Showing all newswire headlines

Canonical have an interesting trial service available where you can get a version of Ubuntu 10.10 up and running withing the Amazon EC2 environment to play with for an hour or so. Obviously it's not enough time to do anything serious, but I thought I would try it out to see if I could actually get a fully functional cloud based desktop. Even with an hour it is possible to see just how well a remote desktop can be when hosted on the Amazon infrastructure.

We all know that Microsoft doesn't like people messing with their stuff. For example, Microsoft really hates the amount of piracy that surrounds Windows and Office. The company frequently releases updates that make piracy of those products harder and harder. This is completely legal considering that only Microsoft owns Windows and Office. You pay about 300.00USD to have MS Office and MS Windows, and those would be introductory versions of each. Now, apparently, the company wishes to control things even more.

In this article I will show how to install and configure BlockHosts on a Debian Lenny system. BlockHosts is a Python tool that observes login attempts to various services, e.g. SSH, FTP, etc., and if it finds failed login attempts again and again from the same IP address or host, it stops further login attempts from that IP address/host. By default, BlockHosts supports services that use TCP_WRAPPERS, such as SSH, i.e. services, that use /etc/hosts.allow or /etc/hosts.deny, but it can also block other services using iproute or iptables.

The Apache Software Foundation’s latest statement on the Java Community Process highlights continued dissatisfaction and dissent from Oracle’s stewardship and involvement in open source software.

In Part 1 Gimp guru Akkana Peck showed us how to cut arbitrary objects out of images. Today we learn advanced techniques for seamless blending into new images.

Distro developers work hard and could use your financial support. These are hard times, and a lot of people are hurting financially. Jobs and money are hard to come by, and many folks are just getting by. It turns out that even your favorite distro developers could use a few bucks to help them keep churning out new & updated distros for desktop use.

DeadBeef is probably the simplest and the most lightweight music player I have ever used in my Ubuntu. If you are someone who loves to keep it simple and useful at the same time, DeadBeef is one music player you definitely don't want to miss.

The awk utility provides a powerful way to search for text strings using regex. This great tool will help you solve many Bash shell script needs.

One of the questions I keep being asked by solution providers is “What does this new Oracle Linux Kernel mean to me?” Knowing how astute your readers are, I jumped at the chance to share my thoughts on this exciting announcement. Here are the details.

Mozilla has announced the availability of Firefox 4 beta 7, a prerelease build for users who want to help test the next major version of the popular open source Web browser. It includes JaegerMonkey, Mozilla's enhanced JavaScript engine. During our tests of the new beta, we were consistently impressed by its outstanding performance and greatly improved responsiveness. It delivers highly competitive performance and puts Firefox back on an even footing with its rivals. The beta also brings the Firefox 4 theming overhaul to Linux, including the new tab position above the address bar.

Red Hat announced a major new Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 release, adding cloud support, performance improvements, and energy savings. Meanwhile, Red Hat also released a RHEL 5.6 upgrade to its 5x platform, adding support for BIND 9.7, improved DNSsec, and PHP 5.3.

If you are the type of person who can’t live without internet, wake up every morning and check your Facebook account before having coffee, always tweet a new update every 15 minutes and have a large circle of friends on social media websites – you are going to love RockMelt. RockMelt is a new web browser, backed by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, which aims to bridge the gap between social sharing and web surfing. The browser is build around your social circle, feeds, search results and friends.

Security researchers have demonstrated two vulnerabilities that allow attackers to install apps on Android and its vendor-specific implementations without a user's permission. During normal installation, users are at least asked to confirm whether an application is to have certain access rights. Bypassing this confirmation request reportedly allows spyware or even diallers to be installed on a smartphone.

Network File System (NFS) has been around since 1984, but it continues to evolve and provide the basis for distributed file systems. Today, NFS (through the pNFS extension) provides scalable access to files distributed across a network. Explore the ideas behind distributed file systems and in particular, recent advances in NFS.

A few days ago I blogged about a dutch conference I was at and the talk I gave there. I realize it is not very smart to announce your talk at a conf after it is over. However, mistakes help with the learning. I learn a lot and to prove it, hereby tell you all that I will be at Latinoware. I realize Latinoware will start tomorrow, hence I did not improve my communication enough yet - but I will keep working on it.

Joomla! can be extended via the use of "Extensions". These extensions fall into three categories: Components, Modules, and Plugins. Modules are a larger 'catch all' than components. Where components add functionality to the Joomla! core framework, modules add functionality that allows the user to interact with parts of the system. Other types of modules are those that can 'contain' code or images within your site. This article covers the installation, creation and management of modules. Occasionally, you will need to enable, disable, or uninstall a module. This step is simple and is covered in a brief recipe.

It's been two years since the release of Urban Terror 4.1, an open-source first person shooter powered by the ioquake3 engine that started out originally as a Quake 3 mod. Extensive work has been made towards the next release, Urban Terror 4.2, with significant improvements being made from new maps and visuals to a new graphics renderer. However, this past week the Urban Terror developers announced some rather surprising changes, which includes Urban Terror no longer being distributed as an open-source, GPL game.

Today we've received in our mailbox a black envelope from Jolicloud, announcing the powerful and amazing Jolibook netbook device!

Cathy Malmrose, the CEO of independent Linux vendor ZaReason, Inc., is a keynote speaker at the upcoming FOSDEM conference in Brussels on Feb. 5-6, 2011. FOSDEM bills itself as "the biggest free and non-commercial event organized by and for the community."

The 2010 edition of the Free/Open Source Software in Academia Conference (fOSSa) was an interesting event, with several talks that are quite relevant for everybody who cares about effective business and human resources management in ANY sector, not just in the software industry.