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Lost your shell connection? Need multiple shell sessions? You are logged into your remote server via SSH and happily plucking along at your keyboard and then it happens. Suddenly, the characters stop moving and then you get the dreaded “Connection Closed” message. You have just lost your session. You were halfway through some task and now you have to start over. Ugh. Well you can prevent this from happening by using screen. The Linux screen tool can not only save you from disconnection disasters, but it also can increase your productivity by using multiple windows within one SSH session. I use this tool all of the time in our server management work.

The latest Humble Indie Bundle whereby Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux gamers can pay what they want for a collection of cross-platform, DRM-free games is off to a tremendous start. This latest bundle just went live around three hours ago, but it's already pulled in more than $100,000 USD...

Altitude is a 2D side-scrolling airplane shooter game created by Erik Measure and Karl Sabo, the founders of Nimbly Games. The game is a fierce contest of fighter planes, battling for supremacy of the skies in a fast paced combat that is way more fun than a flight simulator. It is a game of steely nerves, hair-trigger reflexes and brilliant tactical thinking. There are five unique planes to choose from and an online community that will provide you with hours of entertainment.

David Airlie has called upon Linus Torvalds to pull in his DRM Git tree that offers the key Direct Rendering Manager graphics driver improvements for the Linux 3.1 kernel. Previously I talked about some of the DRM changes for Linux 3.1. What is found in David's tree for the Linux 3.1 merge window is nearly the same. The open-source graphics driver changes queued up for the Linux 3.1 kernel aren't nearly as exciting as what has been merged during some of the past kernel development cycles. There isn't any major new hardware support, no ground-breaking features, or other really fundamental changes, but just some modest updates.

Ryan Finnie announced a few days ago the immediate availability of a new version of his Finnix Linux distribution, now powered by the recently released Linux kernel 3.0.

In this week’s edition of TLWIR, I will take a look at the continuing twentieth anniversary celebration of our beloved GNU/Linux operating system. I will also look at Microsoft’s olive branch extended to the Linux community. In yet another surprising turn of events, the U.S. Department of Defense has released its own GNU/Linux distribution. Finally, I will look at the increasing “biodiversity” in the free software environment, and how Linux and other free operating systems benefit from this diversity.

I've been hard on Ubuntu 10.04 over the life of the release. While the UI changes in 11.04 (GNOME giving way to Unity) are bigger, I thought the changes from 9.10 to 10.04 were too huge and unproven for an LTS release. My opinion was and is that 10.04 needed to be 9.10 with bug fixes and not a total reworking of the GNOME theme with buttons on the other side of the screen and lots of unproven, slightly broken Ubuntu-coded (or -ordered) enhancements.

Disk encryption is not something most personal computer users think of when they consider ways to boost the security profile of their computer. A firewall? Yes, that in the minds of most is what computer security is all about. However, a firewall is a network security tool, and it is useless if your computer is lost or stolen. That is when disk encryption comes into play. And if you truly care about guarding access to your data, encrypting the hard drive holding it is just as important as a firewall.

So, how does encrypting a hard drive, protect your data?

eCryptfs is a POSIX-compliant enterprise-class stacked cryptographic filesystem for Linux. You can use it to encrypt partitions and also directories that don't use a partition of their own, no matter the underlying filesystem, partition type, etc. This tutorial shows how to use eCryptfs to encrypt a directory on Debian Squeeze.

Canonical, promoter of Ubuntu Linux, has finally announced a new partner program called Ubuntu Advantage (UA). Ubuntu certainly has a strong following in certain niche PC markets. But can Canonical finally master the partner ecosystem? Here’s the update.

Keeping Red Hat out of Windows shops The SUSE division of Attachmate has managed to talk Microsoft into shelling out another chunk of change – $100m – to help prop up SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, the Linux distro formerly controlled by Novell, and to help drive Red Hat's rival distro from Windows shops.…

Habey announced a 12-inch panel PC with a 1.8GHz, dual-core Intel Atom D525 processor and Nvidia Ion GT218 graphics card. Ready for home theater applications, the PPC-6512 offers HDMI/VGA dual display capability, plus mini-PCIe, SATA, USB, serial, and Ethernet connections, according to the company....

The latest feature to be pulled into the Linux 3.1 kernel is support for OpenRISC, an open-source CPU architecture...

After an earlier quick look, it seemed Linvo GNU/Linux was worthy of a spotlight. Linvo is a Slackware-based distribution featuring GNOME 2.32 and is shipped as a live image. The desktop is pretty and features a handy set of applications. In addition, additional applications are available through a popular one-click format.

Sharing data is a very frequent activity in the computer world. There are many great ways and utilities to share data with other people on network. Python provides a very quick and simple way to share data with people on the network. To share the data within a directory, go to that directory (through cd command) and execute command python -­m SimpleHTTPServer <portnumber> .Please note that the above command is very case sensitive .

There are three ways to start applications when the Ubuntu server starts; upstart jobs, backward compatible system-V scripts and using rc.local. This article will provide examples of how to make it work.

It's been four years since Microsoft and Novell inked their controversial interoperability agreement and it still had a year left to run. Even though SUSE is under new management with Attachmate Group, Microsoft liked the agreement so much that it decided to re-up the deal for another four years and $100 million. Attachmate looked the $100 million in the face, and said yes.

Few programmers enjoy writing software documentation, though the quality of their lamentations on the subject indicates that many are talented writers. Good source code documentation takes time and effort, and it’s essential, so what’s an overworked coder to do? Look for tools to make it easier, like the Doxygen documentation system. Doxygen generates documentation directly from source code. It supports multiple output formats, such as HTML, PDF, RTF, man pages, and LaTeX. It works out-of-the-box with C++, C, Java, Objective-C, Python, IDL, Fortran, VHDL, PHP, C#, and D, and community members have written helpers for other languages such as Perl, JavaScript, Visual Basic, Object Pascal, VB.Net, and TCL.

This week's KDE Commit-Digest brings two featured articles: Milian Wolff writes about his work on C++2011 support in KDevelop and Dominik Haumann presents improvements in Kate Variable Editor. The changes review brings: Work on C++2011 support in KDevelop continues. KStars gains a program to write NOMAD data to MySQL, GSoC work on FOV export, speed optimizations and a fix in file seek. From the security-related changes, there is improved protection against spoofing attacks in URLs in KWebkitpart. Resource storage support is improved in KDE-Runtime. Karbon now supports moving objects between layers. User interface improvements can be seen in PublicTransport, including new alarm configuration and colors in filter menus. KMail and KGraphViewer, independently, see performance improvements in font handling. SSL support in Rekonq gets cleanup and improvements. Among the other changes, we can see bugfixes in KDE-PIM, KMyMoney, Calligra, K3B and PublicTransport. Read the rest of the Digest here. read more

The Desktop Summit is only 2 weeks away. Excitement builds! The program consists of 3 days of talks, followed by 4 days of workshops and BoFs. In these sessions, Free Desktop contributors and enthusiasts gather face-to-face to discuss and work on current topics. read more