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Checkinstall is a utility that builds a .deb, .rpm or Slackware package from a third party source code tarball. This allows you to introduce such third party software using the standard package management features of your distribution. In contrast, the conventional instructions for installing such software packages puts your package manager out of sync with the actual collection of software installed on your Linux box.

We all know that Android does not allow the camera LED to be controlled directly from apps and hence, you cannot use the camera LED as a Torch or Flashlight unless you are rooted. There are many flashlight apps on the Android Market Place but none of them will work for you if you don’t have a rooted phone. BUT this changed recently

The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.6 for FreeBSD and PC-BSD today. Bordeaux 2.0.6 is a maintenance release that fixes a number of small bugs and includes many new features.

One Laptop Per Child wants to join forces to help develop the Indian government's planned US$35 tablet. In a congratulatory note to the government, OLPC Chairman Nicholas Negroponte said the world needs the $35 tablet, and he offered the country full access to OLPC hardware and software technology.

I am typing this as I am finally connected in shell to my Android phone. The prompt reminds me that it’s based on the Linux kernel (it’s free), the Dalvik virtual machine (it’s free), and free libraries. Millions of Android devices are shipped every day, each one is a Linux system. Today, it’s phone. Soon, it will be tablets: Android 3.0 (coming out at the end of the year) will finally be very suitable for tablets. Apple alone will have to face fierce competition on pretty much every front. Microsoft… who? They are more irrelevant every day. I should be happy, right? Well, sort of. Looking back at how long it took me to get this shell prompt makes me worried. Very worried. We are heading towards a world where we no longer own the hardware we buy — and there is no point in having free software if you can’t own your hardware. Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

One of the free software projects we have been talking to as of late about better enhancing their benchmarking capabilities for likely integration into the Phoronix Test Suite is Rigs of Rods. While the graphics within this driving simulator may not be the best (at least when compared to Unigine, or within the open-source world, Nexuiz) it's not the graphics that the developers pride themselves on but rather the physics capabilities. Rigs of Rods began as a truck driving simulator game, but since then has turned into a rather interesting physics sandbox of goodies. A new release of their code-base was just made.

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on a Fedora 13 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

While attending the 2010 Linux Against Poverty event, I was approached by Dr. Neal Scogin. Dr. Scogin resides in College Station Texas and made the trip to Austin to talk to me about one of his most important projects. Neal knows what many of us know...through the slow but steady processes already in place, Linux as a desktop will become an important part of the educational experience. The operating system has become fully functional but much of the educational software as it applies to Linux itself is lacking. What Neal sees as a critical need, is a way to teach kids about their Linux system. What better way than through a game?

"Canada is currently negotiating two major international trade agreements whose success may ultimately depend on the level of protection provided to Parma ham."

[Food might ultimately doom ACTA..excellent. - beirwin]

What exactly does it mean when Richard Stallman says that the Creative Commons’ Attribution-ShareAlike license has a “Weak Copyleft”? Why exactly is it that “Freeware” and “Non-Free Software” mean the same thing, while “Free Software” is something else entirely? And what is this business with “Free Beer”, and where can I get some? If you’ve asked yourself these questions, this column is for you. Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any information on your desktop.

In this tutorial I’ll guide you through making a cool and fresh Water-Colour Wallpaper in GIMP. At the end you can add your favourite operating system logo and set your new wallpaper as your background :) !

James Morris has outlined a preview of the security subsystem changes he is currently carrying in his security-testing-next branch of the Linux kernel that he plans to have Linus Torvalds pull into the next kernel development cycle for Linux 2.6.36. The big change in the kernel security world is that AppArmor is being planned for integration into the Linux 2.6.36 kernel.

Okie dokie - so I've mentioned before that I play Starcraft 2 under my Linux install with no issues. Since the game's official release a few days ago I have been getting a good bit of traffic on those two pages - so I figured I would put together a quick HOWTO for getting Starcraft 2 working on your Linux distro of choice.

Install “kotd” (kernel of the day) via ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/kernel/kotd/openSUSE-11.3/x86_64/ kernel-xen-2.6.34.1-0.0.19.40d88ce.x86_64.rpm ( supporting udev 157). Next step supposed to be is to upgrade Xen 4.0 to support Lucid Grub2 syntax.

There are still a few weeks left before the deadline that demands Oracle appoint a community liaison for their OpenSolaris operating system that is capable of communicating their future intentions to the OpenSolaris community (like where the hell is OpenSolaris 2010.1H) or else the OpenSolaris Governing Board will return control of the community back to Oracle. However, some OpenSolaris community developers have already had enough: they've begun work on a new project.

Pinguy OS is a remastered Ubuntu with a lot of useful default applications - great for those who don't like to do a lot of tweaking and want an OS that "just works". Pinguy OS doesn't rebrand Ubuntu, so you'll have the same Plymouth theme, the Ubuntu logo for the menu and so on. It's just Ubuntu with a lot of default applications and PPAs enabled by default. You'll probably think you don't need Pinguy since there's already Linux Mint which does a great job at enhancing Ubuntu, but you'll notice a lot more useful stuff in Pinguy OS. And you won't miss Linux Mint either because Pinguy OS comes with the Linux Mint main menu and even the Mint repositories enabled by default.

The Linux scheduler, in both the mainline and realtime versions, provides a couple of scheduling classes for realtime tasks. These classes implement the classic POSIX priority-based semantics, wherein the highest-priority runnable task is guaranteed to have access to the CPU. While this scheduler works as advertised, priority-based scheduling has a number of problems and has not been the focus of realtime research for some time. Cool schedulers in this century are based on deadlines instead. Linux does not yet have a deadline scheduler, though there is one in the works. A recent discussion on implementing the full deadline model has shown, once again, just how complex it can be to get deadline scheduling right in the real world.

Music education is a field of study connected with the learning and teaching of music. Music is an essential part of the fabric of our society, and the intrinsic value of music is widely recognized. Human culture uses music to carry forward its ideas and ideals.

The Black Hat security conference attracts the creme de la creme of the security industry. This year the organizers even offered a paid live stream for those unable to make the trip to Vegas. Called Black Hat Uplink, the service carried a $395 price tag. But as security expert Michael Coates found out, the price could be waived entirely, ...