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Over the next week I will be starting on a new Ubuntu community project. The plan is to create a Social Network for Ubuntu users, giving users free blog space and email addresses on the ubuntu-users.org domain. Think of Facebook for Ubuntu Users by Ubuntu Users but as a non profit entity as opposed to a big business venture.

We don't review many disk controllers or hard drives at Phoronix but we decided to take a quick look at the Promise Technology SATA300 TX4 PCI controller card, which promises to be a cost-effective 4-port Serial ATA 2.0 controller. Two of the features include Native Command Queuing and Tagged Command Queuing support, but how does its performance compare to solutions integrated on the motherboard? In this review of the Promise SATA300 TX4 we tested it with Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn using an nForce 430 chipset.

I recently discovered APTonCD, a utility that makes it easy to store Ubuntu packages on a CD or DVD so that they can be installed again later without having to download the packages again. You can download the packages you want once and then install them all on as many computers as you want. It's also a pretty useful way to get packages onto computers with slow or unreliable Internet connections.

openSUSE 10.3 has reached its Beta 2 stage of development cycle. It was released on the 23rd of August 2007, 2 weeks after the release of the Beta 1 iso images. According to the openSUSE 10.3 release roadmap, the stable/distribution release of openSUSE 10.3 is scheduled for 4th of October 2007. The openSUSE 10.3 Beta 2 is offered in a 1-CD GNOME, a 1-CD KDE, and a 1-DVD iso images, covering the i386, x86_64, and PPC architectures.

Yochai Benkler describes Open Source as a methodology of commons based peer production. This means work made collaboratively and shared publicly by a community of equals. For Eric Raymond the virtue of Open Source is its efficiency. Open Source can create better products faster than the old closed source model. The name Open Source was deliberately chosen for its meaninglessness and ideological vacuity. This was intended to make the results of a very strong ideology more palatable to large corporations by disguising its origins. That ideology is Free Software.

Welcome to this year's 35th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! There is little doubt about it - Ubuntu is the most popular desktop Linux distribution on the market. But the great variety of available statistics, usage surveys and web long analyses means that it's often impossible to estimate the true usage figures and switching habits of individual users. Does it all really matter? Read our editorial on the subject and comment in the forums. In the news section, we link to a handful of interesting articles covering the openSUSE package management, Gentoo overlays, and Debian boot process with initng. Finally, the KDE development team has revealed that its official KDE 4 release party will only take place some four months after the release of version 4.0. The reason? Read on to find out.

Engineers at the UC San Diego have constructed the highest-resolution computer display in the world - with a screen resolution up to 220 million pixels. UCSD's Linux-based OptIPortal consists of 55 Dell displays driven by 18 Dell XPS personal computers. The system at UCSD uses the San Diego Supercomputer Center's new 64-bit version of grid-computing middleware known as ROCKS released in early August and Calit2's Cluster GL for heterogeneous systems (CGLX) framework.

With all of the sturmundrang out there about Micrsoft's tentative foray into the world of open source licensing, it seems people may be missing another aspect of the discussion. In the end, the success of open source software does not depend on who has what license for their products. In the end, all that matters is the usability and the quality of the software itself.

This is a prototype of a video designed to tell the story of DRM. The life and death, the rise and fall, the here today, gone-tomorrow story of DRM. So we start with a heartbeat and a bird, and tell as much as we can. If you think there’s more to say, add to the story. We’ll be posting music tracks later, and if you need higher quality video, that can be arranged. It’s released under a CC Share Alike License, so have at it.

Some days ago Mr. Mike Melanson of Adobe Flash's Linux port fame posted in Penguin.SWF blog about the news of H.264 coded support in Flash. Nice, a new codec. But there's a question that doesn't want to be silenced: What about a nice, clear and objective answer about the availability of a 64bit version of the Flash plugin?

Sometimes you just want to see what connections your machine is making to the outside world and what ports it’s using. While wireshark and tcpdump are really nice for inspecting detailed package contents. IPTraf is really about connections and interface statistics. Because iptraf is based on ncurses the program can be run from a text-console and still have a (primitive) `gui`.

LXer Feature: 26-Aug-2007

A weekly recap of the big stories concerning Linux and Open Source.

A recurring debate discussion among FLOSS-supporters and detractors is related to the estimation of the real number of active FLOSS projects. While it is easy to look at the main repository site (sourceforge.net) that boasts more than 100.000 projects, it is equally easy to look in more depth and realize that a significant number of those projects are really abandoned or have no significant development. How many active and stable projects are really out there?

openSUSE 10.3 is set to contain a new, significantly improved and more mature package management stack by default. ZMD, the package management component causing problems in SUSE Linux 10.1 and to a lesser extent in openSUSE 10.2, has been completely removed and is now replaced by the new libzypp and its tools. Today we’ll be taking a look at the new package management and talking to Duncan Mac-Vicar Prett, one of the central libzypp developers.

With the release of Windows Vista, using your PC to watch and record TV has become a whole lot easier. Now, for the first time, Windows Media Center comes bundled with Home Premium and Ultimate versions of the standard Desktop operating system. However, Vista is pricey, and its form and function are of course dictated by Microsoft. If you want full control over your Home Theater PC (HTPC), and don’t want to have to pay Microsoft for it, then Linux is a more than capable alternative base for building a system of your own. Currently, the two dominant players on Linux are Mythtv and, to a lesser extent, Freevo. We’ll take a look at both of these applications as well as others you can use to create a fully functional Linux HTPC.

As I have blogged before, I have been evaluating Vector Linux 5.8 SOHO over the last 3 months or so. As promised, here are my findings. Vector is now my OS of choice on the machine in question, and who knows, if I didn’t still have to do a bit of VB development, it could well replace XP on my main work laptop as well.

Recently, as in last week, I learned a new Texas idiom. A senior executive at a client explained what he meant when he said that I was beating his dog. I didn't have a reference for the comment until he said that if he invited me over for a barbecue and I beat his dog that was inappropriate."How would you like it if you invited me to your house for dinner and I beat your dog?" he asked.

This is for my brother Willi, who recently bought a new laptop. He has to run Vista and Office on it, and asked me how he could still be safe when underway and checking his mail, or using the web.

(A typical DOH! experience. But I still wanted to share it because it could get newbies thinking... - wjl)

Securing SSH Using Denyhosts

Howto restrict su command to superuser only in Linux