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Red Hat has released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, the first major update for RHEL in over three years. RHEL 5 debuted in March 2007 and used the Linux 2.6.18 kernel. Although incremental updates have added a number of kernel updates and new features, RHEL5 is starting to look aged. Of course much of the appeal of an enterprise distro is precisely that it ages well - ten years in RHEL's case.

The litigation battle between Google and Oracle continues to heat up. The search giant fired the latest volley with a filing that outlines twenty separate defenses against Oracle's claim that Google's Android mobile platform infringes intellectual property that Oracle obtained from Sun. Google argues that no infringement has transpired, and that it isn't responsible even if evidence of actual infringement is found.

Jono Bacon's announcement of the OpenRespect.org project was met with the usual mix of reactions, from approval to charges it is really "The Quit Picking on Ubuntu" project....I think a reasonable baseline is to expect everyone to try, even a little, to get along with their fellow humans.

Burster is an initiative by iTechnologie and Blender Project to bring 3D gaming to the web browser. Burster web browser 3D plugin uses the Blender Game Engine to integrate the fascinating world of 3D into a web page.

Snort is a very powerful IDS that in later versions can act like an IPS. Snort is free to download and use in the personal enviornment as was as in the business environment. In fact Snort is used by many Enterprises as a very effective option for their business because not only is it free but it is one of the most powerful IDS’s out there is you know what you are doing when you configure it. Snort can be created as a program that you run when you want on a personal computer or it can be setup to run when your OS starts and protect all computers on your network from attacks.

Google has accused Oracle of doctoring the code samples that allegedly prove Mountain View pilfered Oracle's copyrighted Java code in building its Android mobile operating system. Late last month, as part of its ongoing lawsuit over the use of Java in Android, Oracle waved six pages of Android code at a federal court (see below), claiming they were "directly copied" from copyrighted Oracle code. But, on Wednesday, Google responded with a court filing of its own, and among so many other things, Mountain View said that in submitting the code, Oracle "redacted or deleted...both expressive material and copyright headers." Google called these omissions "significant elements and features."

VirtualBox is a proprietary virtualization software package currently being developed by Oracle Corporation. Using VirtualBox, you will be able to install additional guest operating systems, each known as a Guest OS, each with its own virtual environment.

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.