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rTorrent is a popular command line based bittorrent client. It provides very powerful features yet it is very light on the system - contrary to other bittorrent clients like Vuze. There are a couple of webinterfaces for it but they are not truly need. SSH access combined with the "screen" program provide you all the tools you need. In addition to the previous compilation guides of rTorrent, this one will also feature ruTorrent on a force Apache SSL connection with password protection.

The Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) is happening this weekend Feb. 25-27 and is, simply, awesome! I heard about it during its infancy but never even looked into it thinking it would be just as expensive as OSCON. Boy was I wrong! The first year I attended, it cost $60. This year the cost is $70. That's $70 for THREE days, which is a steal! Factor in the discounts provided to local open source user groups & it is downright highway robbery. You really cannot beat it.

As many Linux users know, there's a number of motherboard vendors out there who put out very poor/buggy/broken BIOS implementations for their products. For Linux users this can be particularly painful if the changes are catered to workaround issues in Windows but in turn cause a greater mess for non-Microsoft operating systems. As a step to improve the situation, assuming BIOS developers actually will use it, Intel has released a BIOS Implementation Test Suite.

There are a lot of 'touchy' issues in the open source world - none are perhaps more controversial than those involving money. One such case is the recent attempt by Ubuntu to redirect affiliate dollars away from the GNOME project and its Banshee media player - to Ubuntu's own bank account. It's a debate that this week hit Twitter with a flame war of vitriol and NSFW comments. Canonical announced this week that in Ubuntu 11.04, Banshee will have both the AmazonMP3 and Ubuntu One music stores and 25 percent of the revenues will be directed to the GNOME Foundation. GNOME founder Miguel de Icaza wasn't as polite Ewing, and also struck out aggressively at Ubuntu: @jonobacon Oh you are entirely within your rights. Douchebags, assholes and dicks almost never violate any laws. A dick move is a dick move

I started working at NASA Ames Research Center in July, 1992. Prior to this I had worked as a computer operator then network engineer for a large multinational, and I'd been using network services starting with Compu$erve in 1983, then Fido-net, I-link, many BBS's, etc. Being about as close to the heart of things as one could get, and working the graveyard and evening shifts, gave me a wonderful ring-side seat to watch as a Liberty occurred.

Tweak-Center is an idea, albeit a brilliant one, to create a marketplace to download themes, icons, tweaks etc. within Ubuntu Software Center. We have featured a number of very unique mockups and ideas before, but Tweak Center is different in a very good way.

The U.K. has become the latest country to conclude that for information and communications technology (ICT) procurement purposes, “open standards” means “royalty free standards.”

If a picture is worth a 1,000 words a video is worth much more than that! Video overview of Bodhi Linux v0.1.6 Rc2 a nice looking minimalistic distro which uses Enlightenment desktop environment.

Little Linux plug computers come ready-to-use. But they're still Linux, which means hackable. Today we learn how to build a custom kernel for a plug computer.

Yesterday, Amazon.com went live with their free unlimited instant movie and TV streaming service for Amazon Prime Members ($79.00 a year). Amazon.com's Unlimited Instant Video service uses Adobe Flash and is compatible with GNU/Linux based operating systems (such and Linux Mint and Ubuntu).

I've been investigating tiny blog software — mini CMSes if you will (or even if you won't). I already have a blog running on Flatpress. I'm trying to use systems that are simple, radically small and efficient. To that end, I'm anxious to look into Blosxom, PyBlosxom, NanoBlogger and Ode.

Google released a stable version of Chrome 9 earlier this month but now the company has also pushed out a beta version of Chrome 10. As usual, there are many speed enhancements as well as changes in synchronisation and some of the dialog boxes. The biggest, or at least the most noticeable of the changes in Chrome 10 is the completely revamped settings interface. Google has completely redone the settings options which are now presented as a tab rather than a dialogue box.

The flights have been confirmed for some time and they're now being boarded. Speakers are packing and heading to Los Angeles, ready to rehearse their presentations before they go on sometime between Friday and Sunday. Exhibitors prepare to set up their booths. Registrations for the expo continue to roll in. Are you ready for some Linux The 9th annual Southern California Linux Expo is set to start tomorrow, Friday, Feb. 25, at the Hllton Los Angeles Airport hotel.

[I just arrived in L.A. and will be covering it for our readers it all weekend. - Scott]

At the same time "both Nokia and Intel were working on separate handset UIs using Qt, the former proprietary, the latter open-source. A better worked example of squandering your leadership role and wrestling yourself to the ground is hard to see." "This is why Elop needs to fire lots of his senior managers, and beat a 'one company' message into everyone. Nokia deserve their trial by fire – and I hope the people who truly screwed up the amazing Linux opportunity that was the N900 get shut down in the process."

Amazon announced this week that Prime users would now have access to a pool of free content to stream instantly from the video-on-demand portion of their website.

Angela Byron is the co-maintainer of the Drupal open source content management system and framework. She talked to us a bit about her role with the Drupal project, and Drupal 7, the recently released, latest version of Drupal. See the full interview in the April 2011 issue of Linux Journal, on newsstands and in subscriber mailboxes very soon!

Ubuntu has been the most popular Linux distribution on desktop systems for sometime now and according to Google Trends data, Ubuntu probably is the first ever Linux distro to overshoot popularity of Linux itself. And now, Ubuntu is steadily increasing its market share on web servers as well. According to w3techs.com statistics, Ubuntu is now the 4th most popular Linux distro on web servers and growing at a much faster rate than its competitors.

There are some commands that turn out to be more useful than first meets the eye. In my opinion, xargs is one of those commands. It takes the standard input and uses it to build a command line. It's nothing fancy, but it's very handy in some situations. As soon as you have a list of files, you can easily do something to them. A favorite, common enough to have a shell script of its own on my machine, is clean-titles.sh. It simply locates all backup files using the pattern *~, and then passes them on to rm. The result is a nice and clean current working directory and sub-tree.

Gnome Shell 2.91.90 was released yesterday getting some final adjustments according to the release announcement: This release just about concludes user interface changes anticipated before GNOME 3.0. The only significant change we expect after this release is to add a native network indicator based on NetworkManager 0.9.

This tutorial will show you how you can set up an SMS server on Debian with playsms and smstools. In my example I have used an old Nokia 5140i with a USB datacable.