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The Network Information Service distributes information on the network that must be shared between the Linux machines. Sun Microsystems developed a system known as Yellow Pages (YP) that eventually became known as NIS. The original YP is added to most commands for NIS ypserver, ypbind, and yppasswd. Typically NIS is used to distribute information about the users and how they authenticate to Linux.

As of this writing (Tuesday Feb 16th) there don't seem to be any new suggestions from Microsoft to assist XP users whose systems were rendered un-bootable after installing the February 9th patches. For example, the last entry on The Microsoft Security Response Center blog is four days old. So let me offer a suggestion: boot to Linux and move some files around. Windows Update on XP is architected [sic] to allow for the backing out of patches. The problem is that this depends on the system being bootable, so it's of no use when even Safe Mode is unavailable, as is the case here. And, as I wrote last time, the official troubleshooting tool from Microsoft, the Recovery Console, is unusable for many, if not most, Windows XP users.

Codeweavers offers downloads of its Crossover Games for $39.95 and Crossover Professional for $69.95 If you apply coupon code "ComeToTheLight" this will drop CrossOver Games to $29.96 And Crossover Professional to $52.46

For an open source company, nurturing a community around the software is as important as picking the right licence. Although developer communities tend to be more self-starting with a reasonably open development process, user communities, which are a source of valuable feedback, need more encouragement. The H went to the first meeting of the UK BIRT User Group (BUG) to see how one company was helping to create a user community.

Canonical’s partner program for Ubuntu, the fast-growing Linux distribution, took two promising steps forward this week. One step involves a vote of confidence from a key consulting company. The other step involves a key move in the government market. Here are the details.

Mark Guzdial, respected professor and Vice Chair of the ACM Education Board, has expressed some concerns about the impact that open source is having on computing education. Are these concerns legitimate?

He starts from an awfully dramatic position: "At a time when we are trying to broaden participation in computing, open source development is even more closed and less diverse than commercial software development."

PHP might have put the "P" in LAMP - the all open-source server stack - but on the desktop, it seems that those using PHP generally prefer the "W" to the "L." In a recent study from Zend Technologies, forty two per cent of PHP programmers named Windows as their primary development operating system. Linux came second, with 38.5 per cent, while Mac's OS X was third on 19.1 per cent. Zend did not say how many developers it spoke to, but called the December poll a "global survey" ranging from independent consultants to organizations with more than 5,000 employees.

The most heated talk this year during FOSDEM in the X.Org development room was certainly the talk by Luc Verhaegen with his ambitions to clean up the Linux graphics driver stack. Building the entire X.Org stack can be a mess and there is certainly areas to improve upon in the development process and making it easier for end-users and others to test out this latest code. Luc's goal for this is to create unified trees for each driver that contain all of the driver-specific code rather than having various bits scattered all over the place.

There are certain things you need to tweak in Apache running under any Debian platform (including Ubuntu) in order to have it properly redirect webpages (301) after you change your permalink structure in WordPress.

As we shared a few days ago, Fedora 13 will provide OpenGL acceleration support for NVIDIA graphics cards via the Nouveau driver when installing the Mesa DRI experimental drivers package. There is finally 3D acceleration for NVIDIA graphics cards using an open-source driver on Linux without having to depend upon NVIDIA's official binary driver. What makes this open-source 3D support for NVIDIA GPUs even more interesting is that it is atop the Gallium3D driver architecture rather than classic Mesa. With that said, we are providing early benchmarks of the Nouveau Gallium3D driver in Fedora 13 with two GeForce graphics cards as we compare the performance to NVIDIA's official Linux driver.

Dr. Ali Jahangiri, the well known security expert and author of Live Hacking: The Ultimate Guide to Hacking Techniques & Countermeasures for Ethical Hackers & IT Security Experts, is pleased to announce the launch of the Live Hacking CD, a new Linux distribution designed for ethical hacking. The Live Hacking CD contains the tools and utilities you need to test and hack your own network but using the tools and techniques that more malicious hackers would use. As a derivative of Ubuntu this 'Live CD' runs directly from the CD and doesn’t need installing on your hard-drive. Once booted you can use the included tools to perform penetration tests and ethically hack on your own network to ensure that it is secure from outside intruders. As well as the standard Linux networking tools the Live Hacking CD has tools for DNS enumeration and reconnaissance as well as utilities for foot-printing, password cracking and network sniffing. It also has programs for spoofing and a set of wireless networking utilities.

Between radical changes and limited functionality, the KDE 4 series got off to a rough start. However, with each release, KDE 4 has improved steadily and silenced more critics. Now, with the KDE 4.4 release, the series has reached first maturity. Those who expect everything to behave exactly as it did in the KDE 3 series may still struggle with 4.4. But, for those willing to accept change, 4.4 has no shortage of new features to offer, ranging from the implementation of several long-term directions to enhanced usability on the desktop -- including Plasma Netbook, a new interface designed specifically for netbook computers. Released a week ago, KDE 4.4 is rapidly finding its way into distributions. Packages have already found their way into the Debian testing and unstable repositories, and guides are available for installing the new version in many major distributions, including Fedora, openSuse, and Ubuntu.

The convergence of ubiquitous connectivity and cloud computing has one simple and very exciting output: the explosion of hardware gadgets we will use to access information anywhere and anytime. Here are 20 computers you'll be using within the next 5 years.

There is no denying the fact that we have become a touch-centric society in regards to our technology. Where is our technology headed though? With the idea of "bigger is better" in mind: if a 3.5~ inch touch screen is good a larger screen must better right? Enter Tablet PCs and the year 2010

WordPress users rejoice! The latest release of BuddyPress finally brings all that social media goodness to standard WordPress installs. With BuddyPress 1.2, it should only take three steps to get BuddyPress working with a standard WordPress install. BuddyPress was initially developed to add social networking features to a site based on WordPress MU (multiuser), and a stable release followed in 2009, but only for that platform. Installing BuddyPress in the early days was not trivial.

How much functionality can you pack into a 64×64 square? That’s the basic question behind many dockapps – utilities that can be run on the “dock” of many popular desktop environments. While most of them are designed for Step-type window managers such as Windowmaker, these dockapps can also run in things like XFCE, Fluxbox and Openbox. They include system monitors, volume controls, program launchers, email checkers and more. Today we’ll check out some of the more useful dockapps out there, and each will include screen shots, descriptions, and any little notes that might help when it comes to usage. All of the dockapps below are available in the standard Ubuntu repositories. Most of these, and many additional dockapps, can be found at Dockapps.org. Also, as hinted in the opening paragraph, most of these are designed with Windowmaker in mind, which is why so many start with the letters wm.

Last fall, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) issued its much-anticipated Internet traffic management ruling, better known as the "Net neutrality decision." The case attracted national interest because the CRTC established several key requirements for Canada's Internet providers.

Acer announced three new Android smartphones, as well as an Android 2.1 version of its Liquid phone. Acer's BeTouch e400 and BeTouch E110 fall into the mid- and low-end range, while the Acer "Liquid e" and Formula One styled Acer Ferrari smartphone both appear to target the upper ranges of Android phones.

Many times while going through some perl code, you must have come across snippets like “select((select(fh), $|=1)[0])” and wondered what this means, even though you might know that: * $|=1 is used for setting autoflush (i.e. unbuffered data output) and that * select is used to set the default output to a given file handle instead of STDOUT

Call it a rare triple play in the open source server market. Lenovo, Red Hat and Tech Data are partnering to give partners discounts on select Lenovo ThinkServers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced. Here are the details — and the implications for the smal business market.