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Oracle released VirtualBox 4.0.4, a maintenance release of VirtualBox 4.0. that come to improves stability and fixes regressions.

FOSDEM 2011 The Java* track at FOSDEM 2011 started off on the right foot by dealing with the state of the OpenJDK head on – both politically and technically – with a talk from Oracle's Mark Reinhold. There were quite a few speakers at Java DevJam and lots of Java tech over the two days, but this talk was needed to start to clear the air, hindsight suggests.…

We all play it. Every hacker, code monkey, and developer that produces a piece of software - The Version Number Game. Version numbers are suppose to represent the progress of a piece of software makes over time...

Canonical has opened up to the public its vast database of components that are certified to work with Linux in general and its own Ubuntu.

A port scanner is a utility which probes a server or host to verify if the virtual ports of a system are open or closed. Ports allow different applications on the same computer to share network resources simultaneously.

it’s high time that all environmentalists (from big organizations to single people) start to realize, better and on a much larger scale than we’ve seen so far, how important it is to have a real understanding of ICT issues (and to use FOSS/open formats) if you really want to protect the environment

A configuration management database (CMDB) is a repository of information related to all the components of an information system. Although repositories similar to CMDBs have been used by IT departments for many years, the term CMDB stems from ITIL. In the ITIL context, a CMDB represents the authorized configuration of the significant components of the IT environment. A CMDB helps an organization understand the relationships between these components and track their configuration.

awk may be used to count instances and also sum columns for reports. Often it is useful to use awk scripts for the output so that it can be formatted to your needs.

PhoneFactor is the leading global provider for phone-based two-factor authentication and has developed a simple, effective and efficient two-factor security system which ensured protection against today’s biggest threats. The latest version of PhoneFactor features a multi-factor authentication system. They also provide API’s (SDK’s) in PHP and Perl, as well as Ruby and Java, which means it is very compatible with your Linux server.

Where oh where can we find refuge from Microsoft Exchange? One option is Open-Xchange, a groupware suite that serves as a replacement for Microsoft Exchange. From a licensing and cost perspective, OX looks like a great deal--but that means nothing if your users are going to revolt. So let's look at how OX stands up from the user's perspective, and whether you can cut the ties or not and still keep users happy.

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.