Linux News for Feb 27, 2009

• You Want A Beautiful OS? Try Elive (Feb 27, 2009, 23:34)
  MakeTechEasier: "What do you get when you put a stable operating system, an innovative desktop manager and plenty of eye candies together? You get nothing short of a beautiful and functional OS."


• Virtual Private Network and OpenVPN (Feb 27, 2009, 23:04)
  Linuxconfig: "Then, the article will guide you with step-by-step instructions on how to setup a OpenVPN virtual private network by using Symmetric Key Encryption and Public Key Encryption. This article is meant for everybody who possesses a basic knowledge of linux administration and networking."


• Sun Turns Object Storage Over to OpenSolaris (Feb 27, 2009, 22:34)
  Enterprise Storage Forum: ""Development will continue from the community," said Sun spokesman Alex Plant. "The source code is available for download on the OpenSolaris project pages, where you will find other community-led projects for object storage. With more interest from the community, the QFS Object file system project will continue, as there are other open efforts around object storage.""


• News Analysis: Microsoft goes after TomTom -- and Linux (Feb 27, 2009, 22:04)
  Computerworld: "But if Microsoft wants a fight -- oh boy, is the open-source community ready for it. First, it should be noted that Microsoft is claiming its lawsuit, made public this week, isn't really about Linux or open source."


• Advogato, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Flickr, Linkedin, helpmeee!! (Feb 27, 2009, 21:34)
  Linux Today Blog: "I miss the olden days when I was cutting-edge...Now I'm a grumpy old fossil who doesn't own a cell phone or any other portable electronic leashes, and to me this strange new world of social networking is one gigantic overdose of Too Much Information."


• This isn't "Open Source" (Feb 27, 2009, 21:04)
  Open Enterprise: "The piece is entitle "Open Sauce", but it ought really be called "Open Source", since its author, Richard Steel, the CIO of Newham, seems to have such distaste for the concept that he can't bring himself even to write the words without sanitising them between the quotation marks."


• Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 5 Screenshot Tour (Feb 27, 2009, 20:34)
  Softpedia: "The fifth alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 (codename Jaunty Jackalope) was uploaded a few minutes ago on the official mirrors. As usual, we've downloaded a copy of it in order to keep you up to date with the latest changes in the Ubuntu 9.04 development."


• More reasons to use Linux: How green is Linux? (Feb 27, 2009, 20:04)
  Handle With Linux: "How green is Linux? In my previous post 10 things to tell your kids when you ditched windows for linux One of the comments argued that Linux is no more energy efficient than Windows. So I did a little research."


• Debian 5.0 Continues Strong Linux Tradition (Feb 27, 2009, 19:34)
  eWeek: "The top reason for upgrading from version 4 may be the relatively short three-year security fix window, less than the coverage time offered with Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux-derived CentOS."


• 8 Beautiful Themes For Enlightenment WM (Feb 27, 2009, 19:04)
  LinuxHaxor: "Enlightenment is perhaps the least known and the oldest Windows manager still being actively developed. KDE and Gnome (Desktop Environments) made their first release few years after Enlightenment had its first release way back in 1996."


• There must be a way to use this little guy (Feb 27, 2009, 18:34)
  ZDNet Education: "The little guy to whom I'm referring is the Marvell Plug Computer. At $100 and the size of a wall wart AC adapter, the cheapskate in me starts pondering just how I might use this bad boy in a school."


• Celtx jumps a version, releases 2.0 (Feb 27, 2009, 18:04)
  FOSSwire: "After years of perpetual beta (it's vogue these days), Celtx, the open source media pre-production and screenwriting application, finally earned its 1.0 status this past June. So it might seem a little odd that only eight months later, Celtx is making the jump to 2.0"


• Interview: the return of the realtime preemption tree (Feb 27, 2009, 17:34)
  LWN.net: "On February 11, realtime developers Thomas Gleixner and Ingo Molnar resurfaced with the announcement of a new realtime preemption tree and a newly reinvigorated development effort. Your editor asked them if they would be willing to answer a few questions about this work; their response went well beyond the call of duty. Read on for a detailed look at where the realtime preemption tree stands and what's likely to happen in the near future."


• Adobe Patches Flash, But Expect More Problems (Feb 27, 2009, 17:13)
  InternetNews: "Adobe's Flash application is great for creating and watching rich multimedia applications, but it's one of the applications security researchers fear most because it is highly vulnerable to hackers. The application has come under more intensive scrutiny recently after Adobe issued a patch for yet another vulnerability discovered earlier this week."


• Xfce 4.6 Final Released (Feb 27, 2009, 17:04)
  Xfce News: "After more than two years of development, Xfce 4.6.0 has just been released."


• Concurrent boot sequence (Feb 27, 2009, 16:34)
  Debian Administration: "In the quest for the fastest boot ever (see Booting Debian in 14 seconds), you may want to consider setting the variable CONCURRENCY=shell in /etc/default/rcS, recalling from your your theoretical studies that "Parallel is faster than Sequential.""


• Ten Cool Coreutils Commands (Feb 27, 2009, 16:17)
  Command Line Warriors: "While a few commands, such as 'cd' are built directly into bash; many of the most important commands come from coreutils, a GNU package containing over a hundred commands. Some are the well known commands such as 'ls', 'mv' and 'cat'. While there are some more obscure ones that are not always discovered because there are also more modern programs that can do similar jobs."


• Linux ideal for software appliances, says Novell (Feb 27, 2009, 16:04)
  Techworld: "Linux is well suited as the platform of choice for the burgeoning software appliance market, according to Novell executive at the VMworld conference in Cannes."


• LinuxDNA Supercharges Linux with the Intel C/C++ Compiler (Feb 27, 2009, 15:34)
  Linux Journal: "One might ask: Why compile the kernel with something besides gcc? The answer: Performance."


• Advogato, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Flickr, Linkedin, helpmeee!! (Feb 27, 2009, 15:19)
  I miss the olden days when I was cutting-edge. I was the first kid on my block to get into computers, and then I was the first Linux geek. I was the first to have my own domain name and personal Web site, and I didn't even use blink tags, for I was like hip and too smart. For many years I was the only woman in my little corner of geek-land. Now I'm a grumpy old fossil who doesn't own a cell phone or any other portable electronic leashes, and to me this strange new world of social networking is one gigantic overdose of Too Much Information.



• Novell chief: 'Our Linux performance did not meet our expectations' (Feb 27, 2009, 15:17)
  ZDNet: "Novell's fiscal first quarter results were a mixed bag and Linux invoices fell sharply as the company failed to sign big deals."


• Bridging the gap between companies and communities for OSS (Feb 27, 2009, 15:04)
  ars Technica: "In a presentation at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE), GNOME Foundation executive director Stormy Peters discussed the differences between companies and communities and how to bridge the gap. This issue is becoming increasingly important for open source software projects that are trying to build close ties with corporate adopters and contributors."


• Five Questions With A.J. Venter - Creator Of Kongoni Linux (Feb 27, 2009, 14:34)
  OpenSource release feed: "Kongoni is a completely new distribution to Linux, who is behind this and please give some background on what got you to this place."


• PC/OS 2009v2 released (Feb 27, 2009, 14:04)
  PC/OS: "It's the first Linux based distribution that provides ease of use out of the box. It provides all multimedia codecs out of the box, an easy to use and simplified interface. Great compatibility with older hardware to help you extend your hardware and software investments. Being based on Ubuntu Linux all software and hardware that is compatible with Ubuntu is compatible with PC/OS."


• Linux dominates in Amazon Kindle competitors (Feb 27, 2009, 13:34)
  APC Magazine: "Linux runs on the first e-book reader released this year ... and on the second ... and the third."


• MySQL forks: Monty splits from Sun (Feb 27, 2009, 13:04)
  IT Wire: "Sometimes open source projects "fork." Disagreements over direction cause a splinter group to hive off and maintain their own separate code base. This is going to happen with well-known heavyweight FOSS staple, MySQL, after the original author quit Sun Microsystems earlier this month."


• Top alternatives to Microsoft Outlook (Feb 27, 2009, 12:04)
  ZDNet "If you're using a Microsoft Windows operating system there is also a good chance that you use Office and Outlook as your email client. But is this really a choice?"


• Patent suit tells us why we should shun Mono, Moonlight (Feb 27, 2009, 10:34)
  IT Wire: "Microsoft has shown the world exactly how friendly it is towards open source by going to court to claim damages over patents which have been allegedly violated in an implementation of the Linux kernel. And that's a good reason why FOSS users should avoid Mono and Moonlight like the plague."


• Cisco Goes Deep for Linux and Open Source (Feb 27, 2009, 09:04)
  InternetNews: "Without much fanfare or self-congratulations, networking giant Cisco Systems has become one of the top contributors to the Linux kernel and an active contributor to the broader open source community."


• Howto block DDOS attacks on Ubuntu (Feb 27, 2009, 07:34)
  Marc's Linux howtos: "PSAD scan iptables log file to generate the attack block. The problem is that when you log ALL packets as shown in other PSAD tutorials, it will slow down considerably your server if it's busy and generate huge huge log files (growing at a rate of 1meg per second or more). With simple iptables rules, we will only log traffic that look suspicious (5 new connection in 5 second for example)."


• Getting Started With Firewall Builder (Feb 27, 2009, 06:04)
  HowtoForge: "This guide presents an introduction to Firewall Builder. Firewall Builder (also known as fwbuilder) is a GUI firewall configuration and management tool that supports iptables (netfilter), ipfilter, pf, ipfw, Cisco PIX (FWSM, ASA) and Cisco routers extended access lists."


• Subversion 1.6 Release Candidate is out (Feb 27, 2009, 04:34)
  Submerged: "The Subversion project released the first publicly available release candidate for the 1.6.0 release on Friday Feb. 20. You can download the source for this release candidate from the Subversion project on tigris.org. The release notes for the 1.6 release are still being assembled but you can follow the latest state of the document from the project website."


• Could Microsoft be trying to acquire TomTom? (Feb 27, 2009, 03:04)
  Cyber Cynic: "I've been talking to a lot of smart people about the Microsoft/TomTom lawsuit. One thing we all pretty much agree on is that this lawsuit doesn't make a lot of sense."


• Open source is years behind commercial products, says Socitm president (Feb 27, 2009, 01:34)
  ComputerWeekly: ""I don't like the term 'open source'. It's misleading what many people mean is 'anything but Microsoft' few businesses actually use open source directly"


• The ABC's of PHP: Introduction to PHP (Feb 27, 2009, 00:04)
  PHPBuilder: "So, what exactly is PHP? Well for starters, if you're looking to write a web-based game that will rock the world, PHP is not the language you need. If however you're serious about writing top class web applications, or highly interactive web sites, then PHP may just be right up your alley."