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Oracle announced last night, October 3rd, a new maintenance version to its popular and powerful VirtualBox virtualization software, VirtualBox 4.1.4, which brings many improvements and lots of bugfixes.

Dave needs a new 64-bit Linux for his primary audio production machine. What shall he do ? Read on to learn how and why he decided upon the Arch Linux distribution.

How to write a log normalizer for fail2ban logs using the PyLogsParser library.

Chromium Browser talks with Telepathy (IM/Chat Library) to provide an in-browser IM client - prototype

GNOME 3.2 got a "web application mode" through Epiphany web browser, allowing you to save websites as web apps. These web apps show up as regular applications in both GNOME Shell and Unity and can be pinned to GNOME Shell's Dash or Unity's launcher, etc.

Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. This tutorial shows how you can install Nginx on a Fedora 15 server with PHP5 support (through PHP-FPM) and MySQL support.

The Linux find, grep, and awk commands are amazing power tools for fine-grained file searches, and for finding things inside files. With them you can find the largest and newest files on a system, fine-tune search parameters, search for text inside files, and perform some slick user management tricks.

Find Largest or Newest Files

The find command can do nearly anything, if you can figure out how. This example hunts down space hogs by finding the 10 largest files on your system, and sorts them from small to large in human-readable form:

I am not a coder, nor do I fancy myself as any kind of security expert. If I can figure out that secure boot will barely be a speed bump for the bad guys, but will be a killer for the casual computer enthusiast, wouldn’t it be safe to figure that the geniuses at Microsoft understood this long before the decision was made to require the feature’s full use by OEMs who want one of those nifty “certified Windows 8? stickers on their boxes?

Following a series of embarrassing intrusions that hit the servers used to maintain and distribute the Linux operating system, project elders have advised all developers to check their Linux machines for signs of compromise. Emails sent Friday by Linux kernel lead developers Greg Kroah-Hartman and H Peter Anvin arrived as volunteers with the open-source project worked to bring LinuxFoundation.org, Linux.com, and Kernel.org back online following attacks that gained root access to the multiple servers that host the sites.

IBM presented an update on Linux on its mainframe line of computers. It was refreshing to learn about the success Linux has been having outside of the realm of industry standard X86-based systems. Here’s a quick summary of the session.

Every Linux user, after a while, starts creating a toolbox that he/she takes with him/her everywhere. However, that depends on the task at hand. You might need to install a distribution, you might just need a livecd, doing security-related work or just backup. And so the toolbox gets bigger and bigger, thus becoming less and less convenient. The subject of today's article is NetbootCD. NetbootCD is not a supplement for a live Linux environment, but rather it is designed to help you to install multiple Linux distributions using a single multiboot disk as oppose to requirement of 7 Linux installation disks.

After a little wait (Alex went on holiday!) Alexander "motorsep" joined me for question time this week at Gaming On Linux. He is responsible for the Steel Storm series of games!

Canonical introduced this weekend the new wallpapers that will be part of the final release of the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system.

Xubuntu 11.04 is a fast, stable operating system for older systems or systems that could use the performance boost. It is beautifully well put together and easy to use.

If you are a Linux protagonist who has been around as long, or longer, that I have, you have seen responses like these over and over as to why Linux distributions will never go mainstream on the PC desktop:

Amazon is rumored to be negotiating with HP to buy its Palm division, including its WebOS assets -- either to create an update to the Kindle Fire tablet, or just to gain patents. Meanwhile, an IHD iSuppli analysis suggests Amazon is selling each Quanta-manufactured Fire for $10 less than it costs to build....

Becoming a hacker is a worthwhile pursuit. Do you have what it takes to become a hacker? It takes dedication, intelligence and an analytic mind. You must have a desire to solve problems, a knack for verbal and written communication and a persistence to try new approaches when solutions don’t come easily.

Linux is, by design, a very secure operating system, but so what? You can have the best security system in the world on your house, but if you leave your front-door open anyone can still walk in. Even people who know better, like Linux kernel developers, blow it sometimes. That’s what happened to the Linux Foundation’s constellation of sites. Multiple important Linux sites were down for weeks and as of October 3rd, kernel.org is still down. This doesn’t have to happen to you. Here are a few simple suggestions from me, and some more advanced ones from Greg Kroah-Hartman, one of Linux’s lead developers.

I recently did some work with an ELO Touchsystems 1515L 15? LCD Desktop Touchmonitor. I was pleased with the touchmonitor’s hardware and performance, but in order to make it work properly in Linux I had to find a suitable calibration program. Out of the box on several distributions this touchscreen exhibits Y-axis inversion, where touching the top of the screen moves the cursor to the bottom and vice versa. xinput-calibrator is a freedesktop.org project that worked well for calibration, fixing the Y-axis inversion issue, and as a bonus it works for any standard Xorg touchscreen driver.

A review of Sabayon 6 LXDE, a solid and underrated distribution. Sabayon is based on Gentoo, but lacks Gentoo's steep learning curve. It's an intriguing alternative for users looking to try a seemingly-stable rolling release.