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Endian Firewall Community is a free edition of Endian Firewall, a security-focused Linux distribution developed by Endian S.r.l., a Linux solutions provider based in Bolzano Italy. Endian Firewall Community is designed for small, non-profit organizations and SOHO (Small-/Home-Office) deployments. The latest version, Endian Firewall Community 2.5.1, released today, comes with several feature enhancements, including support for most modern UMTS/3G USB dongles, trusted timestamping using OpenTSA, and improvements to the policy-based and static routing modules.

While id Software may have recently lost its main Linux game developer (Timothee Bessett), they haven't abandoned their open-source ways. This afternoon John Carmack had an interesting tweet.

It's beginning to look a whole lot like 2012 will be the year of the Linux Desktop on the Linux Planet. Well, if not the year, then at least this past week, which saw tremendous activity on desktop efforts new and old.

As annoying apps go, Chrome is pretty tame but the constant nagging (crashing) has become too much. I’m going to try a trial separation and see how it goes.

The move to write a non-GPL replacement for BusyBox has sparked an animated discussion on two fronts.

On January 30th, 2012, I started a petition requesting that the U.S. government broaden their use of Free Software and Open Source to save money. I deeply believe that this one step is part of the solution to the problem of the crushing national debt that the United States is currently facing. Will shifting to Free Software completely solve the crisis? No, it will not.

Fedora 16 LXDE left quite an ambiguous impression on me. From the performance side, everything is perfect. The system is responsive, quick and stable. Except for the case when I got a kernel panic in Samba mounts, I experienced no instability whatsoever. But on the other hand, the LXDE spin of Fedora 16 out of the box is far less functional than its brothers.

Microsoft may have scored an early victory in its legal tussle with Barnes and Noble. The two companies are engaged in parallel battles, one via the Department of Justice, another via United States International Trade Commission. In March 2011, Microsoft accused Barnes & Noble of patent infringement with its NOOK and NOOK Color products[/he] in retaliation, Barnes & Noble made a broad complaint claiming that Microsoft is being an abusive monopoly and that the patents are in any case irrelevant. That antitrust complaint looks likely to be rejected by the ITC, a decision that favors Microsoft.

A month or so back I went on one of my little quests to find a piece of software that I don't currently have buttoned down. This time around I was not looking for another handy-dandy media related application nor another operating system. Instead, I was looking for a tool I use daily to find other tools, a Web search engine. I have, in the past, looked for "Google alternatives" but have always found myself back with the nearly unavoidable digital giant. This seemingly inevitable return was, at least partially, due to old habits, market penetration (it's the default just about everywhere!), and also simply because the suite of tools the Google behemoth provides work well, integrate well, and help me to be more productive and have functionality that, in many cases, I can't find anywhere else (Gmail, Google Docs, Google Voice, Google Chat).

Sourcefabric has released their open source radio software Airtime in version 2.0. Airtime is free to download, runs on Ubuntu and Debian, and users can interact with it through any web browser. The latest version now adds the ability to configure Icecast and SHOUTcast streams in the browser, a button to listen to the station’s output and multiple improvements to the playlist and calendar views.

As we earlier reported Ubuntu Dash is getting rid of default useless huge icons (I haven't seen any use of it yet). The update has arrived. We are running Ubuntu 12.04 to keep an eye on the progress and we just noticed updates to Unity which removes those default 8 icons from the Dash and replace them with more useful shortcuts.

AT T says it will begin pre-sales of Samsung's Galaxy Note mini-tablet/smartphone on Feb. 17 for $300 plus contract. To be hyped during the Super Bowl via video shot on its own eight megapixel camera, the Android 2.3-based gadget features a 5.3-inch HD Super AMOLED display, a 1.5GHz, dual-core processor, and a stylus....

AMD released the Radeon HD 7950 today as the second "Southern Islands" graphics card following the release of the Radeon HD 7970 one month ago, but how is the Linux support for the new AMD Radeon GPUs?

Git is an open source distributed version control system which was originally designed by Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, in 2005 for Linux kernel development. This control system is widely used by the open source community, handling small to extremely large projects with an emphasis on speed and efficiency, but maintaining flexibility, scalability, and guaranteeing data integrity. Git is one of a number of open source revision control systems available for Linux. Other popular tools in this field include Subversion, Bazaar, Mercurial, Monotone, CVS, and SVN. However, Git is frequently regarded by many developers to be the finest version control tool available.

The first question you will ask yourself (probably) is "why on earth would I need a firewall? Linux is secure, right?" Right, and I know lots of desktop Linux users that never had to touch the subject or don't know what iptables or Netfilter is. Which is probably just fine, but that doesn't mean Linux is 100% safe from any attacks. Any sufficiently complex software has bugs, and many bugs can be exploited and become a security issue. So in the end it's all about some bored enough cracker to take advantage of some vulnerability (one example that springs to mind is the recently discovered sudo bug). What you will need in this case is a better protection than the default (I know Linux is a tough game to crack, but that doesn't make it impossible) while trying not to change in any way on how you use your computer. Consequently, this article will focus on the casual Ubuntu user that has some knowledge of security and networks (what a vulnerability is, what a port scan is, etc.) that wants to secure his/her system.

Companies that like Red Hat Enterprise Linux but hate changing Linux versions because of the hardware and software qualification process just got an excuse to be lazy for the next decade. Red Hat has announced that it will extend the production life of its latest RHEL 6 releases and the prior RHEL 5 releases by an extra three years, with a full decade of support – up from seven years.

With its vast number of plugins, Drupal can be used to build many different kinds of websites, from simple blogs to photo journals to corporate websites. Managing all of these different kinds of websites with Drupal’s graphical management interface can become a bit of a chore, because while a GUI makes it easy to pick the tasks and options you want, it doesn’t let you run them quickly. That’s where Drush, a Drupal command-line shell, makes a Drupal administrator’s job easy. Drush can make it easy for you to perform an internal cleanup, do a fresh Drupal install, install and enable modules, or create users, among other things.

Digi International announced a ZigBee-based home energy gateway that runs Linux on a Freescale i.MX28 processor. Compliant with the upcoming Smart Energy 2.0 standard, the & ConnectPort X2e for Smart Energy& enables ZigBee devices on a Home Area Network (HAN) to communicate with an energy service provider, says the company....

Tilera announced the general availability of its RISC-based 36-core Tile-Gx36 and 16-core Tile-Gx16 system on chips (SoCs), clocked up to 1.5GHz. The Tile-Gx36 delivers more than 40Gbps of L2/L3 packet forwarding performance while using 25 Watts, and both it and the Tile-Gx16 are supported with Linux-ready PCI Express evaluation systems, the company says....

The first two parts of this series gave you a basic introduction to Linux and helped get your Ubuntu 11.10 system installed. Now I'll go over how to get started customizing your new Ubuntu 11.10 installation. I say get started, because there are so many possibilities as far as what can be changed or installed, that it would be impossible to cover it all. Instead, I am going to point you in the right direction, give you some examples and tell you where you can turn in case you need help.