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Today, Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the open source space. It’s a vast language and there are many gems to discover, so following on from the success of our previous Python tips article, we’ve compiled more tips to make your Python experience that much more worthwhile…

Isecur1ty team have announced the first version of iScanner 0.1. iScanner is a free, open source, tool that lets you detect and remove malicious codes and web pages viruses from your Linux/Unix server easily and automatically. iScanner is programmed by iSecur1ty using Ruby programming language, the current version of iScanner is "0.1" released on (31-Jan-2010) under the terms of GNU Affero General Public License 3.0.

This tutorial shows how to set up a PXE (short for preboot execution environment) install server with Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala). A PXE install server allows your client computers to boot and install a Linux distribution over the network, without the need of burning Linux iso images onto a CD/DVD, boot floppy images, etc. This is handy if your client computers don't have CD or floppy drives, or if you want to set up multiple computers at the same time (e.g. in a large enterprise), or simply because you want to save the money for the CDs/DVDs.

With the Apple iPad buzz going around, there can't be a better time to demonstrate the 'tablet' implications of Google Chrome OS. With the market leader, Microsoft, not having even one credible OS in the netbook or tablet range, one should be literally sleeping not to see the tremendous opportunity.

In our original article two years ago, we did a complete overview of the entire KDE 3.5 Control Center, a task that was not small by any stretch of the imagination. But since so many of you felt that it was unbelievably helpful to you, as well as instrumental in instructing new users on the usage of KDE in Linux, I've decided to go ahead with a new series, this time detailing the new System Settings control panel for KDE4. The reason I'm doing this now, and I hadn't done it before this, is because I wanted to wait until KDE4 grew and matured enough to make this worth doing. I believe it's reached that point with KDE 4.3. It may still have some growing to do, but the new System Settings panel (the replacement for Control Center) is more or less finalized, allowing for articles such as this to be written without concern for too many changes or obsolescing of features in the meantime as it continues to mature.

I wrote this script a few days ago to plot real-time / streaming data with gnuplot. The motivation was that I needed to test a piece of code for a touchscreen driver that I had written at work. The issue was that the UI wasn’t quite ready yet, so I wanted to test just the driver to be working fine. Now, the very first thought for the software to use that came to me was “gnuplot” but I found that it can’t really do this in an easy way. A colleague suggested me to use “replot” command with gnuplot. I whipped out my perl hat and a few hours later, voila!!

FreeBSD, and the other BSDs, are exceptionally stable and powerful operating systems, but they can be quite different from Linux. Although they share common principles and ideals, and a huge amount of software, when it comes down to it, FreeBSD and Linux are two different beasts. This doesn’t make FreeBSD better or worse, but it is something to be aware of. Perhaps the most challenging thing about FreeBSD is the initial installation. While PC-BSD, another BSD variant, has made a lot of headway in making BSD easy to use, FreeBSD is still king as far as the BSD’s go. With the recent 8.0 release, it may be time to give FreeBSD a look. FreeBSD is favoured by many for service management and hosting, running Web servers and mail servers, etc. But it works as a fully functional desktop as well. This tip will take a quick walk through the installation. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on whether or not you are familiar with installing FreeBSD, the installer has not changed significantly over the years. Yes, it is still text-based.

Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Novell developer who maintains the staging, USB and driver core for Linux, has announced that the driver code for Google's Android operating system has been removed from the 2.6.33 Linux code base. Kroah-Hartman says that "I love the Android phone platform" but that the code for supporting Android has not been cared for, and as is his policy, uncared-for code is removed from the source code control system. The change was committed to the Linux source tree on December 11th, last year.

MySQL founder Monty Widenius, who left Sun Microsystems early last year, remained very vocal throughout the long machinations leading up to Oracle's acquisition of Sun, even mounting a letter writing campaign. With the Sun acquisition going forward, we reached out to Monty for an interview and he was kind enough to share his thoughts with us. In this two-part interview he speaks candidly about MySQL and Sun, and we will run the second half of the long interview tomorrow.

Two days ago we reported on hybrid graphics coming to Linux in a crude form that allowed switching between graphics processors on notebook computers that utilize dual graphics processors, one that's meant to deliver the best energy efficient performance while the other GPU is for maximizing the graphics performance in demanding environments. Just 24 hours after this kernel patch hit the Internet it already went through four revisions by Red Hat's David Airlie, which delivered better switching and greater notebook compatibility. Since yesterday this patch has already undergone a few more revisions.

"What’s holding it back is people’s love of the Microsoft operating system and that fact that it’s familiar and so on. But actually the trajectory of progress in the Linux world is very, very impressive. I think it’s only a matter of time for ARM to gain market share with or without Microsoft."

The Britain Loves Wikipedia scheme will see UK museums and galleries opening up to the free online encyclopaedia. Throughout February, volunteer authors can take part in special tours to document artworks and natural treasures at a total of 20 institutions.

Days after a hacker broke open the inner multi-touch capabilities of Google's Nexus One, Google announced it is now offering pinch-to-zoom capability on the Android phone via a software update. In other Google news, the company has posted pictures of the Linux-based Chrome OS running on a tablet prototype.

Canonical and the Ubuntu community are busy polishing Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), a major upgrade set to debut in April 2010. But before the new Linux distribution arrives, the Ubuntu community will host an Ubuntu Global Jam from March 26 to March 28. The big questions: Will customers also join in the Jam? Should they? Here are some thoughts.

Kate Stewart is the manager of the PowerPC team at Freescale. As such, she has a basic customer service problem to solve: people who buy a board from Freescale would like to have some sort of operating system to run on it. That system, of course, will be Linux; satisfying this requirement means that Freescale must operate as a sort of Linux distributor. At her linux.conf.au talk, Kate talked about a new initiative aimed at helping distributors to ensure that they are compliant with the licenses of the software they are shipping.

It happened like this. Recently our online banking authentication procedures changed. For the better I might add. While these security measures are far more secure they also prevented me from accessing our joint bank account whenever I wished. The end result was that I didn't check the account status often enough and an automatic payment didn't go through. Enough was enough I shouted out the window at two o'clock in the morning. After dodging a few smelly shoes and empty beer bottles I decided to set up my wifes phone to enable it to use the new security measures..

Making scripting fun again. Vimscript provides excellent support for operating on collections of data, a cornerstone of programming. In this third article in the series, learn how to use Vimscript's built-in lists to ease everyday operations such as reformatting lists, filtering sequences of filenames, and sorting sets of line numbers. You'll also walk through examples that demonstrate the power of lists to extend and enhance two common uses of Vim: creating a user-defined function to align assignment operators, and improving the built-in text completions mechanism.

Facebook's re-written PHP to transform the dynamic language for fast performance on web-scale server farms without adding additional hardware. The site's engineers have announced HipHop, which turns the popular and dynamic PHP code into highly optimized but static C++ and then compiles it using the GNU C++ compiler, g++. The change has been released to the community under the PHP license, and you can read more here.

Some time back I wrote about creating a number of konsoles automatically using dcop. Although we were at the time well into the KDE4 era I had not yet upgraded since there were still things that weren't quite working with KDE4, most of these have now been fixed so I've upgraded some of my systems to KDE4, which means it's time to update the original code to now use dbus.

With the introduction of Ubuntuzilla repository, it has become even more easier installing latest Firefox updates in Ubuntu. No more command line burn outs, just use the Synaptic instead.