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A few months back, I wrote an article looking at battery life on a couple of laptops using several different OSes. Windows XP, Vista, and 7 were the main focus, but I decided to test battery life on Linux running Ubuntu as well. Naturally, the Linux community wasn't happy to see their OS place last in the battery life results. One of the readers actually took the time to offer his help in getting a Linux OS configured "properly", and we started work.

More games for Linux and open source - a large choice for every taste. Strategy, chess, and more.To be continued..

The reviews on the first edition of this book were overwhelmingly favorable, so you'd expect Sobell's second edition to be at least on par. What I want to know before handing over my hard earned green, is why I should buy the second edition? What has changed so much in the world of Linux in 4 or 5 years that makes a difference? With those questions in mind and tome in hand, off I went in pursuit of the answers.

On Sunday 27th of December at the 26th Chaos Communication Congress (26C3) in Berlin, security researchers published open source instructions for cracking the A5/1 mobile telephony encryption algorithm and for building an IMSI catcher that intercepts mobile phone communication. The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) standard for digital mobile phone networks, which is used by around four billion people in 200 countries, is quite insecure, explained cryptography expert Karsten Nohl in front of a large audience of hackers. While this has been known in academic circles since 1994, the evidence now produced leaves "no more room for playing hide and seek" said Nohl.

Very little is done quietly in a giant multi-national corporation. Exceptionally high-profile firms like Google undergo even more scrutiny, making it somewhat unusual to discover they've been developing numerous projects — in the open, and Open Source-licensed — that are all but unknown. As odd as it may be, that is exactly the case at Google. A post yesterday from a Polish student/software developer lists several dozen such projects, few of which could be described as household names, even in the geekiest of homes.

If you were sat at your Linux computer one dark evening in late 1999, things would have been considerably different. Your machine would probably be running either Red Hat 6.1 or Mandrake 6. Outside your window, the world was going crazy for all things dotcom. Microsoft was prepping both Windows 2000 and its ill-fated Millennium edition, while Apple had just released OS 9 and its Power Mac G4. As a Linux user, you'd have been an uber-geek, someone with an obsessive interest in computing and far too much time on your hands. But things have changed. Linux is now an operating system anyone can install and use, and it's growing stronger every year. Here's how it happened.

In this article we will discuss the basic networking concepts of OpenVPN, and also have a brief look at the configuration. At the end of the article, OpenVPN is compared to IPsec, the quasi-standard in VPN technology, help and documentation for OpenVPN

This might make me sound like an old fogey, but I really do miss the old games like Space Quest, The Curse of Monkey Island and Return to Zork. The problem isn't that I don't have the games anymore, but rather that they were designed for my 386 computer running DOS. Thankfully, I'm not alone in my fits of nostalgia. The developers over at http://www.scummvm.org have reproduced the “Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion” developed by Lucas Arts and packaged it into a virtual machine (thus, ScummVM). That virtual machine is open source and available for just about any platform you can imagine.

In a desperate last gasp bid to stop Oracle buying Sun Microsystems and its precious MySQL kit and kaboodle, the database's co-creator - Michael ‘Monty’ Widenius - has launched a campaign to "help keep the internet free." As we reported earlier this month, the European Commission welcomed a series of promises made by Oracle about the future of the MySQL database, all of which signalled that the company's planned $7bn takeover of Sun Microsystems may now get the all-clear from regulators in the New Year.

Hardly a day goes by without yet another news story about creative uses of copyright, the DMCA, and generic attack lawyers to stifle free speech, criticism, and competition. It seems that money can buy all kinds of creative "justice." For example, in the increasingly bizarre Apple vs. Psystar drama, in which Psystar commited the awful crime of selling a tool to help customers install Mac OS X on the hardware of their choice, Apple have prevailed yet again in court, and Psystar cannot do this anymore.

Packet Fence bundles many useful and powerful network protection tools into an attractive, integrated package. Such as network access control, monitoring, intrusion detection, VLAN isolation, DHCP fingerprinting, and captive portal. Eric Geier introduces us to this protective powerhouse.

The best thing about Firefox is that just when you think you know everything there is to know about the browser, something new comes along and surprises you.

Most people have tended to dismiss the OpenOffice.org project as a distant runner-up to Microsoft Office, and certainly not a serious contender. Microsoft seems to feel otherwise judging by a new job ad for a “Linux and Open Office Compete Lead". According to this, competing with both GNU/Linux and OpenOffice.org is "one of the biggest issues that is top of mind" for no less a person than Steve Ballmer.

The new year is almost upon us, so it's a good time to wrap up the year 2009 and ruminate over the best open source software and hardware this year brought us.

NNTPGrab 0.6 Beta 1 now has support for plugins. With this it will be easy to add new functionality to the program in future releases. Right now several plugins are already available. The yEnc decoder, PAR2 repair and automatic unpack functionality have been moved to individual plugins.

For those of you that still have time off of work from the holidays, there is a new release of the Alien Arena first-person shooter if that piques your interest. Alien Arena 7.33 has been released, which is coming just two months after Alien Arena 7.32.

RAIDCore VRA solutions support Windows and Linux and offer a storage "system on a chip" that provides the same functionality as hardware-based RAID. The technology uses the power of multi-core server CPUs to provide integrated storage capabilities and process RAID tasks without compromising performance.

Your editor wishes to take no position on whether Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems should be allowed to proceed by the European Union. Such a decision certainly involves a number of antitrust considerations which go beyond the free software community. That said, some of the positions being taken around this acquisition shine an interesting light on how parts of our community work.

Speculation is a part of technical news as prophecy is to religion. Its only important, valid or genius if it turns out to be true. However, we dare not have technical news without any speculation at all since this will surely hinder the creativeness of individuals and corporations to explore avenues influenced by ideas expressed in speculation.

The annual O’Reilly Open Source Convention won't roll around for another six months, but the time is already here for those who want to get their foot in the door and their message on stage. Conference organizers are ready to hear what you want to say, and they want to hear it now.