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Following last week's release of Phoronix Test Suite 0.3.0 and the 0.3.1 hot-fix, a surprising amount of changes have wound up in this week's development release known as version 0.4.0. In fact, there are 21 major changes in this new release not counting general development work and minor bug fixes. Among the changes are new test profiles, a number of new PTS options, PTS External Dependencies support for new Linux distributions, reworking how results are saved, and the graphs are now rendered locally when saving the results.

YouTube is a very popular web service that allows people to share video content online. Although YouTube and other streaming video websites satisfy many users, you may have reasons to create your own streaming video website. Perhaps you work for a company that wants a more professional face on their media. Or, you may want more control over exactly how your videos are presented.

I was left without the GRUB bootloader. In order to restore GRUB, I started with the Debian Lenny business-card CD in the "rescue" mode. All I want to do is reinstall GRUB, and I'm being asked all kinds of questions about my drives, how I want them formatted, waiting for the base system to install ... I got out of there quick. I didn't want to screw up my current Lenny install, which I'm actually relying on heavily at the moment.

gpgdir uses GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) to encrypt and decrypt files or a directory tree. You could accomplish the same objective by tarring the filesystem up and then encrypting the tar.gz file with GnuPG, but then you would still have to shred or wipe every file in the original directory tree. With gpgdir the whole tree is encrypted in one command.

A couple of years back, Oracle chief Larry Ellison and then Sun CEO Scott McNealy held an event in Redwood City to renew their vows. Oracle signed on to ship Java for ten more years, and Sun started bundling Oracle's database on its servers at no charge. That last bit was meant to give Sun an edge over hardware rivals, although we can't claim to have heard of it ever making a difference in the market and aren't even sure the deal is still going. What we do know is that Oracle is working over Sun customers who have adopted the multi-core T2 processor and its recent successor the T2+. In fact, Oracle looks set on exacting some measure of punishment on Sun customers who - dare we say it - want to use the T2 boxes for databases.

The Phoronix Test Suite is for testing hardware performance under Linux. It's still very young and incomplete, but it's worth getting acquainted with--it is based on the the scripts developed by the fine folks at Phoronix for hardware testing.

If you use wireless networking in GNU/Linux with native drivers, then chances are that you benefit from work done by the Rt2x00 project. You may use the MadWifi Atheros drivers with OpenHal, or drivers for the Realtek RTL8180 chipset, but most likely you use one of the drivers developed by the Rt2x00 for Ralink chipsets. In the nearly four years since the project began, its work has moved from having a reputation for bugginess to the point where some of its drivers are now part of the latest Linux kernels. Recently, Linux.com talked to three of the lead developers on the project about where Rt2x00 has been and where it is going.

Arguably the world’s most popular free anti-virus software, Grisoft’s AVG, has just been upgraded, set for free download from Friday, the 25th of April. We’re sure AVG’s servers are about to get hammered even harder as millions of AVG 7.5 users take advantage of the new version!

Your editor has certainly attended no shortage of Linux-related conferences. Many of those are developer conferences, which are invariably interesting events. Others are oriented around marketing or outreach, with rather more variable results. The Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit, which ran from April 8 to 10, is unique, though, in that it attracts representatives from throughout the Linux ecosystem. Developers are not in short supply (though it seemed like there were fewer than last year), but those developers spend three days talking with corporate executives, industry analysts, and, crucially, a number of high-profile users. This mixture of people creates a very different dynamic which supports a whole range of interesting conversations.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a gOS Rocket G 2.0 (GNOME) desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. gOS is a lightweight Linux distribution, based on Ubuntu 7.10, that comes with Google Apps and some other Web 2.0 applications; gOS Rocket G 2.0 uses the GNOME desktop.

I reported about printers which work well with open source once in a while. This time, it was myself who needed a replacement for the fax machine, so I was looking for an all-in-one printer / scanner / copier / fax. And I found one which I really like.

Generally speaking, I have been quite happy using Nautilus with a little help from Tracker from time to time. Nautilus is a no nonsense file manager that allows most users to get the most out of their files and the way they choose to manage them.

Discussing the latest breakage of the linux-next tree, Stephen Rothwell noted that the problem went unnoticed due to the arm tree not currently being included,"this is why I would have liked you to participate in the linux-next tree ...". Arm maintainer Russell King questioned the usefulness, saying,"linux-next will not give me anything which -mm isn't giving me. As I said in the discussion, linux-next value is _very_ small for me. Sorry but true."

By default, amaroK stores information about your [music] collection including listening habits and rankings into a SQLite database file on your filesystem. If you only use amaroK on a single computer, this works fine, but if you run it on multiple computers you might want your information to be persistent across machines. amaroK supports the use of a MySQL database for this type of storage, but it does require a bit of a setup beforehand to use. This hack will describe the steps necessary to migrate to a MySQL collection database.

Cryptmount is a friendly front-end to a batch of Linux utilities used to create encrypted volumes, such as device mapper, dm-crypt, and the kernel's loopback device. It requires root privileges to create encrypted files or partitions, and then once it's set up users can mount and unmount their own encrypted volumes on demand.

An increase in the interest and use of open source in clinical research has led to rapid growth of the community surrounding the OpenClinica open source clinical trial software from Akaza Research. In April 2007 this community comprised approximately 1,300 registered members. One year later, this figure has increased by 155 percent to over 3,500.

Microsoft CEO defends Vista's critics - Now why would he defend Vista's critics? I asked myself. It's interesting how ill at ease he seems while defending Vista against those critics.

The newest Ubuntu Linux long term support (LTS) release, code named 'Hardy Heron' (officially called Ubuntu 8.04) is set to be available today, including both desktop and server editions with a long list of new features. Among them is an innovative new way to install and uninstall Linux with a Microsoft Windows desktop.

Are you in the mood for some '90s-style Web browsing with no graphic elements? Or, more realistically, do you work with a Linux console and often need to check something on the Web? If so, get acquainted with text-based Web browsers such as w3m, Lynx, and the similarly named Links. While browsing the Web without a mouse, graphics, fancy fonts, JavaScript, and Java can be sorely restrictive, it can also be quite speedy. If you're a fan of function keys and special commands, you'll be pleased to learn that these browsers provide plenty of shortcuts for every taste. After you gain experience, you'll be able to navigate around with just a few key taps.

Nicholas Negroponte, the head of the One Laptop per Child project, is in the news again, this time trying to rationalise the appearance of Windows XP on the laptop manufactured by the project.