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Herein resides a brief (somewhat) tutorial on creating and signing PGP keys with GPG. I’d originally intended to use this as the outline for a presentation on the subject, but decided to put it on the web so I could point people at it. The introductory section (Basics) is pretty lean, but should provide enough of a background for simple stuff. All of this is documented elsewhere on the web.

Google may want to rethink the App Engine price hike that pissed off developers so much last week and implement a more modest hike.

In case you are still not aware, Canonical (the team behind Ubuntu) has released the first beta of Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric. There are several new additions to the family, notably the revamp of the Ubuntu Software Center and the replacement of the Evolution with Thunderbird. Follow us for the full review and screenshots tour of the Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Beta 1.

Latest version of Dreamlinux XFCE was released in March 2009 and has version 3.5. From this you can see that Dreamlinux is not the most dynamically growing system. Since that time, Debian has changed its stable version. But anyway... let's have a look at what Dreamlinux has to offer.

Usually making Ubuntu mount a partition at startup would require fiddling with the “fstab” which is confusing. The easiest way to mount your partitions automatically when you turn on your computer is by reading this article. So let’s get started!

There is less than one week to go until the 2011 X.Org Developers' Conference begins in Chicago, United States. The tentative schedule has been published on the X.Org Wiki. Among the topics to be discussed are the Nouveau driver, GPGPU computing, OpenGL 3.0 support, the Low-Level Virtual Machine within Mesa, and much more.

I hope someone finds them useful.

This tutorial describes how to give users chrooted SSH and/or chrooted SFTP access on Debian Squeeze. With this setup, you can give your users shell access without having to fear that they can see your whole system. Your users will be jailed in a specific directory which they will not be able to break out of. I will also show how to restrict users to SFTP so that they cannot use SSH (this part is independent from the chroot part of this tutorial).

One of the most interesting devices showcased on the IFA this year is the KT SpiderPad. The main device is an Android smartphone. What makes this smartphone desirable are the accessories.

Some of us take keyboard and mouse input for granted: You type a character on the keyboard, and it appears in your window, or you type a string of characters, press Return, and some action happens—either locally or at a networked distance. What else is there to expect? But what if you don't have or cannot use a keyboard or mouse, or you want to put a keystroke into one window and have it do something in a different window on a different desktop? Or, perhaps, you want to create a window, resize it, pull up a browser in that window, navigate to a URL, then tab through a number of links in the web page and click one—all without a keyboard or mouse, using your voice through a speech recognizer. This approach calls for keyboard and mouse emulation.

Using fixed-price contracts for a contract may seem to limit risk, but it mostly costs more and produces less satisfactory results.

One of my current favourite indie games (and the only Rogue-like I actually like!), Dungeons of Dredmor is still officially coming to Linux!

The BackBox development team has released version 2.0 of its penetration testing distribution. According to the developers, the latest release has a new look and feel, as well as a significant performance boost over previous versions.

Bitfighter is a free multi-player 2-D space combat game with Robotron-like controls. It’s a team-based strategy game featuring retro vector graphics and customizable ships. It’s fast, fun, and frenetic. Bitfighter centers around creating and playing levels made by others. This is done by players hosting servers.

Roccat, the European manufacturer of various gaming peripherals like keyboards and mice, actually has rather good Linux support for their hardware.

HP evidently sees a brighter future for its webOS platform after moving the team into the Office of Strategy and Technology (OS&T) as it figures out what to do with the software. The other half of the business HP acquired from Palm – the hardware element – will continue to reside in its Personal Systems Group that will likely be spun out once the globocorp has considered all the options on the table.

With his characteristically dry British humor, Matthew Garrett outlined the current situation with x86 platform drivers at LinuxCon. These drivers are needed to handle various "extra" hardware devices, like special keys, backlight control, extended battery information, fans, and so on. There are a wide range of control mechanisms that hardware vendors use for these devices, and, even when the controller hardware is the same, different vendors will choose different mechanisms to talk to the devices. It is a complicated situation that seems to require humor—and perhaps alcohol—to master.

Tux Linus Torvalds has published the fifth release candidate of Linux 3.1. As the main server for kernel.org is not completely back up and running after the break-in that was made public last week, Torvalds uploaded the git repository with the mainline Linux sources to GitHub.

Android is growing at a stupendous rate and so is Android Market. Number is applications in Android Market is nearing 300,000 now and the rate of growth is only increasing. Trying to pick the very best of Android games from that enormous list is tough. I will try to give it my best shot anyway. Here are the games I enjoy playing in my Android 2.3.3 powered Galaxy S2.

Ubuntu App Developer Week starts today at 1600 UTC. Find out more about the schedule of events and how you can join in