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Just in time for the Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) release, Stack Exchange has introduced a new website, called askubuntu.com, dedicated to Q&A for Ubuntu users, developers and partners. Here’s a look, and some thoughts on where the site fits into the Ubuntu ecosystem.

With all the hype surrounding mainstream Linux distributions like Ubuntu, openSUSE and Fedora, it’s easy to forget that there are quite a few other excellent distros out there. Case in point – Zenwalk. As Dmitri Popov discovers it’s a great way to give your old hardware a new lease of life…

Dalibor Topic was the one to give me this idea, though I’m not sure if he’d remember the tweet. He was, however, the one who pointed me at MarkMail‘s archive of open source list traffic, which I’d seen before, using a by domain constraint, which I hadn’t. The idea is simple: MarkMail maintains a searchable index of the mailing lists for a number of open source projects (these, specifically). As a means of demonstrating the value of its MarkLogic Server, it parses the individual messages into XML and renders them queryable according to specific dimensions.

James Michael Dupont (Mike) is a software developer that is doing a lot to promote Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) in Kosovo and other Balkan countries. This year, Mike invited a first class team to spend a couple of weeks in the southern Balkans, to explain why and how FOSS can play a great role in the social and economic development of those countries.

In what has become an unfortunate tradition for the past few releases, prior to the release of Ubuntu 10.10, AMD provided Canonical with a pre-release of their latest proprietary Catalyst driver at the time. They have done this to fix some major bugs, but primarily to provide a working ATI/AMD proprietary graphics driver that will run against their latest Ubuntu Linux release as usually their latest public releases at the time do not support Ubuntu's kernel and/or X.Org Server. With Maverick Meerkat, which was released yesterday, there is a pre-release of the Catalyst 10.10 Linux driver, which will not be released to the general public until later in October.

On most Linux setups, MySQL comes as a readymade installation package, making it easy to get started. It is, however, a little more complicated to run multiple instances in parallel, often a setup handy for development. This is because in contrast to Windows, MySQL is usually not installed in a self-contained directory, but most Linux distribution packages spread it across the appropriate system folders for programs, configuration files, and so on.

Today is 10/11/10 on the US calendar, mm/dd/yy. Happy binary day! Today is binary day in the US, 10/11/10. European calendars put the day first, 11/10/10, which is still binary. Yesterday was binary day too, 10/10/10. It might seem like cheating a little bit to use a two-digit year, but I'll worry about Y3k later.

What you do with your disks after you're done with them does matter. Find out how to properly prepare them for the next owner. Listed at number ten in Ten Essential Linux Admin Tools a few weeks ago, you had what was perhaps your first glimpse of Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN) disk wiping utility. Today, you have it in glorious 3D* action that’s sure to convince you to add DBAN to your utility belt as you head to the inner sanctum of your local data center.

eyeOS is a web based desktop operating system. Despite its unusual deployment orientation, in many ways, it's a full desktop operating system, complete with file management and full applications that operate within draggable, resizable windows. As well as an overview of what the eyeOS 1.9 branch has to offer, I'll take you through what I did to install it on a Debian type operating system. Overall, I felt that it was a usable system and perhaps even a glimpse at what most computing is going to be like in the future.

A step by step tutorial on how to install OpenQRM 4.7 with LXC support in Debian Lenny/Squeeze.

FTP is a very insecure protocol because all passwords and all data are transferred in clear text. By using TLS, the whole communication can be encrypted, thus making FTP much more secure. This article explains how to configure PureFTPd to accept TLS sessions on a Debian Lenny server.

A quick look at the latest release of Sabayon Linux. Sabayon Linux 5.0 was released about a year ago, and I did a review of it for Desktop Linux Reviews. Version 5.4 has just been released so I thought it was definitely worth a quick look to see what has been updated and if it’s worth checking out.

LXer Feature: 11-Oct-2010

Some of the big stories this week included Steve Ballmer saying Android isn't free, Bruce Byfield talks about Ubuntu's real contribution to FOSS, Google makes aggressive counterclaims in the Oracle suit, Glyn Moody asks; Is Microsoft running out of steam? and last but not least Scott Charney, a Microsoft VP says that infected PCs should be banned from the internet. You have to read it to believe it. Enjoy!

The Wine maintenance release 1.2.1 is now available. The source is available now, Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

The last Open World Forum explored many sides of openness beyond Open Source software. Here are some notes I took while I was there, from women in FOSS ("The day women go to FOSS, it will finally become mainstream.") to Eben Moglen's keynote ("We make software that supports Freedom; then we put that software everywhere; then we turn Freedom on")

It's been quite a while since having anything to report on with the LM_Sensors project, which is the free software project to provide user-space utilities and kernel drivers for various hardware sensors to be supported under Linux. LM_Sensors makes it possible to monitor the CPU/system temperatures, fan speeds, voltages, and other metrics for many systems and motherboards. The last time though we brought up LM_Sensors was in May when it received some better Intel CPU support, but the last major release (LM_Sensors 3.1.0) happened in March of 2009. Today though, LM_Sensors 3.2.0 has been released.

OpenSSH key public key authentication, let users log into server without the need to use their user's passwords. It is possible to disable any other form of login into server, and let available only authentication based on ssh public key. What is achieved, using this method is to avoid password break by brute force attacks. For this method to work, three steps should be taken. Create a pair public / private key ssh Disable root login in the server Disable password login for any other user in the server

An article published last month that explains how to generate OpenDocument spreadsheets directly from DB2 databases also shows how easy it is (with any database, not just DB2) to generate dynamically from a database, for all the visitors of your website, spreadsheets and other office documents in an editable format that is immediately usable by many office suites (including Microsoft Office)

Ladies and gentlemen, dear Ubuntu users, after three alphas, one beta and a release candidate, we are pleased to announce that Ubuntu 10.10 is here, today (October 10th), available on mirrors worldwide (see the download links at the end of the article).

Ubuntu 10.10 'Maverick Meerkat' has been released few minutes back as part of 6 months release cycle and it is the first release that follows Ubuntu 10.04 'Lucid Lynx' Long Term Support (LTS).