Webcast: Hacking 101--The Top 10 Attacks in Web Applications Defend your web applications from attack. Learn about the three most common web application attacks, including how they occur and what can be done to prevent them. Well also discuss manual versus automated approaches for scanning and identifying web application vulnerabilities and how IBM Rational AppScan, an automated vulnerability scanner, can help you automate more of what you are doing manually today. View the webcast;
Whitepaper: Rightsizing Blades for the Midmarket Sponsored by HP
The initial investment in blade servers has been an obstacle for midmarket deployments. This white paper examines the requirements for servers, storage, and blade systems in the midmarket and outlines how to reduces up-front expenses and get past the break-even point faster.
Learn more
What Linus Torvalds thinks about BSD Internet News: "It's soo rude that it's 'funny' - that is if you're not an OpenBSD developer or have a particular affection for monkeys." (Jul 16, 2008)
Linux Today Features
SCO Goes Down and Sun's in Trouble Practical Technology: "The decision is in, and SCO has gone down in defeat. The U.S. District Court in Utah has ruled in favor of Novell in SCO vs. Novell, the keystone case in SCO’s long, and ultimately unsuccessful war against Linux." (Jul 17, 2008)
Ubuntu Netbooks vs. Ubuntu Mobile Internet Devices: What's the Difference? (Jul 24, 2008, 09:00 UTC) (205 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Workswithu: "The company has at least two Ubuntu software projects — one for Netbooks, the other for Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) — that sound strikingly similar. So what’s the difference between Ubuntu for Netbooks and Ubuntu for MIDs?"
Confirmed: Canonical Ubuntu Server Blitz at LinuxWorld Expo (Jul 24, 2008, 07:30 UTC) (382 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) The VAR Guy: "Canonical is preparing an Ubuntu Server blitz at LinuxWorld Expo in August. Alfresco, IBM, Openbravo, Zimbra and others are expected to rally around Ubuntu Server at the conference, The VAR Guy learned during meetings at OSCON. Here’s the scoop, and the implications for Ubuntu partners."
OS Roundup: BSD Bug Emerges From Chrysalises (Jul 24, 2008, 04:30 UTC) (541 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Serverwatch: "Paul Rubens How long does it take to spot a bug in an operating system? The answer, it seems, can be as long as 33 years. At least, that was the case with a recently discovered bug in the yacc parser generator originally developed at AT&T back in the 1970s and discovered recently by OpenBSD developer Otto Moerbeek."
Simple Multiple-Steam Output Redirection With Zsh On Linux and Unix (Jul 24, 2008, 03:00 UTC) (360 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) The Linux and Unix Menagerie: "Following up on yesterday's post regarding using zsh's extended globbing functionality, today we're going to look at another feature supported by zsh, that can't be done nearly as easily in most other shells. Today we're going to look at some unique ways you can manipulate input and output redirection, even with multiple streams, while avoided a lot of extra code, and maybe a temp file or three."
Setting up DRBD in an Open Source SAN (Jul 24, 2008, 01:30 UTC) (549 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) SearchEnterpriseLinux: "As we established in part one of this series on open storage area networks (SANs), building an open source SAN provides a cost-effective alternative for companies with a tight budget. Now that we've established the merits and some of the important considerations in creating open source SANs, we'll explain how to set up the Distributed Replicated Block Device (DRBD) service, which allows for replicated storage in a SAN."
SECURITY: Attack Code Published for DNS Flaw (Jul 24, 2008, 00:32 UTC) (624 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) ZDNet: "Exploit code for the flaw, which allows the insertion of malicious DNS records into the cache of the target nameserver, has been added to Metasploit, a freely distributed attack/pen-testing tool."
SCO Group: Its Future is All Used Up (Jul 24, 2008, 00:03 UTC) (1021 reads)
(2 talkbacks)
(feedback) Network World: "I've now been writing about SCO for five years -- how time does fly when you have someone to despise. In my first column about SCO's decision go into the lawsuit business rather than having to do all the hard work of making a product that someone might want to buy, I thought that someone would just buy the slime off. I was wrong -- I guess there is some truth to the punch line of the old joke that "there are just some things a lawyer won't do." I guess IBM's lawyers could not stomach the idea of rewarding such repulsive behavior."
Researcher Spills Beans on DNS Flaw Specs (Jul 23, 2008, 23:15 UTC) (622 reads)
(2 talkbacks)
(feedback) LinuxInsider: "Although Dan Kaminsky -- the security researcher who discovered the massive DNS flaw widely reported two weeks ago -- asked the security community not to reveal details about the vulnerability for 30 days, a reverse engineering expert posted a theory about it on his blog. Later, the security firm Matasano confirmed the hypothesis, only to later apologize for doing so."
CLI Magic: For Geek Cred, Try These One-liners (Jul 23, 2008, 22:45 UTC) (1073 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Linux.com: "...a one-liner is a set of commands normally joined through a pipe (|). When joined by a pipe, the command on the left passes its output to the command on the right. Simple or complex, you can get useful results from a single line at the bash command prompt."
Return of the InstallFest...It Starts Here (Jul 23, 2008, 22:00 UTC) (396 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Blog of Helios: "As far as the events for Lindependence in Felton go, Saturday’s event might be Lindependence’s last event before the formation of a LUG and an on-the-ground GNU/Linux presence in the area, but the spirit of Lindependence and movement itself are currently snowballing into something that will be felt in these parts, and happening at a rate faster than I had expected."
OSCON: Open Source Database Study Has Obvious Results (Jul 23, 2008, 21:45 UTC) (493 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) InternetNews: "The biggest conclusion of the EnterpriseDB open source database study is that PostgreSQL is the open source database of choice for transactional applications. Not a surprising conclusion given that EnterpriseDB is a sponsor of the PostgreSQL project and has its own supported distributions of it."
Google Blogger "hosts 2% of world's malware" (Jul 23, 2008, 21:17 UTC) (587 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) PCPro: ""Blogger accounts for around 2% of malware," according to Sophos's senior technology consultant, Graham Cluley. "It's head and shoulders above the rest [of the blogging services].""
Vector Linux SOHO 5.9 Deluxe -- Not Just For The Office (Jul 23, 2008, 21:00 UTC) (506 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) O'Reilly News: "For those not familiar with Vector Linux it's a decade old distribution based on Slackware that provides many of the user friendly tools and features offered by the largest and most popular distributions. I've often compared the Standard edition to Xubuntu with it's relatively lightweight Xfce default desktop while the SOHO (Small Office, Home Office) edition is comparable to Kubuntu, with a fully integrated KDE desktop."
OSCON: Canonical's Shuttleworth Calls On Linux to Overtake Apple (Jul 23, 2008, 20:15 UTC) (1079 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) The VAR Guy: "Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, delivered the keynote address at OSCON this evening. Here’s a recap of his presentation, which explored how free software can drive innovation — and how the Linux desktop has to become a piece of art that leapfrogs Apple within two years."
Lazy Linux: 10 Essential Tricks for Admins (Jul 23, 2008, 19:45 UTC) (1774 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) IBM Developerworks: "Trick 4: Getting back the root password
You forgot your root password. Nice work. Now you'll just have to reinstall the entire machine. Sadly enough, I've seen more than a few people do this. But it's surprisingly easy to get on the machine and change the password. This doesn't work in all cases (like if you made a GRUB password and forgot that too), but here's how you do it in a normal case with a Cent OS Linux example."
Vista Adoption going no-where, IT considering Linux and Mac instead (Jul 23, 2008, 19:32 UTC) (1609 reads)
(2 talkbacks)
(feedback) Practical Technology: "KACE, a systems management appliance company, announced that their recent survey of IT administrators showed that 60 percent of them have no plans to deploy Vista. That’s almost 10% more turning their backs on Vista then in KACE’s last survey in November 2007."
The Current Development Kernel is...Linux-next? (Jul 23, 2008, 18:45 UTC) (1099 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) LWN: "But the value of the mainline repository for development would appear to be less than it once was. The mainline is no longer where the action is."
Fedora Launches OLPC Group (Jul 23, 2008, 18:00 UTC) (644 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Tectonic: "“Their time is stretched perilously thin … we in the Fedora community can therefore have a huge, direct, and immediate impact on the success of the OLPC project.”"
Guide to Faster Ubuntu (Jul 23, 2008, 17:15 UTC) (2027 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Ubuntu Snippets "Optimize ubuntu boot sequence by profiling it...This one time special boot may take more time than ordinary boot. But during this boot ubuntu monitors file usage and preloads those files during subsequent boots."
Video and Audio Broadcasts From OSCON (Jul 23, 2008, 17:00 UTC) (462 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) O'Reilly News: "At OSCON: Pia Waugh, President of Software Freedom International; Jim Zemlin: The Mysterious Work of the Linux Foundation; Larry Wall: Open Source as a Parenting Experience"
Dictators in Free and Open Source Software (Jul 23, 2008, 16:30 UTC) (760 reads)
(2 talkbacks)
(feedback) Free Software Magazine: "Some people seem to challenge the idea that most (if not all) free software projects need a benevolent dictator—that is, somebody who has the last say on every decision. They are quick to point out Linus Torvalds’ past “mistakes” (see the brackets): using BitKeeper to manage the kernel, not allowing “pluggable” schedulers in Linux, etc. As a software developer, I feel that a dictator is absolutely necessary in every free software project."
"Mark Shuttleworth: It's actually an offensive idea to me. We take the view that distributions should be humble in what they claim they do. The reality is that we distribute Linux, and we're at our best when we do that particular thing efficiently -- when we most effectively celebrate the work of others."
SELinux and Fedora (Jul 23, 2008, 15:45 UTC) (675 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) LWN: "Red Hat has undoubtedly done more to make SELinux usable than any other organization, but has it actually reached the point where it can be enabled by default for all desktops? The Fedora project clearly thinks so. Not only is SELinux enabled, but the installer no longer has an option to disable it or to put it into "permissive" mode."
Linux is Easier to Install Than XP (Jul 23, 2008, 15:30 UTC) (1514 reads)
(10 talkbacks)
(feedback) Practical Tech: "when I had to get a new PC in a hurry, after one of my PCs went to the big bit-ranch in the sky with a fried motherboard, the one I bought, a Dell Inspiron 530S from my local Best Buy came pre-infected with Vista Home Premium. Big deal. It took me less than an hour to install Linux Mint 5 Elyssa R1 on it."
Killing the Desktop Metaphor with GNOME (Jul 23, 2008, 15:00 UTC) (1739 reads)
(1 talkbacks)
(feedback) Open-Source.ecchi.ca: "One of the most significant problems I can see with the idea of having contents on a "desktop" is that most of the time, that desktop is hidden by multiple windows. To access your contents, you need to minimize a bunch of stuff, or hit ctrl-alt-D, or use the "Show desktop" panel applet, and when you are done, raise all your windows again. You keep moving things out of the way and putting them back in the way, all the time!"
Open Source Still the Best Way to Develop Software (Jul 23, 2008, 14:15 UTC) (596 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Computerworld: "I can't take this study too seriously. After all, what else is Fortify going to say? "Open-source's Law of Many Eyes works great. You don't need our products?" I don't think so."
Do We Need to Wipe the Slate With x86? (Jul 23, 2008, 14:00 UTC) (1540 reads)
(3 talkbacks)
(feedback) ZDNet: "While today’s entry-level x86-based systems are hundreds, nay, thousands of times more powerful than the original IBM PC, in theory you can still run OSes on them bare metal that last saw the light of day on a production system in the early 1990s or even earlier."
Beyond the Desktop With KDE4 (Jul 23, 2008, 13:30 UTC) (1837 reads)
(4 talkbacks)
(feedback) Tectonic: "Lately, there has been quite some bitching on the fringes of the KDE project about KDE4 and the direction it takes. Some people go as far as saying: “Give us back our old desktop!” I beg to differ. The old desktop has served us well for thirty-odd years since its invention by Xerox. It is beyond its due date by now. We need something new that meets the reality we are living in now."
ISO is Being Challenged (Jul 23, 2008, 12:45 UTC) (1320 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Arnaud's Open Blog: "Essentially, the ISO and IEC courts of appeal are made of a jury composed of a subset of the very same parties that judged OOXML in the first place. Now, I’m not a law expert by any means but it doesn’t take much expertise to figure out that such a set up is bogus."
OLPC Wins International Design Excellence Award- 2008 (Jul 23, 2008, 12:00 UTC) (545 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) International Design Excellence Awards: "Brilliant design for an even better cause. From the physical design to the sociological impact, every element of this laptop is exemplary of true innovation."
Novell Turns ICE into Kablink (Jul 23, 2008, 11:00 UTC) (938 reads)
(1 talkbacks)
(feedback) InternetNews: "The Kablink project is Novell's effort to grow the market for open source collaboration solutions, and chip away at the hold that Microsoft's Sharepoint commands among small business users."
Open Source Cloud Computing Service 10gen Gets $1.5 Million (Jul 23, 2008, 09:30 UTC) (639 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) OStatic: "Union Square Ventures, the venture firm that funded such names as Del.icio.us, FeedBurner, Etsy and Twitter, is investing $1.5 million in open source cloud computing service 10gen. 10gen's software stack is roughly comparable to Google App Engine..."
Fancy Globbing With Zsh On Linux and Unix (Jul 23, 2008, 08:00 UTC) (790 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) The Linux and Unix Menagerie: "Today we're going to look at some stuff that's probably not much of an education for the zsh aficionado, but that I find pretty cool... I did what I could to verify that this stuff only works with zsh"
Linux Tools to Convert File Formats (Jul 23, 2008, 05:00 UTC) (1590 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) Linux.com "The easiest way to transfer data between systems is by using plain text files or common formats like comma-separated value (CSV) files. However, converting such files from Windows or Mac OS results in formatting differences for the newline characters and character encoding. This article explains why we have these problems and shows ways to solve them."
Anatomy of Linux Loadable Kernel Modules (Jul 23, 2008, 03:30 UTC) (1280 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) IBM Developerworks: "The Linux kernel is what's known as a monolithic kernel, which means that the majority of the operating system functionality is called the kernel and runs in a privileged mode. This differs from a micro-kernel, which runs only basic functionality as the kernel (inter-process communication [IPC], scheduling, basic input/output [I/O], memory management) and pushes other functionality outside the privileged space (drivers, network stack, file systems). You'd think that Linux is then a very static kernel, but in fact it's quite the opposite. Linux can be dynamically altered at run time through the use of Linux kernel modules (LKMs)."
Face Off: Windows vs Linux Real World RAM and Disk Tests (Jul 23, 2008, 02:00 UTC) (2753 reads)
(1 talkbacks)
(feedback) IT Wire: "How do Windows Vista and Linux really compare against each other? It’s one thing to talk about the familiar applications available to Windows users contrasted with the rich suite of free open source apps for Linux, but something totally different to actually compare the loads of the two operating systems as they perform functionally identical tasks."
PC Vendors Want to Sell You Desktop Linux (Jul 23, 2008, 00:30 UTC) (1999 reads)
(1 talkbacks)
(feedback) Computerworld: "It used to be that finding a PC with pre-installed Linux was harder than finding a needle in a haystack. Now, though, all the major PC vendors are offering Linux-powered PCs."
Verizon Shuns Android for LiMo (Jul 22, 2008, 23:15 UTC) (1366 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) the Register: "Sometime next year, Verizon will roll out a Linux OS as the "preferred operating system" for phones on its US wireless network. And that Linux OS is not Google Android."
Intel Snubs Microsoft; Offers Linux Certification (Jul 22, 2008, 22:30 UTC) (1484 reads)
(0 talkbacks)
(feedback) APC Magazine: "Attendees at the annual techfest can land a substantial discount sitting for any of three open-source exams held by the Linux Professional Institute, the world’s premier Linux certification organisation. However, there’s been no word on any similar arrangement for Microsoft certification, despite Redmond once again paying top dollar to be listed among IDF’s Gold Sponsors."
Featured on the
