros available for their own distribution. They tweak, customize, and rebuild each package for PCLOS, creating a fast and stable environment.

A handy little set of scripts for KDE that puts video conversion for ipod/psp just a right click away.

Never mind that what I really need is an up-to-date "Absolutely OpenBSD," but since I'm in an I'll-take-what-I-can-get mood, I just secured a copy of "The Book of PF: A No-Nonsense Guide to the OpenBSD Firewall," which for all practical purposes is the most up-to-date book out there that has at least some focus on OpenBSD. In this book by Peter N.M. Hansteen, I hope to get somewhat up to speed on PF, the packet filter that originated in OpenBSD but which now is available in the other BSDs as well -- though not in Linux.

You can install and run Ubuntu from within Windows without any risk of accidentally deleting your existing programs and files by using Wubi, an unofficial Ubuntu installer for Windows users. Unlike UNetbootin, which installs Linux on a hard disk partition, Wubi works by installing Ubuntu within a file stored on your Windows drive, and adding itself to the Windows boot.ini file to allow you to choose between Windows and Linux at boot time. Wubi is based on Ubuntu 8.04 Long Term Support (LTS), which will be released this April. Both Wubi and Ubuntu 8.04 are available now in stable beta versions.

Mandriva today announced the release of Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring. The new release includes features such as full support for the Asus Eee, easy synchronisation with Windows Mobile 5 and later, Blackberry, and Nokia devices, a new parental control utility, the Elisa multimedia center, Codeina for easy installation of necessary media codecs, PulseAudio by default and much more. Software updates include KDE 3.5.9 (with 4.0.2 available from the official repositories), GNOME 2.22, OpenOffice.org 2.4, Linux kernel 2.6.24.4, X.org 7.3, Compiz 0.7, and more.

Ever been to a night club on a Monday morning? There's you, there are the chairs, and the potential to host a party on the weekend. There are lots of buttons, lots of potential, but no member except you. But unlike a night club, you don't have to wait for the weekend to host your friends on Elgg. Invite them as soon as you're done setting up the software. Elgg is designed to make it easier for you to invite people. If you've ever setup a blog or rolled your own website, how long did it take before you could invite your friends over? You had to put up all sorts of content to indulge them, and also fiddle around decorating the portal so that it doesn't look dull.

At first glance, you might think the headline to this blog entry is an oxymoron. In reality, Microsoft certainly does have an open source chief (Sam Ramji). And in some cases, Microsoft is downright happy to support open source. Skeptical? Allow The VAR Guy to explain.

Discover a tool that simplifies the creation and deployment of MapReduce applications. The Eclipse plug-in uses the Hadoop open-source MapReduce framework, which enables data-intensive applications to run on large clusters of commodity hardware.

Microsoft’s Windows juggernaut is collapsing as it tries to support 20 years of applications and becomes more complicated by the minute. Meanwhile, Windows has outgrown hardware and customers are pondering skipping Vista to wait for Windows 7. If Windows is going to remain relevant it will need radical changes. That sobering outlook comes courtesy of Gartner analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald. Half of a full room of IT managers and executives raised their hands when asked whether Microsoft needed to radically change its approach to Windows. “Windows is too monolithic,” says Silver.

Here is a short screenshot tour of the latest from Mandriva Linux. Just released Mandriva One 2008.1 Spring GNOME and KDE Editions. Today we will show only the GNOME release and do not forget to checkout our short flash video.

The market for cheap sub-notebooks is simply exploding. It all started with the OLPC XO, then Intel jumped in with the Classmate. Soon Asus revealed its critically acclaimed Eee PC, and these low-priced, low-powered (often Linux-running) machines truly started to take the world by storm. The latest entry into this field is the Hewlett Packard 2133 Mini-Note PC. The Mini-Note starts at $499, for the entry level model with 512 megabytes of RAM, 4-gigabytes of storage, a 1-gigahertz VIA processor, and Linux.

[Other reports say that the HP laptop will run SUSE -- sr]

HP has entered the mini-laptop arena with a device targeting education and cost-conscious consumers. The HP 2133 Mini-Note PC weighs 2.8 pounds with a nine-inch display and a nearly full-sized keyboard, and runs runs Linux, Windows Vista, or Windows XP on a Via C7-M ULV processor.

In this age of multi-core processors and 3-D desktops, some people still get work done on old resource-strapped single-core machines, thanks to programs like the AbiWord word processor. The latest stable AbiWord 2.6.0 release was unveiled last month, two years after the software's last stable release. Feature-wise, the little cross-platform word processor has closed the gap with heavyweight OpenOffice.org Writer, but it suffers from the oldest Linux ill of all -- it's a pain to install.

The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, currently in progress in Austin, Texas, is a small event, with only about 300 invited attendees. Because it is small, you can find yourself face-to-face or in conversation with some of the biggest names in and around the Linux kernel, business, and open source scenes, including Ted Ts'o, Jon "maddog" Hall, Bruce Perens, Dan Frye, and Larry Augustin. The venue for the event -- the J.J. Pickle Research Center Campus at the University of Texas -- is the same place where IBM held its first "secret" Linux summit in 1999 to announce and refine its Linux strategy internally.

South Africa’s minister of public service and administration, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, took centre stage at a protest march in Norway today. The march was held to protest alleged irregularities in the ratification of Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) document format as an ISO standard last week. Sections of a speech, given by the minister ahead of the ISO vote last week, were read out to the gathered crowd by Steve Pepper, former chairman of the Norwegian committe responsible for that country’s OOXML vote.

Brian Jones of Microsoft feels that the storm of publicity about shortcomings in OOXML is largely due to IBM investing its money and time in developing the expertise to consult for ODF-using products.He says that he really stands for choice. In fact, he wants the end-user and the developer to be able to choose freely whether to support ODF or OOXML or perhaps even both. Mr. Jones, if you really care about choice, implement ODF as a fully-native peer to OOXML and automatically download it in the next batch of updates, rather than using a partially-functional plug-in that has to be searched out and then downloaded. Or is it really Microsoft that is afraid?

At the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit at the University of Texas Supercomputing Center April 8, Hewlett-Packard announced the release of its first Linux-powered computer to be sold in the United States, the HP 2133 Mini-Note PC running Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 Service Pack 1.