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There are video converstion programs available for Linux . But if that doesn’t do the trick for you there is a website where you can upload a video have it converted to the desired format online and then when it is finished you are provided with a download link for the file.

Between all that's been happening in the weeks before the release of Ubuntu's third long-term-support release and what's happening in my own computing oeuvre (hey, if you can throw in an obscure French word every once in a while, why not just do that?) I think schizophrenia (hello, LatinGreek) is my personal order of, if not the day then this Debian-FreeBSD-Ubuntu month.

A commenter just wondered if my Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid system's increasing use of swap was due to the known memory leak in X on the soon-to-be-released distro. Could be. After 5 hours 30 minutes of uptime, htop shows 9 MB of swap is being used — or at any rate "reserved." Remember, I have 1 GB of RAM on this Intel video-equipped laptop.

This technique, use iptables to block a particular IP, that has passed the threshold of a certain number of connections in a given period of time. This only uses IPtables and not DenyHost nor Fail2Ban

In a surprising move today, Google chose to feature the HTC Droid Incredible instead of its own Nexus One on Verizon. Could it be a sign, they are backing off from their branded phone?

Marvell is shipping a new member of its Linux-ready Armada line of system-on-chips touted for delivering up to 1GHz performance while consuming less than a single Watt. A slower but more power-efficient version of the Armada 300, the Armada 310 offers 256KB L2 cache, plus PCI-express, gigabit Ethernet, and USB 2.0 connectivity, says the company.

On Unix platform, tar command is the primary archiving utility. Understanding various tar command options will help you master the archive file manipulation. In this article, let us review various tar examples including how to create tar archives (with gzip and bzip compression), extract a single file or directory, view tar archive contents, validate the integrity of tar archives, finding out the difference between tar archive and file system, estimate the size of the tar archives before creating it etc.,

While there's likely already a number of you tired of hearing about Valve's efforts to bring the Steam client and Source Engine to the Linux desktop and are just waiting for an official announcement, there's a few more Linux details to shed this afternoon for those interested in this event that has the possibility of sparking a Linux game revolution. Valve rolled out their "Steam 2010 Client" to Windows gamers today, which brings a new user-interface and other improvements (here's the details for those interested), and is also what their forthcoming Mac OS X client is based upon. Hidden within this major Steam client update are more references to Linux.

Canonical - the commercial entity behind the Ubuntu distribution of Linux - is taking to the clouds. But will cloud builders take to the new Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and its Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud variant? It sure looks like it, if the early results with UEC are any indication. Companies like the utility computing ideas embodied in Amazon's EC2 compute cloud and S3 storage service. But any company that has been managing its own data processing for decades is not going to trust its key applications and workloads on EC2, no matter how cheap and easy it is, no matter how secure Amazon says it is.

Sources say Hewlett-Packard and Red Hat are set to meet for dinner in Las Vegas the night of April 26. So what's on the menu? How about a healthy serving of Sun Microsystems customers. Here are the details.

Canonical has announced that it will offer its own certification programme for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and that graduates will be entitled to claim an 'Ubuntu Certified Professional' certification. Previously Canonical had worked with the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) to offer the Ubuntu Certified Professional exam which combined the general Linux LPI 101 and 102 modules with the Ubuntu 199 module to provide an Ubuntu tailored qualification.

The clipboard is one of the oldest and most important features of desktop computing. With it, you can temporarily store pictures, images, and even file information in the system’s memory, and then copy or move that information to a new destination. KDE has an advanced clipboard system, largely due to a small program called Klipper, which can store more than one piece of data. KDE also has the ability to copy and move files with copying and pasting, and automatic creation of files using clipboard data.

I just finished writing that new book about Fedora 13 last night, so I'm feeling pretty good right now. It's nice to have a project like that put to bed. Of course, when writing any beginner's Linux book, invariably the topic of DVD playback comes up, and I always wrestle with what to tell new Linux users about the convoluted legal mess that watching a DVD on a Linux machine has become. For those who are unfamiliar, DVDs are encrypted with a content scrambling system (CSS) that is designed to prevent unauthorized machines from playing DVDs. What it's really for, of course, is to prevent unauthorized machines from copying the content of a DVD, so illicit copies of Did You Hear About the Morgans? won't be distributed freely across the Internet.

OK, so I had a not-so-great night running Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx — in release-candidate stage at this writing — and wondered what exactly made things so sluggish during a 2+ hour production session hacking away at Dailynews.com. Was it Firefox 3.6.x swallowing CPU and memory? All the social-networking and cloud-integration stuff running in the background? Xorg issues (which come and go with every kernel and Xorg update)? At this point I really don't know.

Google's Android, the increasingly important embedded Linux, had one major problem: it had been moving slowly away from the Linux mainstream. Now, after the recent Linux Foundation Collaboration Conference, Android and Linux are coming back together. Not only is Google going to be hiring two new Android developers to work more closely with the Linux kernel development team, they're also working on re-merging its driver code with Linux. Indeed, the first series of driver patches that will bring Android and Linux back into alignment have already arrived.

Freescale Semiconductor announced that it has signed strategic agreements with Enea, Green Hills Software, and Mentor Graphics to support Freescale's QorIQ, PowerQUICC, and StarCore processors. The agreement with Mentor Graphics calls for the company to work with Freescale on developing a common Linux build and distribution methodology for PowerQUICC and QorIQ system-on-chips (SoCs).

Prior to launching their next-generation graphics processors, NVIDIA dropped their obfuscated open-source driver and have said they will not provide any open-source support at all for their GeForce GTX 400 "Fermi" series as they just recommended their customers use the X.Org VESA driver until they can install the official binary Linux driver. However, the community developers working on the Nouveau driver project still plan to support the GeForce GTX 470/480 graphics cards via clean-room reverse engineering. Today their efforts might be helped thanks to a hardware sponsorship.

It was simply a matter of time before Linux became my primary operating system. My most recent malware incident was the final straw that sent me into the safe haven of Ubuntu. Suffice it to say that last week was a pretty crappy one for me. My FaceBook account was somehow compromised, causing untold amounts of my friends to receive a spammed invite to some sort of diet seminar scam event and then having to endure the embarrassment that accompanied it.

There are times that I would like to open an app as root user without having to use the command line in order to do that. I learned of a nice app in the Fedora repos called beesu and I will show you how to set up a menu entry to be able to use this nice app.

It would appear that the OpenSolaris project is back on track. This is a bit long overdue. The acquisition of Sun by Oracle left a few projects in questionable states. It was unknown as to whether Oracle would continue supporting these open source projects. OpenSolaris was included in that list.