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One thing I have noticed on just about all windows installed computers outside of my strict control is that they are full of viruses, spyware and there are more programs installed than they know what to do with. These programs are also not updated with the latest service patches and virus lists. Most of the time the programs are junkware that are installed automatically with other programs and automatically start up when they log in. Consequently their machines are a mess and run slower than I can swim through frozen molasses. It is easy to see why virus and malware writers love windows machines.

Besides the Fedora 13 Graphics Testing Week taking place over the next few days, this week is also significant within the Fedora community as it will mark the release of Fedora 13 Beta. There's just one month left to go until Fedora 13 (codenamed Goddard) will be officially released, but over the past few hours we have been testing out what will become the official Fedora 13 Beta spin this morning. Fedora 13 is quite exciting and worth checking out.

This tutorial shows how to set up a USB-over-IP server with Mandriva 2010.0 as well as a USB-over-IP client (also running Mandriva 2010.0). The USB/IP Project aims to develop a general USB device sharing system over IP network. To share USB devices between computers with their full functionality, USB/IP encapsulates "USB I/O messages" into TCP/IP payloads and transmits them between computers. USB-over-IP can be useful for virtual machines, for example, that don't have access to the host system's hardware - USB-over-IP allows virtual machines to use remote USB devices.

NagiosGrapher can be used to create graphical presentations of your data that you collect with Nagios. This tutorial will provide you with some of the tricks to get it working and show graphs once you have it all installed. The response time for your web server is used as an illustration.

If you're looking for a handheld hd multimedia device, your search ends here. This is such a cool device. The only downside is apparently the korean manufacturer can't keep up with demand as it's fully sold out at the moment of this writing.

fter covering the war of words over IBM's use of patents in a business dispute with French start-up TurboHercules and giving my two cents on this open-source family fight, I'd hope the matter would die down. I was wrong. Florien Mueller, the founder of the European NoSoftwarePatents campaign, who started this most recent open-source internal fuss, has now published an analysis which claims that some of the patents "IBM asserted against Hercules may also [jeopardize] other major Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects, including but not limited to OpenBSD, Xen, VirtualBox, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite and Kaffe."

Google appears to be prepping an Android-based tablet device, says The New York Times. Meanwhile, a study by IMS Research predicts that at year's end, Apple's iPad will own 51 percent of the $3.6 billion tablet PC market, with Android taking 24 percent.

For a long time, using an iPhone with Linux was a complete no go. With a jailbroken phone, you could mount it over a wireless connection using fuse, and then sync music your music that way – but syncing an entire music collection via wifi? No thanks. However, thanks to some rather clever folk, there’s a new solution that gives you access to a whole lot of your iPhone functions on Linux “natively”.

While TonidoPlug is a great personal server as it is, you can teach it a few neat tricks. For example, how about turning your TonidoPlug into a fully-fledged server running the MySQL/PHP stack?

Most folk know if they want a secure gateway between the Internet and their home or business they should use Linux for maximum protection. The new IPFire distribution seeks to take security to the highest level while also making things a breeze for the less experienced to set up.

The free software community, along with the commercial ecosystem which surrounds it, is widely seen as having pointed the way toward successful, collaborative development of common resources. We have seen a number of attempts to port the free software model to other areas of endeavor. Open content, headlined by sites like Wikipedia, has adopted this model with considerable success. Other areas, such as open hardware, are still trying to find their way. Your editor recently read an interesting book (Rob Carlson's Biology is Technology), which raises an interesting question: is there a place for an ecosystem based around free "software" running on biological processors?

One of the remarkable features of KDE 4 is the extensibility. Developers or even regular users can contribute to the rich collection of artwork, software, widgets, and visual improvements. Ever so often, I look around for rather random add-ons that make my desktop experience more pleasant or occasionally even serve a meaningful purpose. They range from full applications to very basic widgets.

The sidux distribution is one which has been on my to-review list for a while. It's a small project which makes a bold effort to take Debian's Unstable repository and turn it into a functioning day-to-day operating system. Prior to trying out this ambitious distro, I had a chance to chat with two of the project's developers, Ferdinand Thommes and Chris Hildebrandt.

The annual DrupalCon conference is coming up, April 19th to 21st at San Francisco's Moscone Center. Drupal, of course, is the increasingly popular open source content management system founded by Dries Buytaert, and OStatic itself runs on the platform. There will be many movers and shakers from the Drupal world at the conference, and we've been running a series of Drupal-focused guest posts in advance of it. In this latest Q&A post, Zack Rosen, co-founder of Drupal-focused services company Chapter Three, discusses the company's new offering, dubbed Mercury.

It's been three weeks since Phoronix Test Suite 2.6 Alpha 2 was released (compared the usual two weeks, due to the tour of Chernobyl), but the third alpha release for this next release codenamed "Lyngen" is now available. Phoronix Test Suite 2.6 Alpha 3 is carrying mostly internal changes and improvements to pts-core, but there are some externally visible changes too. The start of the suite-to-pdf option has been introduced, various bug-fixes, text-based interface enhancements, tweaks to the generated graphs, and compatibility with older versions of PHP 5.1/5.2.

I would wager that you don't know where many of your most important files are. Can you access them with your file manager with little effort, print, copy, delete, duplicate, or otherwise work with these files? Probably not.

It was 8:00 AM and CIA agent Carl Cummings was already having a bad day.

I’m having an identity crisis. Regular readers of both this blog and my Education blog will know that I border on being a Google fanboi and Linux tends to work its way into my computer passions as well. I work almost constantly in the cloud and Linux obviously provides a cheap, stable platform for whatever I want to do online. My primary desktop and exclusive web and file server platforms? Ubuntu. Google Apps makes my life easy in my day job and manages virtually all of my communication needs in and out of work. However…

In the mood for a bit more color in your life? Check out Bashish to try out themes for your terminal. I installed from source due to problems with the Debian repository; if doing this, note that you'll need to install the dialog package manually via apt-get. Once you've run ./configure; make; sudo make install, run bashish to get things set up properly. Then restart a terminal to get the default theme. bashish list shows the theme list and bashish THEMENAME switches theme. Try elite for a multi-line prompt, moan for something more basic, or flowerpower for a floral look!

How does a distribution with 25 packagers maintain 8,600 packages in their repository and come back for more? Here's a look at the new Unity Linux Build Server (buildserv) which was recently designed to allow developers and packagers to point and click RPMs into a testing repository after building both x86 and x86_64 in a chroot...all done "automagically" in the background.