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Silicon Graphics supplants its proprietary IRIX operating system with Linux in order to enter the supercomputer field. So which bit of news is more surprising: SGI going with Linux, or SGI still being in business?

Mozilla Firefox 1.0.5 has been released. This latest update contains several security fixes and improvements to stability. Grab Firefox 1.0.5 from the Firefox product page and check out the Mozilla Firefox 1.0.5 Release Notes for more information. The security advisories page has not been updated at the time of writing this, but should soon be.

There is more to the CLI than a collection of operating system commands. There are many tools - applications written without a thought as to the operating system - available at the CLI to handle a wide range of chores. Like cracking passwords, for example. Not for nefarious purposes, you understand: but for education. If you've ever wondered just how secure your passwords are, John the Ripper is a good way to find out. A much nicer way to find out than having a script-kiddy crack it seconds.

I knew when I mentioned something negative about the GNU Project’s General Public License (GPL), in my column last week, I would inevitably be accused of arguing the GPL was a bad license. I knew this would happen despite my qualification to the argument that I had released code under the GPL myself.

Xandros touts its Desktop OS Version 3 Business Edition as "an alternative to Windows and . . . does not try to hide that fact that it was designed to be a Linux distribution for Windows users," leading to "a focus on ease of use and Windows compatibility but with the unique advantages of Linux," according to a recently published review at XYZComputing.com. The review summarizes the key features of the Xandros Linux OS, and briefly outlines the installation process, providing screenshots of several configuration wizards.

This week’s show is on web browsers for Linux. While there are waaaay to many available to check them all out on one show, Kelly Penguin Girl and I take a look at 4-5 of them

He goes unrecognized in Portland's coffee shops. He rarely shows up at his suburban Beaverton office. And while Linus Torvalds is a cult figure among computer enthusiasts worldwide, he's essentially invisible in his new home state.

We have just released Trustix Secure Linux 3.0TSL's rapidly expanding new user base has identified a wide range of possible improvements which have now been implemented and made available in this release. Foremost amongst these is the new installer"Viper"... Other additions to the system include X.org X11 libraries, FreeRadius support, easy PXE installs, Mini CD and Net CD versions of the OS, enhanced hardware detection, installation on RAID and logical volumes and a range of kernel upgrades including the shift to Linux 2.6 kernel and BASH 3.

One day, a $4,358 electronic deposit appeared out of nowhere in Karl's online bank account, followed by e-mail instructions to keep a small amount as pay and wire the rest to Moscow. Then he began receiving account statements intended for online banking customers from across the USA. Someone had changed the billing addresses for stolen credit cards and bank account numbers to his residence in Grass Valley.

Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) representative Chet Littlemore is pressing for a raise in the little known Hard Drive Piracy Tax, a small percentage of a hard disk's storage space kept from a consumer so that it can't be used for pirated materials....Littlemore says that in these early years of the 21st century, up to one quarter of the average hard drive is pirated material. "The Hard Disk tax must be raised a proportional amount. If the space is not there, it cannot be used for illegal storage. We're balancing the effects of people's illegal downloading habits."

Lead by Progeny, numerous Debian Linux distribution companies and nonprofits consider forming a common core server distribution for the enterprise. But Mandriva and Turbolinux are rethinking their involvement.

Although it appeared that its Web site would remain stale and funds would not support Linux developers, there is now growing interest and opportunity for LinuxFund.

The third most popular browser (arguably) on the web Opera has just got a technical preview update with the capability of downloading torrent files from within the browser.

Now, the Open Source Community is in process of developing an extension for the Mozilla Firefox browser to add this similar functionality in the popular Firefox browser.

A few months ago, I started looking for an alternative to Windows Media Center Edition 2005, a personal video recorder (PVR) or digital video recorder (DVR) system. While other complete hardware/software combos, such as the popular TiVo, solve many of the headaches of having to build your own system and find out which hardware works and which doesn't, they also lack a level of customization and user freedom; with TiVo, for instance, you have join one of the company's monthly subscription plans. I decided to build my own system using open source software and carefully picked hardware. This proved to be much easier than I expected, thanks to MythTV.

With the release of several Firefox extensions by Google - we can take a look at how Google officially implements PageRank queries.

Episode #2 of the LQ Radio Show has been posted. The show is hosted by jeremy and includes a panel of LQ moderators. Topics include Linux on the desktop, beagle, Apple moving to Intel, blogging, Linux appliances, broadcom, Google’s Linux app, the Vienna Linux migration and much much more. Total running time is 1:29. A Bittorrent is available. You can also download the show directly (in mp3 and ogg format) or as a Podcast.

Welcome to this year's 28th issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The recently released Fedora Core 4 has been getting some bad press lately - what are the reasons? The security problems plaguing Debian sarge in recent weeks have been solved, while Ubuntu's increasing impact on the world of Linux distribution has received more momentum by the launch of a US$10 million Ubuntu Foundation. Also in this issue - we interview Jean-Philippe Guillemin, the lead developer of Minislack and introduce three new Asian distributions - AsianLinux, OpenLX (both from India) and Niigata Linux (from Japan). Happy reading!

If the success of the "Shrek," "Toy Story," "Stuart Little," "The Incredibles," and many other Hollywood hits is any indication, animations add glitz to the mundane. While animation in the movies still requires professional animation packages like Blender, you can make simple animations using the command-line wizardry of ImageMagick.

One of the first developing countries to clearly stand behind OSS was Brazil. For the last five years Brazil’s government lead by President Lula is abandoning proprietary software (mainly Windows) in favor of OSS. The National Institute for Information Technology estimates a $500 saving in software for every machine owned/operated by the government which saves Brazil overall $150M a year

Hot-shot entrepreneurs, VC money, even 'paradigm shifts.' Dot-coms revisited? No, it's today's flood of open-source startups.