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Sun Microsystems, recently bought by Oracle, have announced plans to cut 3000 jobs in the near future.

In part 1 we learned some neat tricks using OpenSSH and SSHFS for fast remote logins and file sharing. Today in Part 2 we learn how easy it is to configure OpenSSH to use secure public key authentication instead of a password login.

As a homeschooling family, my wife and I are very involved in our children's education and since we're both a couple of nerds, much of our children's education is done on the computer. I use Linux for work almost exclusively so I was a bit curious to see if there were any good children's educational programs for Linux; it turns out that there are some very good ones and I'm going to discuss 3 of them today: Tux Paint, Tux Typing, and Tux of Math Command. Do you sense a theme developing here?

The Dutch police force will move to open source wherever that is possible, but not exclusively, a spokesperson said this week, correcting a statement published by Linux distributor Red Hat a week ago.

Cherokee is a very fast, flexible and easy to configure Web Server. It supports the widespread technologies nowadays: FastCGI, SCGI, PHP, CGI, TLS and SSL encrypted connections, virtual hosts, authentication, on the fly encoding, load balancing, Apache compatible log files, and much more. This tutorial shows how you can install Cherokee on a Mandriva 2009.1 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

One concern when users FTP into your server, is that by default users who have accounts can roam your server to view contents of files. VSFTPD by default does not allow user logins, it allows anonymous by default. Anonymous users by default are locked into the directory that they login to. This is exactly what you would want. However, if you set up user FTP accounts you will probably want to limit those users so they can only access their own files and not other users. In order to achieve this you must place them in a chroot jail.

The Fedora Project released the beta version of Fedora 12 "Constantine," adding the Moblin desktop environment and speed optimizations for i686 and the Intel Atom. The latest version of the Red Hat-related Linux distribution also offers IPv6 support plus enhanced Bluetooth, virtualization, multimedia, and power management.

The open source Metasploit penetration testing framework has been acquired by a firm called Rapid7. I've personally never heard of Rapid7 before today, but this acquisition in my view, has both a potential downside and a potential upside. I've been tracking the metasploit project for years (and have version 3.2 running in my test lab now) and in my view, it is an incredibly important security framework that sets the standards by which others are judged. On the positive note, H D Moore the creator of Metasploit now gets some additional money and backing. With a commercial entity around the project, mundane items like revenue streams and pay stubs can be taken care of by someone else, while Moore concentrates on the framework itself.

I think Darl more than earned his pay. He sued his own customers, Daimler-Chrysler and Autozone in 2003. These suits went nowhere and Daimler-Chrysler was dismissed in 2004. Also in 2003 he went after Novell and IBM, and both suits are still dragging on. Red Hat sued SCO in 2003, and the case has been stayed until SCO v. IBM is resolved. Keeping three major actions going with no basis whatsoever is quite an achievement, and he was also the primary public target (cannon fodder, if you will) for everyone who knew the whole thing was bunk.

As the development team over there at GoboLinux works away on making an up-to-date CD-ROM ISO image, I figured I would revisit the distribution. For those of you who are unaware, GoboLinux is a distribution that does things quite a bit differently from others.

To coincide with the Windows 7 launch, IBM issued a press release yesterday promoting its Ubuntu-based IBM Client for Smart Work solution.

Are open source companies really open source? Sharing the code isn't enough: you need to have a vibrant community forming around the code. And that is unlikely to happen if the company insists on owning all the copyright, even for external contributions. Could the way forward be the creation of more foundations along the lines of Mozilla Foundation, Eclipse Foundation or Symbian Foundation?

The FlightGear flight simulator project is an open-source, multi-platform, cooperative flight simulator development project. The project is primarily aimed at civilian flight simulation. It should be appropriate for simulating general aviation as well as civilian aircraft.

Twidge is a command line Twitter desktop client for Ubuntu/Linux. Twidge supports posting updates, reading replies, adding more friends etc and its integration with the Unix shell scripting environment is just superb. Twidge is so easy to use and obviously light weight which makes it even more adorable. Lets take a peek into the Twidge features and installation.

According to a self-administered survey, Enterprises are still at risk from common security 'gaps.' Novell today released the first summary of data from its Threat Assessment Tool and the view isn't pretty. The results show that "many enterprises are still highly vulnerable to preventable security threats. To date, the survey has revealed significant vulnerabilities, particularly in the areas of inadequate data protection, insufficient mobile access policies, and lack of application control and system integrity for endpoint devices."

ABLEconf has announced its schedule for October 24th, and features a wide variety of talks that touch on topics such as virtualization, computer security, overviews of various open source projects, and practical use of open source in a business environment.

As expected, bookseller Barnes & Noble has announced a dual-screen e-book reader dubbed the Nook. The company has also entered into a partnership with Adobe to work on e-book standards.

Hear that clock ticking? There are only nine days left to the release of Ubuntu 9.10. It's all very exciting and that excitement was bouncing about inside my brain as I drove my son to school this morning. A little ditty was echoing in my mind along with what I might write about the big event, when suddenly it hit me. No, not another car. I was paying attention. What hit me was a fully formed vision of the future, nine days hence. Sort of like what happens on FlashForward, the series based on Robert J. Sawyer's book. Except I didn't black out. I started telling what I saw in my vision to my five year old son who, sitting quietly in the back seat, quietly ignored me.

The Puppy Linux project has released a 4.3.1 bugfix upgrade for last month's major 4.3 release of the popular, lightweight GNU/Linux distro. Puppy Linux 4.3, which has been rebuilt with a new "Woof" build system and PPM package manager, has received a number of positive reviews.

We have reached the Fedora 12 Beta, the last important development milestone of Fedora 12. Only critical bug fixes will be pushed as updates leading up to the general release of Fedora 12, scheduled to be released in mid-November. What's new? Optimized performance, smaller and faster updates, NetworkManager broadband and other enhancements, next-generation (Ogg) Theora video, graphics support improvements, automatic reporting of crashes and SELinux issues, new Dracut initrd generation tool, PackageKit plugins, Bluetooth on-demand, Moblin graphical interface for netbooks, PulseAudio enhancements...