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Every once in a while I run into a distro that has me scratching my head and wondering what the developers were thinking. PureOS is just such a distribution. Version 3.0 was just released and announced on DistroWatch, so I thought I’d give it a download and see what it was like. I had initially planned to do a full review of it on Desktop Linux Reviews, but I ran into a snag with the install (which I’ll talk more about in that section of this quick look) so I decided to do a quick look instead. This quick look is based on the live desktop environment.

Jason Perlow and Ken Hess discuss Ubuntu 11.04 and other exciting Ubuntu information with Community Manager Jono Bacon.

Are one company's castoffs another company's treasure? Open source startup ForgeRock this week is celebrating its first year in business, thanks in part to technology giant Oracle. The core of ForgeRock identity offerings were born at Sun Microsystems, which has since been acquired by Oracle. ForgeRock has managed to take a number of open source technologies started at Sun, including the OpenSSO single sign on and identity platform, and position them as the foundation of a growing business. According to ForgeRock, the technologies that it is now building and evolving might not have had a future with Oracle, which has created an opportunity for the startup.

Ever since the PCI council made using a web application firewall a requirement, the WAF market has been screaming for an open source alternative. At the RSA Security, not one, but two vendors came forward to announce new projects: IronBee (a venture between Qualys and Akamai) and the Art of Defense open-sourced its core WAF in a project called openWAF. A few other interesting open source tidbits surfed in RSA, too, from Suricata and Cloud.com.

I’m donning my flame-proof suit for this post. Vim is arguably one of the two most popular text-editors used in the free software world: built on vi (its name stands for VIiMproved) it will be found as a default package in many GNU/Linux distributions. The other popular editor is EMACS (although I am sure there are those who will argue that EMACS is much more than a mere text-editor). I use Vim a lot in my work and have found it to be a little like chess: a moment to learn a lifetime to master. With that in mind here are some of the tips and handy commands I have picked up over the years.

Read the tutorial at Free Software Magazine.

Customisation is an inherent part of Linux, but if you're not comfortable working without your mouse, tweaking aspects of your desktop can be tricky. That's where Ubuntu Tweak comes in. It's a nifty little app that helps you modify aspects of your Ubuntu installation. It breaks your desktop into various categories and enables you to tweak settings buried inside the regular Gnome admin panel and config scripts.

In a recent interview with The H, Eben Moglen professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, and the founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, spoke about his ideas for using simple hardware to free individuals from the tyranny of the client/server model imposed by current web services. It seems his ideas may be on the way to becoming reality in the form of the FreedomBox.

Microsoft and Mozilla traded barbs this week in a dispute over what constitutes a "modern" Web browser. The competitive friction is starting to heat up because the Redmond software giant and Silicon Valley nonprofit are preparing to release the next major versions of their respective Web browsers. Mozilla's Firefox 4 is expected to arrive this month and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 is in the release candidate stage. Both browsers are set to introduce a significant number of new features for end users and Web developers, including extensive support for critical next-generation Web standards.

When the law fails, when government fails, when greed and corruption triumph that is when we need hackers the most-- hackers of technology, law, journalism, community service, of every essential job and workaround that needs doing. Hackers of liberty.

awk allows you to change the fields separators so that you can use on a various kinds of files. You can also use multiple field separators on one file.

Over the last few months the KWin development team worked on bringing the Window Manager for KDE's Plasma workspaces to mobile devices. This has required porting the compositing code to OpenGL ES 2.0, the open graphics API for programmable embedded graphics hardware. With the migration of KWin's codebase to git, the code was imported into the master development tree to be part of the next release of the KDE Platform.

Linux 2.6.38 contains patches to improve the scalability of VFS that has been the topic of much discussion for the past six months and that Torvalds himself was waiting for. Ext3 and XFS now support batched discard, which is interesting for SSDs, while Btrfs and SquashFS support additional compression technologies.

Dear Ubuntu 10.04 LTS users, Kate Stewart announced a few minutes ago, February 18th, the second maintenance release of the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) operating system, which incorporates numerous security fixes and updates.

A second update to Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Xubuntu 10.04 'Lucid Lynx' LTS (Long Term Support) has been released. The announcement was made by Ubuntu release manager Kate Stewart and iso images are immediately available to download.This release include updated server, desktop, alternate installation CDs and DVDs for the i386 and amd64 architectures.

What's the right answer to a programmer that tells you "I don’t even care much for people who use Open Source Software that they didn’t pay and then demand to be treated as those who paid something"? Here's mine

Firewall Builder is a firewall configuration and management GUI that supports configuring a wide range of firewalls from a single application. Supported firewalls include Linux iptables, BSD pf, Cisco ASA/PIX, Cisco router access lists and many more. This tutorial is the second in a series of articles that walk through the basic steps of using Firewall Builder to configure each of the supported firewall platforms. In this tutorial we will configure Access Control Lists (ACL) on a Cisco ASA firewall.

A new Unity version was released a few minutes ago with some exiting new features. New for Ubuntu 11.04 I mean, because they are something that's always been around in Gnome but not available or removed in Ubuntu 11.04 / Unity. The biggest change is the addition of a systray (notification area) to the Unity top panel. But it's different!

The rules for Microsoft's Windows Phone Marketplace appear to mean that even Microsoft's own MS-RL open source license is banned. And perhaps Nokia should worry too.

"I often tell people that setup, configuration, writing, scripting, and other general development of any website is better done on the same web server, or at least the same operating system, that is installed on the web server that the site is going to be hosted and ran on, rather than developed elsewhere and simply dropped in place later. It doesn't matter whether you're using Apache or Windows Server, GNU/Linux or Windows."

The US government has gone full bore into the Cloud as a way to cut its massive IT costs long-term. What's holding you back?