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Zenmap is the official graphical user interface (GUI) for the Nmap Security Scanner. It is a multi-platform, free and open-source application designed to make Nmap easy for beginners to use while providing advanced features for experienced Nmap users. The purpose of Zenmap is not to replace Nmap. You still can use the good old command-line, but you will be able to use some advanced features like the “Topology” tab. This is an interactive view of the connections between hosts in a network. The following article will explain how to install Zenmap 5.0 on an Ubuntu system and how to use the main features.

Ubuntu 9.10 is the upcoming version of the Ubuntu operating system. The common name given to this release from the time of its early development was “Karmic Koala”. Here is how you can update your machine to this new version. Note: This is a beta release. Do not install it on production machines. The final stable version will be released on October 29th, 2009

Oracle will out-invest Sun Microsystems on Sparc and Solaris and provide more open source contributions, Larry Ellison and Scott McNealy told OpenWorld Sunday night. Oracle's chief executive and Sun's chairman, joined by executive vice president of systems John Fowler, also made the pitch that Oracle customers should run more of their applications and middleware on Sparc and Solaris. Java father James Gosling, meanwhile, stepped in to reassure the Java community Oracle has a vested interest in maintaining and developing Java. Just one thing threw out their OpenWorld opening pitch - MySQL. Specifically, the European Union's investigation of Oracle's proposed purchase of Sun, given Oracle's ownership of nearly fifty per cent of the RDBMS market, and concerns among the open-source community over MySQL's future under the closed-source giant.

Applications created for Nokia's N900 smartphone will be easier to port to future versions of the company's Maemo Linux operating system as well as to Symbian and Windows Mobile, after Nokia officially ported its Qt graphical toolkit to Maemo 5. The N900, which will be released this month in the UK, runs on Maemo 5 rather than Nokia's usual Symbian operating system. Maemo 5 uses the GTK+ graphical toolkit for its application-development framework, but Nokia said in July that future versions of Maemo would use Qt instead.

The last development release, Release Candidate 2, of Mandriva Linux 2010 is now available. Mandriva Linux 2010 adopts Plymouth and brings other new features like Moblin packaging, Tomoyo security framework integration, improved boot performance, and more...

Are you tired of being hunted down by marketers following your digital crumb-trail? If the answer to that question is yes, you might want to take an interest in a panel called Getting Personal With Data: How Users Get Control — And What They Do With It. It's happening Tuesday morning at 9:30am (U.S. Eastern time) at Harvard Law School. I'll be moderating it, and the panelists are four very cool people, each working (one way or another) in the fields of self-tracking and personal informatics.

In just about any class or set of tutorials involving beginning programming, there's usually a problem or set of problems having to do with converting temperatures. Just about everyone has had to write a wee bit of code to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius or vice versa. That's not much of a chore. However, there are eight major temperature scales available (though some are around now only for their historical value), according to wikipedia. What if you had to write a program that let a user convert a temperature from any of these scales to any of these scales?

This week there were several new software releases including the Linux 2.6.32-rc3 kernel, KDE 4.3.2, Alien Arena 7.31, OpenChrome 0.2.904, Wine 1.1.31, and xf86-video-radeonhd 1.3.0. Worth noting with the new Wine release are continued Direct3D 10 advancements and the start of Microsoft ActiveX support within JavaScript. The Alien Arena release is also interesting for the graphics improvements, new game mode, and other new content for this first-person shooter. Also made available this week were new preview releases of Mutter and the GNOME Shell.

The free vmware product, vmware-server (formerly GSX) does not have auto power on for certain guests. A simple workaround for not being able to auto power on guests using the vmware interface is call the vmware command line utility at boot up using the local init function. A better way is to write an init script to handle the start up and possibly other functions. This text will examine a simple method to create a control script for managing power functions in vmware-server.

KDE people @ Maemo Last weekend Amsterdam was visited by hackers from various Free Software communities and companies from around the world. Brought together by the Maemo Summit in the WesterGasFabriek, they gave and attended talks about topics like the Maemo applications, user interface components, the underlying infrastructure and of course the future of Maemo. Read on for a short impression of this conference. read more

When you delete a file, you are not really deleting it from your had drive. All the system does if free up the space occupied by that file to make room for other files and until that space is filled with new data, the files you tried to delete are actually still stored on your hard disk and can be recovered. In this article, I am going to tell you how to delete files for ever (almost) in Nautilus using a command-line tool and also, how to add this functionality to Nautilus, when right clicking a file / folder.

This tutorial describes how you can install Apache2 with mod_fcgid and PHP5 on Mandriva 2009.1. mod_fcgid is a compatible alternative to the older mod_fastcgi. It lets you execute PHP scripts with the permissions of their owners instead of the Apache user.

Microsoft has filed for a patent for ‘Time-Based Licenses’ and the application abstract reveals this to be a method and system for “issuing a number of different types of time-based licenses associated with software products”.

[So if you can't make your Windows payments on time they turn your computer into a paperweight and/or make it illegal to use? - Scott]

Linux is brilliant at serving files. It's this ability that keeps the enterprise world turning to Linux for its heavy lifting jobs and that keeps the world Googling 24/7. But it's just as good at serving files from a computer tucked away under the stairs or stuck in the loft, and a server in your house is now becoming an essential accessory. Mobile phones, games consoles and even televisions are rapidly developing the ability to read, display and play files held on a media centre PC, and Linux is the perfect free software solution. All you need is a relatively low-powered PC, a decent amount of storage and somewhere safe to hide it.

Open sourcerers might have saved an Australian power supply system after its electrical grid control room network got infected with a virus. A Windows virus hit the networks of Integral Energy and, according to a submission to Slashdot, the virus managed to spread to the operator display consoles in the control room. Quick thinking techies in the control systems department of the utility swapped the infected Windows boxes for machines running Linux that they were using for development.

The Wine development release 1.1.31 is now available. With Wine it's possible to run Windows applications on top of Linux.

When rumors first began to fill the air that an agreement of some sort between Microsoft and the EU Commission was imminent, Sean Daly interviewed Thomas Vinje and Ashwin van Rooijen, attorneys for ECIS, the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, which is an intervenor in the case.

This Ubuntu installation guide is available to anyone for free. Once you've completed this guide you'll be able to install Ubuntu and have a good understanding of the options on each step of the install. Users should also be able to perform a manual installation of Ubuntu after using this Ubuntu installation guide. A step-by-step video tutorial is included with this guide.

Hulu, a popular website which offers free, ad-supported TV shows (and a few movies) has ported their Hulu Desktop software to Linux. Hulu says that Hulu Desktop for Linux will work on Ubuntu 9.04 and Fedora, althoug it could almost certainly be run on other Linux distributions.

Sam opened his eyes to the sun shining in his window, birds chirping outside, and the smell of a fresh summer breeze. It was a glorious day, perfect for the launch of the campaign. Sam got himself ready, grabbed a bite to eat, and jumped on the bus on his way to his job at the Proprietary Software Foundation.