Showing all newswire headlines

TrueCrypt is secure, multi-platform, and free "as in beer". The first article illustrated the power of TrueCrypt (a readily available encryption package that is platform independent) and the second article provided a command line method of setting up an encrypted partition on a USB drive. As a result of having read both these articles, It occurred to me that there may be renewed interest in external device encryption with the rash of lost or stolen USB drives, or external hard drives, in recent years. It only makes sense. If you lose an encrypted drive that contains sensitive data, (see the first article listed above) you are only out the value of the drive. If you lose an unencrypted drive, you have the potential to be out thousands, if not millions, of dollars. Which would you prefer?

"If you are running out of RAM on your Linux system, you will want to find the culprit in order to solve the problem, either by reconfiguring the RAM-hungry application or by stopping it." "We'll use ps, awk, head and sort with a pipe, to find out which application is consuming our RAM" "List running processes ordered by RAM usage" ps aux | awk '{print $2, $4, $11}' | sort -k2rn | head -n 20"

I wondered why my formerly favorite open-source-focused blogger Matt Asay has been so ... silent lately. He became Canonical's COO not so long ago, his Cnet blog went into hibernation, his personal blog not so much (but not exactly bursting with activity, either), and he didn't exactly cut a large profile media-attention-wise at Canonical.

The Gimp is a fantastic and free piece of software that can run on all major operating systems and can do nearly any graphic related task! I have been using GIMP for over two years now and really appreciated the many tutorials I had at hand for when I was starting out. Since the early days I have produced my own tutorials in an effort to give back to the open source community and so the purpose of this post is to share and acknowledge the hard work that people have put in into making these great tutorials of 2010!

KDE 4.6 will be slightly more ambitious than the last couple of releases. Judging from the recently-announced first beta, it will include the usual behind-the-scene enhancements, and additions of interest to developers. But it will also include some concrete improvements to the desktop, especially with the changes to the Dolphin file manager and the so-called re-introduction of Activities.

NetCitadel LLC released version 4.1.3 of Firewall Builder today. Firewall Builder is a leading firewall management solution for Linux iptables and other firewalls.

DockBarX 0.41 has just been released, featuring redesigned window previews and menu as well as a close button for the window previews. Before more info on the latest DockBarX, here are some screenshots:

students of the State-owned Federico II University in Naples, Italy, get Windows 7 for free thanks to a deal with Microsoft, but can't access the University online campus from Linux

YouTube is running an HTML5 trial that will allow those with compatible browsers to enjoy the site's millions of videos without the Flash Player/plugin. The fact that maybe 99 percent (I don't know the exact figure, but it's huge) of web-delivered video comes wrapped in Flash, a protocol controlled by one company — and only available on platforms that company deems worthy — is a major disturbance in the Force.

Thankfully, Google has started the release process for their latest and greatest Android version -- Gingerbread. I'm looking forward to installing CyanogenMod's spin of 2.3 as soon as it's available. The big frustration for me, however, is that Gingerbread turned out not to be the tablet killing OS we all hoped for. Oh sure, there are some Android tablets available, but until Google allows regular access to the Marketplace, tablets running Android are going to be a kludge.

Nagios is the foundation for many networking applications world wide and is know for its flexibility. Building upon those concepts is a new project named the Nagios Visual Shell (V-Shell). What follows is a short review of V-Shell and an interview with the lead developer of this new Nagios project.

The Linux Foundation (LF) announced that nine major Linux distros have been certified to Linux Standard Base 4.0 (LSB 4.0), said to confer application portability. While announcing LBS 4.0 registrations for Canonical, Kylin, Linpus, Mandriva, Neoshine, Novell, Oracle, Red Flag, and Red Hat, the LF The LF also released a beta of LSB 4.1.

Part of the big hype over the release of KDE 4 was its new and improved eye candy, mostly due to the Plasma workspace. Those who liked the changes, loved the new KDE from the beginning. Those who did not are still complaining about it. But like any good desktop environment, you are by no means stuck with the default look. In fact, KDE offers more easily customizable features than any other. What follows are 7 ways to get the desktop look you dreamed about when you were a child.

Optimisation only makes sense if the code in question is used a lot – this seems to be the philosophy followed by the compilers of the latest incarnation of Google's free V8 JavaScript Engine. The new "Crankshaft" compilation infrastructure for V8 uses runtime information to see which parts of the code would benefit the most from optimisation. The developers say that the technique is mainly useful in large JavaScript programs; short scripts, such as those used by the SunSpider benchmark, do not benefit much.

You know the basics of how to find out what an errant process is doing. But what do you do when the basics aren't enough? But sometimes those methods aren't enough. What if the failed process is on a server, or a minimal system like a sheevaplug, and you don't have tools like gdb and strace installed? Or what if the runaway process is in Python, so your gdb stack trace isn't any help? What are your options then?

Because Chrome OS is open source, it has been available for people to explore for some time, which means that it's not really possible for any elements of it to be a surprise, rather deflating any attempt to launch it in the traditional sense. But in yesterday's, er, confirmation, there were a number of new announcements separate from the underlying operating system.

Though we used to talk a lot about Ubuntu desktop eyecandy, Conky is something we never really discussed at all. Conky Ubuntu Lucid theme was the only exception, which is by far the most easy to install Conky theme I have ever used. So as to settle the Conky drought once and for all, here we feature one of the best collection of Conky configurations available.

In this tutorial we will setup two Debian Linux nodes with a DRBD volume. MySQL will be available on the primary /actice node. If the primary node fails, the secondary /passiv node will takeover the MySQL daemon.

Ubuntu One Music has now support for iPhone's new AirPlay technology, which allows users to stream audio, video and image files stored in your Ubuntu One account directly to your Applet TV, stereo device, or any other AirPlay-compatible hardware. The AirPlay technology was made available by Apple via the new iOS 4.2 software update.

In an unexpected move, Matt Asay, Chief Operating Officer (COO) for Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, will be leaving Ubuntu. In an e-mail to me, Asay, former VP of Business Development at Alfresco, the open-source enterprise Content Management System (CMS), told me that the news of his departure from Canonical would be be announced internally at Canonical today, December 8th.