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Last week there was a GNU Hurd status update, which generated a fair amount of attention as it stated there are plans for a Debian GNU/Hurd release in conjunction with Debian "Wheezy" when it's out in late 2012 or early 2013. After being in development for more than 20 years, the Hurd is finally taking some shape. The Debian GNU/Hurd installer for Wheezy is even now working, which I tried out and ended up porting the Phoronix Test Suite to GNU Hurd. In this article is a brief look at Debian GNU/Hurd along with the first-ever benchmarks of Debian GNU/Hurd against Debian GNU/Linux.

One of the age-old criticisms of Linux-based operating systems is that they are complicated, not easy to learn, and not user-friendly. Those who actually use Linux, however, know this is not the case. Like any new technology, you do need to take time to learn it, but once you do, it will open up doors for you, allowing you to unleash the full power of your server.

This tutorial shows the process of installing CentOS 6.0 using the HTTP NetInstall method. This method is much faster for basic systems since you don't have to download ISO files or one huge DVD based ISO just to get started. If you are installing many systems you may want to look into the stand-alone DVD as it will save time in the end.

I'm here again. Since the beginning of my UGP gameplay videos series on youtube (Youtube UGP channel), i never did a comparison between Ubuntu, Windows and another linux distro. So i decided, now, to do this. The reason of the long time between this and the last post, is that i had to install also Windows 7 (such a weird experience...) and Chakra (Arch Linux). Why Chakra? Simple. Because Chakra seems to perform better in playing games. Thanks to Jeff for his benchmarks that made me do this choice! (link post Jeff). Are you ready? Let's start with a beautiful game from Lionhead Studios... Black & White 2!

So I finally got to test Google Talk Video on the Nexus S. The result is simply: Excellent. It feels like a completely new era of communication has begun. Walking around with your phone in your hand having a nice, fluid video conference is just great.

Today, Google announced they were adding Git support to Google Code. This is certainly the most requested feature, and one I've been patiently waiting on. I move from Google Code's SVN repositories to GitHub's Git repositories almost 2 years ago. I love GitHub, but frankly, I'd rather have one less account to worry about and move over to Google Code with a few projects

So, you want to pimp up your Gnome 3 desktop? The good news is that Gnome 3 is incredibly customizable. The appearance of the icons, mouse pointers, window decorations and the Gnome 3 Shell itself can all be altered to suit your tastes, and web sites like Deviant Art have a huge range of themes to choose from. The bad news is that customizing Gnome 3 is not really a point and click affair. While every element can be customized, generally these are customized separately, and it can be confusing. What I will show you is what tools you need to customize the various aspects of Gnome 3.

LXer Feature: 18-Jul-2011

In the LXWR this week we have the 10 best open source apps you never heard of, the freeload factor in FOSS, why Jason Perlow is smarter than an Open Source surrender monkey, IBM donates its Lotus Symphony code to OpenOffice and will Toyota's membership in The Linux Foundation actually spur it to contribute? Enjoy!

On 10 July CentOS 6 has been, finally, released. CentOS-6.0 is based on the upstream release of Red Hat EL 6.0 and includes packages from all variants. All upstream repositories have been combined into one, to make it easier for end users to work with.

CentOS stands for Community ENTerprise Operating System and it exists to provide a free enterprise class computing platform and strives to maintain 100% binary compatibility with its upstream distribution, in this case Red Hat EL 6.

This tutorial explains how you can store the contents of your /etc directory in a version control system (VCS) with the help of etckeeper on Debian Squeeze. etckeeper hooks into Debian's package manager apt so that whenever you install/remove a package with apt, etckeeper will commit all changes to the /etc directory to your VCS; it also tracks file metadata such as permissions which is important for files such as /etc/shadow. Using etckeeper, you can go back to a previous version of /etc if an update has overwritten valuable configuration files. Not only will etckeeper track apt's changes to /etc, it will also do a daily auto-commit so that your manual changes go to VCS as well; in addition to that, you can do commits at any time manually.

Money. It’s something that most of us don’t have enough of. And what we have, we want to hold on to and keep track of. For many people, an old fashioned spreadsheet is perfect for their needs. The rest of us need a little something more. Not with the features, of say, ,KyMyMoney or GNUCash but something that isn’t as confusing or convoluted as a spreadsheet can be. Presented for your approval: wxBanker, a software that makes it easy to manage your finances. It might not have every bell or whistle, but it does have most of the bells and whistles that you actually need.

Recently I decided I should make a permanent backup of my files on to blank DVD discs just in case my backup hard drive fails. I had the following requirements..

While NVIDIA yesterday released a new Linux driver, it was quick to be pointed out in our forums that NVIDIA Optimus Technology still is not officially supported under Linux. But that's not all that's missing from their proprietary driver.

Tired of automated attacks on your systems? Want to beef up security a bit by denying would-be attackers a third or fourth chance? Then you need Fail2ban. Fail2ban watches logs and then bans IP addresses, based on too many password failures, by updating the firewall rules. Specific rules can be defined by the user and multiple log files can be monitored. This weekend, let's get started on improving security with Fail2ban.

According to an article which recently appeared on LinuxInsider, “the biggest change and impact to the Linux landscape and market to date has been the advent of cloud computing”. The IT industry is headed towards a centralised data centre model once more with cloud computing gathering momentum and a swagger of big integrators and small start ups alike are offering services in this arena. Open source solutions such as Linux naturally thrive in the current environment where multiple platforms seek solace under the same apparent cloud.

The 343 changes made by Microsoft developer K. Y. Srinivasan put him at the top of a list, created by LWN.net, of developers who made the most changes in the current development cycle for Linux 3.0. Along with a number of other "change sets", Microsoft provided a total of 361 changes, putting it in seventh place on the list of companies and groups that contributed code to the Linux kernel. By comparison, independent developers provided 1,085 change sets to Linux 3.0, while Red Hat provided 1,000 and Intel 839.

There is a market for Linux commercial games which is still largely untapped. This offers a real opportunity for indie developers, who lack significant funding, to generate good sales. The more publicity that indie games receive should hopefully entice their developers to release further titles, as well as encouraging new entrants to the scene.

This is an easy tutorial on how to make your own 20th Century Fox and LIONSGATE styled intro using Blender 2.5. It is very easy you just need to donwload the templates blender and follow the instructions, it shouldn't take more than 5-10 minutes to edit it.

I am writing to announce the release of my Linux RAM disk kernel module. Yes, the Linux kernel has the brd module already integrated into it, and also the zram module it the staging tree. And yes, you can instead utilize ramfs or tmpfs for RAM based file systems. But RapidDisk or rxdsk is a bit different.

IBM is donating the source code of its Office suite (Lotus Symphony) to the OpenOffice project. IBM is looking to accelerate the development of open source software by donating the IBM Lotus Symphony source code to the Apache OpenOffice project. According to the IBM announcement, this is intended to provide this open source community with new capabilities, “further accelerating the development of the OpenOffice platform.”