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Installing NVIDIA drivers on Debian Lenny requires a little extra work compared to doing so in other distributions like Ubuntu, due to the lack of some required packages in the default installation.

This is my first release of ldNetDeviceManager.py. The ldNetManager.py tool gives you the ability to manage your network devices with out having to purchase a product like Cisco's LMS or go through the planning phase of deploying a product like func. Each of the tools I mentioned before, only have the ability to manage devices in their realm. Func supports Linux devices and Cisco LMS supports only Cisco devices. This tool has one goal. And that is to update your devices with out deploying any software to your remote devices. All you need is either telnet or ssh access to your devices and Python2.4 or better with Pexpect installed. Once you have those 2 requirements fullfilled, then you are pretty much ready to go.

As computing and the internet become ever more a part of everyday life, reliable and strong security becomes increasingly necessary. Security is critical in the areas of business communications, online banking and online shopping, but until quite recently security has not been an integral part of the core computing hardware. Hardware manufacturers have been taking steps to rectify that by introducing the idea of trusted computing based on devices such as the Trusted Platform Module (TPM). Many of these ideas, and the methods to implement them, have come from what the open source community see as the proprietary commercial establishment and so are greeted with some suspicion. Nevertheless, in order to continue to flourish, open source will have to somehow accommodate them and provide support for secure functions such as TPM.

Canonical will be releasing Ubuntu 9.10 at the end of next month while the final release of FreeBSD 8.0 is also expected within the next few weeks. With these two popular free software operating systems both having major updates coming out at around the same time, we decided it warranted some early benchmarking as we see how the FreeBSD 8.0 and Ubuntu 9.10 performance compares. For looking more at the FreeBSD performance we also have included test results from FreeBSD 7.2, the current stable release. In this article are mostly the server and workstation oriented benchmarks with the testing being carried out on a dual AMD Opteron quad-core workstation.

Once, the Netcraft Web Server Survey was boring: Apache was always streaks ahead of the competition. Then Microsoft decided to fight back - and started winning significant market share. Now things are more complicated, with major Web servers from Google, qq.com and Russia. Apache is holding up...but Microsoft's IIS is on the way down again.

LXer Feature: 28-Sept-2009

I just got back from OhioLinuxFest "Forty Years of Unix," and I want to report on what I heard, who I saw, and what I learned. I wasn't sure how it would be this year, with a slowed economy. Compared to last year, it had fewer exhibitors, but roughly the same number of attendees. The raffle tickets sold out, which is a good sign for any fund-raising activity.

Last year Gentoo canceled their 2008 release plans to focus on putting out just one release per year, while in years past they had put out as many as four releases per calendar year. There has not been a new official release of Gentoo since July of 2008, albeit they are one of the distributions to use a rolling release approach, but in honor of their tenth birthday they have begun work on a new LiveDVD. Gentoo has been producing timed snapshots of their installation media, but this will be the first Gentoo release in 2009.

This is the third entry in the continuing "cave dwellers" saga and their new lives with Ubuntu. Someone posted a comment on the previous cave dwellers entry about iTunes not working on Linux and I was absolutely sure that it did. It doesn't. Much to my surprise (and disappointment), iTunes isn't available as a native application on Linux. What's a penguinista to do? Try WINE of course!

To me this inconsistency is a true sign that computer discrimination and software profiling not only exists but should be a very big concern for all of us. There is no other reason that the Pearson system works with a Linux operating system sporting Firefox except for their Microsoft based computer course which they claim doesn't work with anything but Microsoft which is actually untrue.

The public sector is ignoring government guidelines on procuring open-source software, according to open source database company Ingres. At a roundtable event on Thursday, Ingres worldwide operations chief Steve Shine praised the guidelines--issued in February--but said they were being ignored because there is nobody in place to enforce them.

Intel hosted their developer conference this week in San Francisco (Intel Developer Forum) where several new announcements were made, with Linux being involved in some of these announcements. It was revealed that Dell will begin shipping Ubuntu Moblin Netbook Remix on one of their Atom-powered netbooks, Moblin 2.0 was released, and there was a snapshot of Moblin 2.1 was released. This week we also showed off some new Lynnfield Linux benchmarks that Intel had sent over to us using the Phoronix Test Suite.

(*) By “Unix”, I mean Linux, Unix, AIX, OS/X, and similar flavours. Way back when, about twenty or so years ago, I was a Unix admin, and a Unix developer. I had to be both, because I was the only person in the company who could spell Unix. My favourite game was to go along to presentations for Microsoft Windows ‘new features’ and say “Oh, but hasn’t Unix had that for the last twenty years?” Sure enough, there were countless things that Windows users and developers were just discovering (TCP/IP, shared libraries, multiple sessions on the same computer) that had been in Unix for some time. Linux was yet to make a mention, but as I’ve moved firmly into the Windows world, and left Unix behind, I’ve pretty much assumed that technologically speaking, if Windows has it, Unix and the like must also have the same functionality.

For pidgin users , there is a security issue regarding storing passwords in pidgin, so this program stores the passwords in archives .xml in clear text without any encryption. So any one can easily boot into recovery mode while you are away and find all your passwords in plain text. Then he can just copy the password files and opps he will got all the passwords easy way.

FOSS license compliance is particularly problematic in the consumer electronics market. Veteran gpl-violations.org and FSFE experts examine the issues and what can be done to improve matters.

This tutorial shows how you can boot Linux over HTTP with boot.kernel.org (BKO). All that users need is Internet connectivity and a small program (gpxe) to boot the machine. This gpxe program provides network booting facility. BKO allows you to boot into the following distributions: Debian, Ubuntu, Damn Small Linux, Knoppix, Fedora. BKO provides gpxe images for USB sticks, CDs, and also for floppies, i.e., you can boot from a USB sticks, a CD, or a floppy.

Sabayon is a system administration tool to manage GNOME desktop settings. Sabayon provides a sane way to edit GConf defaults and GConf mandatory keys: the same way you edit your desktop. Sabayon launches profiles in an Xnest window. Any changes you make in the Xnest window are saved back to the profile file, which can then be applied to user’s accounts.

The Wine development release 1.1.30 is now available. With Wine it's possible to run Windows applications on top of Linux.

"How am I to continue supporting the growth of Firefox if they're gonna chalk it up to Google to control what sites we should visit? They're putting us in a position from which supporting Firefox is getting to be equal to supporting Google's further grip on the market. That's NOT making me happy."

Banshee 1.5 has been released, but not yet found its way into the official Ubuntu repo yet. Here is how you could install the latest version of Banshee in Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix came around last year at Computex Taipei and the original version we tried out was quite nice with its small-screen optimizations and very different launcher interface compared to simply running GNOME or KDE on a small mobile device. This year when the Moblin V2 user-interface was finally unveiled and it put us in awe with its sleek, intuitive design that was driven by Clutter. How has Canonical responded to Intel and Moblin V2? Well, there is Ubuntu Moblin Netbook Remix that just debuted to deliver the best of Ubuntu and Moblin, but the traditional Ubuntu Netbook Remix has also picked up several improvements for its 9.10 release.