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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: ParallelKnoppix Size: 503.48 MB Status: 2 seeders and no leecher Added: 2007-02-06 16:32:18

Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: BeleniX Size: 992.88 MB Status: 7 seeders and 5 leechers Added: 2007-02-06 16:21:34

Source: vector

Robert Lange has announced the second beta release of VectorLinux 5.8 Live edition: "The Vector development team is proud to announce the release of VectorLinux 5.8 Standard Live beta 2 and the eye-candy spectacular Beryl Live beta 2. This is a bug-fix release with new bootloader options (GRUB), .

Source: engarde

A new stable version of EnGarde Secure Linux has been released: "Guardian Digital is happy to announce the release of EnGarde Secure Community 3.0.12. What's New? A new SELinux policy boolean: httpd_write_content_dir; updated PCI tables and hardware detection system, which allows for much better detection of more recent .

Source: Linux Today

Free Software Foundation, or FSF for short, is one of the most controversial information technology related organizations. Some people hate it and some people love it

Source: Linux Today

As I pore through reams and reams of good news concerning open source companies, one thought occurred to me: I didn't really care

Source: Linux Today

I don't think it's a coincidence, or a mere marketing choice, that caused Gates to pop up as the public face of the Windows Vista launch last week, after publicly retiring six months earlier

Source: Linux Today

But one relatively young Linux distribution worth keeping an eye on is Foresight Linux, a desktop-oriented distribution that hit its 1.0 release milestone at the end of January

Source: Linux Today

Beryl is simply creating some of the most exciting and innovative work on any computing platform

Source: Linux Today

Thrifty's IT manager Michael Morton said the transformation initiative began about eight months ago when its Red Hat Linux and SCO Unix systems were becoming outdated

Source: Linux Today

SCALE 5X, the 2007 Southern California Linux Expo, opens its doors at the Westin Los Angeles Airport hotel Feb. 9 and will continue through Sunday, Feb. 11

Source: Linux Today

Meanwhile, in the United States, PC makers, private foundations, government agencies and others strive to provide suitable technology to all students who need it

Source: Linux Today

Red Hat today announced that the Swedish Armed Forces has made the decision to migrate its servers from Windows NT to Red Hat Enterprise Linux .

Source: Linux Today

A little less than a year ago, Internet Brands, which operates Web sites for big ticket purchases such as cars, homes and mortgages, was looking to rid itself of the big ticket hardware in its data center

Source: Linux Today

Company will release Enterprise Linux 5 in March as it continues to fend off competition from Oracle and Microsoft/Novell

Source: Linux Today

The Open Source Consortium (OSC) has slammed the BBC over plans to lock online TV viewers into Microsoft products

Source: Linux Today

Linux kernel version 2.6.20, released on Sunday, offers access to a new framework meant to provide a user-friendly, high performance platform for Linux virtualization in the future

Source: Linux Today

Ticket broker In Ticketing is going head to head with Ticketmaster. It's able to offer lower fees for the same services because of open source software

Source: Linux Today

This last week I've been trying my hand at a bit of DVD authoring and I thought I'd pass on everything that I've found out !

Source: Linux Today

But the truth is that you don't need all that fancy stuff to harvest podcasts with Linux. BashPodder is a quick CLI-based GPLed podcatching client "

Source: Linux Today

With the Nagios Looking Glass (NLG) tool, developer Andy Shellam has tried to resolve a common problem for network administrators running Nagios

Source: Linux Today

Depending on your background and experience, you are probably interested in different features of Groovy

Source: Linux Today

In this how to I will explain how to setup a Postfix virtual mailserver with Courier-IMAP, Maildrop and Postfix Admin GUI

Source: Linux Today

Today's security advisories: samba (Debian GNU/Linux); postgresql (Fedora Core); samba (Mandriva Linux); and bind, ed, and elinks (Trustix Secure Linux).

Source: Linux Today

Xgl is a hardware accelerated X-server created by Novell. Thanks to the abilities of modern graphics cards, it uses three-dimensional rendering, which opens up a whole new bunch of possibilities for modern computer desktops

Source: Linux Today

As disenchantment with today's increasingly outdated economic and political system grows, so more and more people are turning to a proliferating number of free and open movements--in pursuit of alternative ways of doing things

Source: Linux Today

There are many obvious and fundamental ways in which using free software is good for you, such as choice, cost, and rights

Source: Linux Today

This show features an interview with Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement and the man who put the GNU into GNU/Linux

Source: Linux Today

The first pieces of the B1 series have been produced in November last year. The B2 prototypes are planned to be delivered to the interested countries for practical testing later this month

Source: Slashdot: Linux

cgrayson recommends Richard Stiennon's blog on ZDNet — a post titled Why Windows is less secure than Linux shows a compelling graphical comparison between system calls on the two operating systems. The blogger tips Sana Security for the images. Quoting: "In its long evolution, Windows has grown so complicated that it is harder to secure [T]hese images are a complete map of the system calls that occur when a web server serves up [the same] single page of [HTML] with a single picture."

Source: Slashdot: Linux

BinnyVA writes "You know the story about Novell losing the right to distribute Linux? Well, the Free Software Foundation has absolutely no control over Novell's distribution of Linux. A zealous Reuters reporter apparently conflated the FSF with the open source community in general, took some quotes out of context, and ended up with a sensational headline that fooled a number of people. The Novell deal is completely within the bounds of the GPL, GPLv3 isn't even done yet, and even when it is the Linux kernel is unlikely to be covered by it." Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.

Source: Slashdot: Linux

coondoggie writes "As x86 servers become increasingly capable, IT managers are taking a closer look at their Unix installations to determine whether a move to Linux or Windows might make sense, analysts say. "The defensible hill for Unix is the big, vertically scaling, mission-critical application, which is usually some type of database serving," says Andrew Butler, a vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "But increasingly, the appeal of Windows- and Linux-based systems running on cheaper, commodity hardware is becoming more and more compelling.""

Source: Slashdot: Linux

daria42 writes "To help make kids aware of alternatives to proprietary software the Ile-de-France, the political district of greater Paris, will give 175,000 school children and apprentices USB keys loaded with open-source software. With a word-processing program, audio and video playback capabilities, an email client and an IM client, these are essentially computers on a stick. The council touts this as 'represent[ing] for students a tool of freedom and mobility between their school, cybercafes and their home or friends' PCs'." With the prevalence of internet cafes in Europe, that might work better than in the US but do you think such a project would work here as well? If so, what software would you want to see loaded up?

Source: Linux DevCenter

Some years ago Linux creator Linux Torvalds famously compared changing operating systems to “performing brain surgery on yourself”. I’ve quoted him often because so many people seem to have unrealistic expectations when they pick up a Linux DVD or CD-ROM. I’ve recently received a couple of e-mails in response to my articles here on O’Reillynet that illustrate Linus’ point beautifully and demonstrate part of the problem Linux has faced in gaining greater acceptance on the desktop. OK, one of the e-mails was addressed to Cathy, whoever that is, but since it came to my inbox I’ll assume it was meant for me. Here are some excerpts:
Problem was, I couldn’t even figure out how to install a driver….where the driver files had to go….what the extension were (inf)….and stuff like….where is the .dll library and so on.
Linux isn’t Windows. There are no .dll or .inf files. Those are exclusively Microsoft concepts. Working with Linux (or FreeBSD or MacOS) is an exercise in dropping your ingrained Windows concepts and learning a different way of doing things. That’s precisely what Linus Torvalds meant by “performing brain surgery on yourself”, For some people that initial learning curve is just plain difficult. Nobody said this would be easy for everyone.
To answer the question: most drivers are kernel modules. Your hardware is detected at boot and appropriate modules are loaded into the kernel. You don’t need external drivers at all most of the time. A notable exception are printer drivers which are packaged separately and are not part of the kernel. All the major distributions have GUI printer configuration tools that let you choose your printer from a list and takes care of everything else pretty much automatically.
In the fairly unusual case where your hardware isn’t recognized properly there can be several reasons the problem occurs. For example, some unusual hardware modules may not have been included by a given Linux distributor by default. In other cases no Open Source module exists. There may be a proprietary driver but you’d have to check the hardware manufacturer’s website or CD-ROM just like Windows. The most common cause I’ve seen with new users is loading up a borrowed copy of an older release of a Linux distribution on newer hardware. A new kernel has all the latest drivers and an old one simply doesn’t. This is why I always advocate a newcomer runs a current distribution, not one that’s a year or two old.
having to read and learn and ask questions from strangers (because nobody else uses linux) just to boot WITHout destroying the precious winNdows enviro that the rest of the family DEPENDS on is LUDICROUS.
You’ve actually raised three different points here. Let’s take them in reverse order.
You shouldn’t install or upgrade any operating system without doing a backup first, period. Even upgrading Windows is fraught with danger simply because there are so many possible hardware combinations that nobody, not even Microsoft, can test them all. If you’re not doing regular backups to protect that precious Windows data already you’re playing with fire for no good reason. Hard drives fail, data becomes corrupted, and that can happen in any operating system.
I just bought a 10 pack of blank DVDs at the supermarket for $4.99. DVD burners, if your system doesn’t have one, are in the two digit price range. There’s plenty of inexpensive Windows software out there to image your entire system and preserve your family’s Windows environment.
Having said all that, most major Linux distributions are designed to install side by side with Windows and do a very good job of it most of the time. You should have no problem with a current copy of Mandriva, openSUSE, Fedora Core, or Ubuntu. Make a backup anyway just to play it safe.
Your middle point, “nobody else uses Linux”, is just plain silly. Every report I’ve seen over the last couple of years puts Linux’ share of the desktop at somewhere between four and six percent. That, my friend, is tens of millions of people. That’s hardly nobody. Maybe none of your friends or family use Linux. I’ll accept that, which brings me to your first point.
Linux, and the Free and Open Source Software movements in general, rely on a community support model. Yes, that means that to get help you plug yourself into that community and that means asking a stranger for help. Those strangers often expect you to ask and are downright welcoming. It’s amazing how, for the most part, the F/OSS community has remained so welcoming despite growing so large. Once again, you need to think of things in a new and different way than you would as a Windows user and that includes how you ask for help. If you aren’t comfortable doing that Linux just plain isn’t for you.
Don’t knock community support until you’ve tried it. I used to hang out on the LinuxChix Techtalk list and I can tell you for certain that within that list there are no stupid questions and everyone is answered with patience and courtesy. Oh, and despite being LinuxChix they really don’t care what your gender is on TechTalk. They just want to help. I’ve also answered a question or two on the Vectorbie (Vector Linux newbie) Questions forum and found it without exception to be equally friendly and helpful. Not fast enough? LinuxChix has IRC channels as well. There are just two examples of a wide range of available help. If you don’t avail yourself of that help don’t blame Linux. Blame yourself.
Using a livecd is great unless you want to save anything and then it is a PAIN IN THE ASS (that I still have not discovered how to do) or completely not an option.
Actually, it’s perfectly simple to save your data. Once again, did you ask the community for help? If you want to figure out everything for yourself then I can’t help you, can I? If you had only used Linux or MacOS and were trying to learn Windows you’d be running into similar issues. I’ve seen it. It’s not Linux that’s the problem. It’s your own stubbornness and independence during what is admittedly a fairly steep learning curve for some people.
Is this operating system goofy on purpose or was it a Sweed with bad English that wrote it. Although it looks like English, I may have well been speaking bad Yiddish. My point is, if you can’t make any sense of the words….Nothing is logical…..You may not have a clue….And yes, after a lot of frustration, I uninstalled it.
Once again Linus Torvalds’ words about “performing brain surgery on yourself” are very apt to your situation. My experience is that people who first try Linux absolutely hate it. If they stick with it for six months they can’t figure out how they ever made do with Windows. Once you’re past the learning curve the advantages of Linux become pretty darned obvious.
Some months back my mother came to visit me in Wisconsin. She is a grandmother in her late sixties, a retired professor of French, and though she is extremely intelligent and well educated she has never exactly been tech savvy. It took her quite a while to learn how to program a VCR. She is also a Windows user with only a small amount of exposure to Linux. She got up earlier than I did one morning, turned on my computer, logged in to Xubuntu Dapper, and proceeded to check her e-mail, read news on the web, and look through a PowerPoint presentation a cousin in Israel had sent using OpenOffice, all with no problems and without asking a single question. Linux passed the grandma test. I have to believe that anyone who makes an effort and doesn’t come in with preconceived notions can run a Linux desktop.
Wake up and look around you - outside of your little shell. It is a very very large world that you do not participate in. Don’t assume the rest of us are idiots- I take personal offense to your language asserting in essence that the rest of us are just not illuminated as you are.
What little shell? Like it or not I’ve had to support Windows throughout my professional career. As long as Windows is dominant on the desktop I will at least have to help my customers deal with interoperability between Linux or UNIX and Windows. That means I have to stay up on Windows technology and retain a fairly high level of expertise with it. I’ve used every version of Windows since 1.04 back in 1985. Sorry but you are the one making a false assumption about what I use and don’t use.
I certainly have never called Windows users “idiots” or implied anything of the sort. What I do say is that you don’t know what you are missing and, in your case, you haven’t done what is necessary to give anything else a chance. Most things which are truly worthwhile don’t came easily.