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One of the planned features for Ubuntu Hardy Heron, a fresh new theme, is a perfect opportunity for Ubuntu to become known for its incredible artwork and themes. With other distributions, and even Fedora, using very simple themes, now is the perfect time for Ubuntu to create a unique and attractive theme to draw even more users.

Discover how to scan your network for services and how to regularly monitor your services to keep uptimes to a maximum. A key way of ensuring the security of your network is to know what is on your network and what services individual machines are at risk of exposure. In this article, learn how to use these same techniques to ensure that genuine services.

Novell unexpectedly delays its fourth quarter and end of year financial earnings report. Novell stockholders were unpleasantly surprised on Dec. 5, when instead of hearing from Novell on how the Linux distributor had done over the last quarter and the full 2007 fiscal year, they were presented with an earnings announcement postponement instead.

Has the television writers' strike left you with hours of spare time and no way to fill it? Well, put down that book and put the running shoes back in the closet, because TED is here to help. TED is the torrent episode downloader, an open source, cross-platform tool that simplifies the tedious process of searching for torrent files. TED is not a BitTorrent client itself; rather it is a search tool for torrents that can pass along its results to your preferred BitTorrent downloader. TED is geared toward retrieving episodic television shows; it lets you search for specific episodes by season and episode number. The app ships with a database of predefined shows and a manually selected set of feeds from torrent sites that frequently carry such content.

Working with vast raster images: NIP2

It’s been almost seven years since I stopped buying desktops for personal computing, and since then, I am always under the impression that buying a new laptop to run Linux on is a bigger challenge that it needs to be. Over the years, I’ve spent countless hours on linux-laptop.net (and others) trying to get the most out of my hardware working under Linux. Things like proprietary drivers for video cards, network adapters and wireless, sound and modem support were virtually always making the life of the Linux geek a bit harder.

Howto Setup a Remote Calendar using WebDAV with Mozilla Sunbird

Firefox 3 should be welcome both for its many small usability improvements and for its under-the-covers Web rendering engine and security enhancements. When you first install and launch the beta of Firefox 3, the initial impression (especially for those who remember some of the earlier promises of a revamped user interface and increased Web 2.0 integration) can be a little disappointing, since it doesn't look much different from the current version of Firefox.

Despite technical difficulties with the phone lines, Linux.com's live podcast with Jeff Waugh of the GNOME Foundation and Roy Schestowitz, cofounder of the Boycott Novell site, attracted a large audience eager to discuss GNOME's involvement with the efforts to make the Microsoft Office Open XML (OOXML) document format an ECMA standard. Hosted by Rod Amis on his Lightning Strikes show at BlogTalkRadio, and with questions from Linux.com's Editor in Chief Robin Miller and me, the discussion revealed that the two sides of the issue are closer than they have appeared in the past.

Ottawa copyright circles are buzzing with hints that the government is preparing its new revised copyright bill, and will be tabling it soon, perhaps as early as next week. And the buzz is that the new law will basically be a copy of the controversial U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act. [Also see: Michael Geist's blog: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2431/125/ - Barbara]

If you need to type a diacritical mark such as an acute "e" (é) -- let alone a character not found in a Western European language -- the standard English keyboard layouts for GNU/Linux users are barely ahead of those of typewriters. However, adding support for both extended characters and multiple keyboards has become much easier in the last few years. These days, you can quickly add extended character support from both GNOME and KDE, and, should either desktop fail you for any reason, you can fall back on other methods to improve your input.

It's early December 1995 and it has been a heady few days for Java. IBM and Adobe Systems have agreed to license this strange and embryonic new software that Sun Microsystems keeps telling us can be "written once and run anywhere". Two days before, Sun and Netscape had announced JavaScript that - according to the press release - was: "Analogous to Visual Basic in that it can be used by people with little or no programming experience to quickly construct complex applications."

According to the The Washington Post, on Friday it reported that global measles fatalities had been reduced by two-thirds following stepped-up vaccination campaigns since 2000. Furthermore, this phenomenal success had a helping hand from open source software.

OpenOffice is the darling of the FOSS office suites, and it is a nice suite. It's cross-platform, and OpenOffice Writer is a first-rate word processor with a lot of advanced features. But it's not the only good option for Linux users: Abiword and KWord are excellent lightweight word processors with good feature sets, and both are licensed under the GPL. All three are wonderful. In this two-part series we're going to dig into KWord 1.6, and mine some of its hidden jewels.

Breach Security announced today that the Breach Security WebDefend web application firewall has earned certification by ICSA Labs, an independent division of Verizon. WebDefend is one of the first web application firewall products to achieve this distinction.

Promises have been made. Assurances have been given. Commitments have been proffered. But far less has been delivered. We heard over and over again that we should approve OOXML because that was the only way to ensure that the format remain open. The first version might be a mess, but if we approve it just this once, the future versions will be developed in openness and transparency. But Ecma is really seeking to transfer to SC34 the responsibility of spending the next 3 years fixing errors in OOXML 1.0, while future versions of OOXML ("technical revisions") are controlled by Microsoft, in Ecma, in a process without transparency, and as should now be obvious to all, without sufficient quality controls.

Marcos Marado wrote this exclusive article. Is the situation really so dramatic as he explains? Leave your comments, this could be our first really important debate on ManuelMarino.com

Earlier this week we published benchmarks of the XRender extension using NVIDIA's latest beta Linux driver, which had a substantial performance boost thanks to Render improvements with this latest driver. One of the questions that have since come up is how ATI/AMD's binary Linux driver compares when using this X extension. Well, right now, it lags behind NVIDIA, but a Phoronix Forums member has discovered a hidden ATI Linux option that should yield XRender performance gains.

A Step by Step tutorial on installing few basic applications /applications that any desktop user of Linux would like to install on his Ubuntu desktop explained in a simplistic fashion. Steps include how to configure compiz-fusion , install Adobe Reader , Flash player , Media Players , JRE and few other interesting applications .

Microsoft's newfound interest in this space is largely a response to growing demand for inexpensive subnotebook hardware that uses flash-based storage. Manufacturers of such devices are increasingly adopting Linux instead of Windows because Linux is free and easier to adapt for use on systems with limited computing power and storage capacity. Microsoft likely views the rising popularity of Linux-based budget mobile hardware in the developing world as a significant competitive threat.