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LXer Feature: 13-Feb-2008

Here is a roundup of articles from the 2008 SCALE 6x conference in Los Angeles.

The beta 3 version of Firefox 3, released this week, will probably be the last version of the browser based on the original Mozilla platform, celebrating its tenth anniversary next week. Work is already underway on a revamp of Firefox's underlying platform - Mozilla. It was on February 23, 1998, that Netscape announced the creation of the Mozilla website as the "focal point for developers interested in modifying and redistributing Netscape client source". It was an historic time for the embryonic open-source movement. Netscape's move happened around the same time that open-source evangelists Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond formalized open-source development with the Open Source Definition.

This guide explains how you can enable a remote desktop on an Ubuntu desktop so that you can access and control it remotely. This makes sense for example if you have customers that are not very tech-savvy. If they have a problem, you can log in to their desktops without the need to drive to their location. I will also show how to access the remote Ubuntu desktop from a Windows XP client and an Ubuntu client.

Hmmm - my son reminded me that today is considered a very special day for millions of people around the world. Almost forgot. So let’s ask one of our favourite mascots, and ask what day it is:

Last year leading up to the release of Ubuntu 7.04 "Feisty Fawn" and Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" we had published several articles looking at various aspects of this desktop Linux distribution. These articles had varied from looking at Ubuntu's power consumption for the past six major releases to presenting the visual history of Ubuntu and how its graphics have evolved since Ubuntu 4.10. With Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" shipping in just two months, we are once again looking at Ubuntu from several points of view. In this article, we are looking at Ubuntu's boot performance for the past five releases through the use of Bootchart for measuring its boot time, disk throughput, and the running processes.

I am a fan of affordable technology. I like relatively cheap gadgets, and I like open source. When I heard about Asus’ Eee PC, I took it with a certain grain of salt. I thought that maybe it was just another company trying to take a piece of the pie from the One Laptop Per Child initiative. Then the more I read about the OLPC, the more I realized that the two gadgets may have been created for different purposes. The OLPC is a non-profit, educational-social project, while the Eee PC is an affordable subnotebook being sold with the intent for profit.

This tutorial describes how to hide information within Binary Executable using Hydan . In other words Binary Executable is used as carrier.

It’s St Valentine’s Day in much of the western world (and, it seems, the World of Warcraft too). Did you know Linux is unique among operating systems due to its inherent romanticism? Here’s how Linux helps sling forth Cupid’s arrows on this day. Spice up your love life with these seven sure-fire tips.

If you've ever had that sick realization that you made a mistake immediately after emptying your Trash or deleting a file with Shift-Del, then Magic Rescue may be the cure you're looking for. Magic Rescue searches block devices for particular file types, then restores them to a designated directory where you can sort through them. Although subject to certain limitations, such as how recently a file was deleted and the availability of a definition for the file header of a given format, Magic Rescue is not difficult to use. It even features a man page with a few mini-tutorials. However, it does require organization and planning in order to use effectively.

Plug-in development in Eclipse is somewhat of an art form. If you're new to the concept of plug-ins it can be quite burdensome learning the myriad tools Eclipse has to help you write plug-ins. The purpose of this article is to help you learn some basic plug-in development skills with some best practices sprinkled in for good measure.

Whether it is a big or small update, every month AMD releases a new Catalyst package for both Linux and Windows for their supported ATI Radeon products. Last month in the Catalyst 8.01 Linux driver the changes had just consisted of a few bug fixes and nothing more. Today the Catalyst 8.02 Linux driver has been released, and like last month, it's short on the change-log. The fglrx changes are very brief and the driver version is still in the 8.45 release stream and wasn't even bumped to 8.46.x.

Have you ever said, "This program is pretty nice, but I wish it would ..."? For applications that offer the capability, scripting gives users the ability to customize, extend, and tailor a program to meet their needs. Scribus, a free page layout program that runs on Linux (and Mac OS and Windows) uses the Python programming language for user scripting. Python scripting in Scribus can drastically improve your work flow, and it's relatively easy for beginners to not only use scripts, but also write them.

Unlike a lot of the events that I discuss in my Blog, the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit is a "by invitation only" event with a twist. Normally for "invitation only events", the potential attendee sits by the phone with their prom clothes on, waiting for the call that may or may not come. In this case the Linux Foundation wishes to engage "leaders of the development, ISV, distro, end user, non-profit and vendor communities". In other words, a representative form of governance, rather than a full democracy. Therefore leaders of various communities are encouraged to apply, with no guarantee of admission.

After a number of years in development Linux Test Drive is becoming a reality, from the page:

The Free and Open Source Developers conference, one of Europe's finest free technical conferences, opens its doors Saturday the 23th in Brussels, Belgium. In anticipation of the main track talks, a batch of interviews with FLOSS project leaders have been published at the FOSDEM website. You can read up on Linux in Hollywood, Perl6, klik2 and much more at fosdem.org/2008/interviews. The event features a busy line-up of project development rooms, a Lightning Talk track and a social beer tasting event the night before.

Sangoma produces telephony cards and writes drivers that work with open source applications such as Asterisk, Yate, FreeSwitch, and CallWeaver. Sangoma CEO and founder David Mandelstam says that before Sangoma started producing cards to work with Asterisk, the open source project was "kind of a toy for hobbyists."

Today’s the first day of the largest-ever JBoss World! To celebrate, we’re giving you a few links to bloggers who are talking about it. What’s below are just clips from what they’ve posted so far. Watch JBoss bloggers and check back here to find out more as the event goes on.

Yesterday I went on about the man page for fvwm, the default X window manager in OpenBSD. It clearly says that, in the absence of a .fvwmrc file in the user's home directory, fvwm will look in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fvwm/ for a file called system.fvwmrc ... There's a file called system.fvwm2rc in that directory, but it doesn't control fvwm. I know this because I added a line to it, stopped X and restarted it. No change.

I hate accounting. The one accounting class I took in college proved that to me. The fact that I could get an A in the class by doing one homework problem and copying all the others during class was only part of the reason. But, it's related. I hate doing the same thing over and over and, to me, that is exactly what accounting is.

Having a great defense involves proper detection and recognition of an attack. In our security world we have great IDS tools to properly recognize when we are being attacked as well as firewalls to prevent such attacks from happening. However, certain attacks are not blindly thrown at you - a good attacker knows that a certain amount of reconnaissance and knowledge about your defenses greatly increases the chances of a successful attack. How would you know if someone is scanning your defenses? Is there any way to properly respond to such scans? You bet there is...