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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Ark Size: 642.03 MB Status: 9 seeders and 4 leechers Added: 2007-08-17 13:50:43

Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Ark Size: 125.66 MB Status: 3 seeders and no leecher Added: 2007-08-17 13:49:48

Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Ark Size: 619.56 MB Status: 5 seeders and 1 leechers Added: 2007-08-17 13:48:53

Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Ark Size: 559.06 MB Status: 6 seeders and 2 leechers Added: 2007-08-17 13:47:41

Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Ark Size: 255.03 MB Status: 5 seeders and 2 leechers Added: 2007-08-17 13:46:34

Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Ark Size: 345.53 MB Status: 5 seeders and 1 leechers Added: 2007-08-17 13:45:39

Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Ark Size: 698.78 MB Status: 10 seeders and 7 leechers Added: 2007-08-17 13:43:23

Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Parsix Size: 692.84 MB Status: 4 seeders and no leecher Added: 2007-08-17 10:16:08

Source: pfsense

The second release candidate of pfSense, a FreeBSD-based firewall, is ready for testing: "pfSense 1.2-RC2 has been released. Here are just a few of the new improvements and features that have made their way into this new version: automatically restarts racoon (ipsec-tools if it wedges); ensure CARP status .

Source: mepis

Warren Woodford has announced the first official beta release of the upcoming SimplyMEPIS 7.0: "MEPIS has announced the upload of the first official beta of the upcoming 7.0 release of SimplyMEPIS. Since the pre-beta of two weeks ago, there have been several changes which are included in Beta .

Source: ark

Ark Linux 2007.1 has been released: "The Ark Linux team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Ark Linux 2007.1, the latest version of its multi-purpose desktop operating system. Ark Linux can be used for office/school work, desktop publishing, graphics, multimedia entertainment, editing, gaming, software development, and .

Source: parsix

Alan Baghumian has announced the availability of an updated release of Parsix GNU/Linux 0.90: "An updated version of Parsix GNU/Linux 0.90, code name Barry, has been released. Barry r1 introduces the project's first ever 64-bit edition, both 32-bit and 64-bit editions have been built from scratch using debootstrap, .

Source: Linux Today

LinuxDevCenter: "Fast-forward a year or two, and what happens? Does LJ wise up? Why, no! Not at all! Instead they take a huge step backwards and run a full-page ad that insults both women and men "

Source: Linux Today

Channel Register: "It may have been frustrating for the open source activists, more vocal than numerous, who had been hoping for more instant gratification than the software market delivered "

Source: Linux Today

Editor's Note: We are asked to respect Microsoft. I can buy that--but let me suggest to you what kind of respect it should be.

Source: Linux Today

ZDNet: "This is part of Sun's exit strategy from the server business "

Source: Linux Today

Walking With Elephants "Sometimes events transpire in the software industry that, when tied with other events, take on a much bigger meaning "

Source: Linux Today

LinuxDevices: "IBM may acquire embedded software powerhouse Wind River, according to rumors originating in the blogosphere, and a statement issued by Wind River competitor Enea "

Source: Linux Today

Computer Business Review: "'If you go back to the press conferences that SCO repeatedly called back in 2003 and 2004, they never began those press conferences by making the standard disclaimers cautioning investors to take what they were saying with a grain of salt '"

Source: Linux Today

LWN: "A one month, world-wide celebration of
GNOME's tenth anniversary begins this week, culminating in mid-September with Software Freedom Day and the release of GNOME 2.20 "

Source: Linux Today

InformationWeek: "Despite having competing browsers, Opera used Mozilla's JavaScript security software tool, which was recently submitted to the general software community "

Source: Linux Today

ZDNet UK: "Networking giant 3Com is banking on an open-source strategy to differentiate itself from the competition "

Source: Linux Today

CNET News: "Though Dell has finished an internal investigation into its accounting practices, there are still plenty of questions about the company, which not long ago could do no wrong in the minds of investors and customers "

Source: Linux Today

internetnews.com: "Apparently having an Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved license does matter "

Source: Linux Today

PR: "This is our seventh development release on our road towards GNOME 2.20.0, which will be released in September 2007 "

Source: Linux Today

Computer Business Review: "Now that's what I call an open source acquisition. Intrusion detection and prevention firm Sourcefire has snapped up the ClamAV, the gateway anti-virus project "

Source: Linux Today

Datamation: "Behold the vast and sprawling feast of open source downloads. Incredible, ain't it? Armed with little more than an Internet connection and some extra space on your hard drive, a rich cornucopia awaits you "

Source: Linux Today

Enterprise Linux Log: "As a journalist, I get perturbed when I see talking heads on TV (on issues political, technological or otherwise) 'attack the messenger' when the message they're delivering isn't something they agree with "

Source: Linux Today

Blue GNU: "It has been said there is no such thing as a 'true' Free Software business "

Source: Linux Today

Linux.com: "System administrators need to secure their systems while avoiding locking them down so strictly that they become useless "

Source: Linux Today

Enterprise Networking Planet: "In which we learn how to plug printers directly into and share scanners over the network "

Source: Linux Today

Mrzonbu: "It has been over two weeks now since I started playing with the Zonbu "

Source: Linux Today

Linux.com: "After I wrote an article on optimizing disk performance, some readers commented that tweaking settings was just part of the job "

Source: Linux Today

HowtoForge: "In this tutorial I will describe how to install and configure mod_deflate on a lighttpd 1.4 web server on Debian Etch "

Source: Slashdot: Linux

mrcgran writes "In eight months since Office 2007 was released to the general public (10 months since release to enterprise customers), there are fewer than 2,000 of these office documents posted on the Web. In the last three months, 13,400 more ODF documents have been added to the Web, with only 1,329 OOXML documents added. It would be hard for the Microsoft camp to spin ten times as many ODF documents added as OOXML documents, especially since 34% of those new documents were added on Microsoft.com. That isn't what I would call good traction for Microsoft's overwhelmingly dominant office suite."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: ONLamp.com

Hearing that Uncle Bob feels afraid to refactor Ruby code without an IDE sends me back to the stern-but-loving embrace of Vim, my comprehensive test coverage, and a decent version control system.

Yikes. That’s like forgetting how to type. (No, that’s not a Hindley-Milner joke.)

Source: ONLamp.com

In a now famous article by Joel Spolsky, he argues that you should never rewrite projects from scratch. To be fair, I’ve done this, but generally on open-source projects where I’m donating my time. I’m less worried about financial constraints or competitive advantage.

Aside from that edge case, I generally agree with Joel Spolsky. If something is a tiny project, refactoring is often trivial and if you want to do a rewrite, so be it. However, large projects are often dangerous to rewrite. But how did they become large projects? The vast majority of “large” projects I have worked on started out as small projects which gradually had features and cruft added. Interestingly, this is very similar to how agile methodologies work: build something small, but useful, in the first iteration or two. Always have working code and keep building on it. So the rewrite seems like a good idea because we’ve already shown we can create the project, right?

Anyone familiar with the Mythical Man Month has an idea of how and why large projects are more likely to fail than small ones. When we have a rewrite that we’re concerned about, we tend to have a “large project” and thus we increase its chance of failure. However, we also have a lot of domain knowledge and if you have competent enough programmers with plenty of experience, is this domain knowledge sufficient to overcome the disadvantages of a rewrite? The larger the project, the more likely the answer is “no”. However, while I’ve seen plenty of studies regarding the success of projects and correlating their success with project size, I can’t recall seeing one correlating success with whether or not the project is a rewrite. Though this is informal, what’s been your experience? I don’t expect you to answer all of these questions, but I’m curious.


What was the problem domain?
Did the project succeed or fail?
What success criteria were used to judge?
What was the rational for the rewrite?
How many developers?
What was the “size” of the project? (tough to quantify, I know)
What was the expected versus actual timeframe?
Was automated testing involved?
Any other comments you care to offer?


Feel free to answer any or all of the questions above.

Source: Linux DevCenter

This just keeps getting worse. Please tell me how anyone could think this is a good idea:
Tech Tips with Gnull and Voyd
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9452
“Howdy. My husband is Chester Gnull and I’m Laverta Voyd, and I’m the lady to light a way for all you sweethearts out there who do fancy stuff with Linux. Me and my husband’s gonna be bringing you tech tips just about every month now….I don’t know nothing about Linux. Chester, he’s the smart one…”
How many moronic stereotypes can you count in this? I thought the odious Mango Parfait http://www.tuxmagazine.com/node/1000131 in Tux Magazine was bad; somehow the fine folks at Linux Journal managed to exceed their previous Standard of Awfulness.
Here is a free suggestion for the fine folks at Linux Journal, though given the systemic awfulness of their perception of women it’s probably wasted: women don’t need husbands and boyfriends to do tech. We don’t need to be portrayed as cartoony stereotypes. We stand on our own merits as competent, skilled adults and tech professionals. Are you capable of understanding this? Why do you have an editorial policy of belittling and being disrespectful to women?
When are you going to issue a public, sincere apology? When are you going to get a clue and quit portraying women in such idiotic ways?
Linux Journal contacts page: http://www.linuxjournal.com/xstatic/staff/index

Source: Linux DevCenter

I use RT as a request/bug tracker, but until recently hadn’t set it up with an email address plugged directly into it. This was because I don’t run my own email server - that’s centralised - which makes setup a bit more difficult. And undocumented, hence this post. Convincing users to use a different email address may well be tough, but at least you yourself can start bouncing relevant emails to the RT address, thereby creating a more trackable system.

There are 2 basic steps: 1. setting up the mail gateway to RT; 2. mail pickup from the external central server. Note that I’m using exim4 - other mail programs will obviously work differently. Details are below…




Mail gateway


As per the documentation, edit /etc/aliases to include the line

rt-email: "|/usr/bin/rt-mailgate --queue General --action correspond --url https://localhost/rt"


Then edit /etc/exim4/exim4.conf.template to include the line

pipe_transport = address_pipe

Note that this needs to be outside the SYSTEM_ALIASES_PIPE_TRANSPORT block. Reload exim4 for the change to take effect.

If you have any authorisation set up for RT access, you run into a problem here, which is that the mail server doesn’t have that authorisation. For this reason, there are sections of RT which are identified as NoAuth - you should turn authorisation off for those bits. The relevant section of your Apache2 config should look a bit like this:


Order allow,deny
Allow from all
Satisfy any



Order allow,deny
Allow from all
Satisfy any



# whatever auth you have in place - Kerberos for me.


(thanks to this RT howto for this).

To test all of this, try:
cat testfile |/usr/bin/rt-mailgate --queue General --action correspond --url https://localhost/rt

and then try sending an email to your rt-email address from the local command line.


Picking up mail from the central server

The next step, then, is to grab the mail from the server and deal with it correctly. I use fetchmail for this, with the following config:

poll imap.example.com protocol IMAP username rt-email password passwd smtpaddress example.com
mda '/usr/bin/rt-mailgate --queue General --action correspond --url https://localhost/rt'

(that’s 2 separate lines, there). imap.example.com is whatever email server you use; example.com is whatever domain your email appears to come from.

The command to make this happen is:
fetchmail -f /root/rt-fetchmail.conf
which you will probably want to put in an appropriate crontab.

Email rt-email from somewhere non-local. Wait for the cronjob to run. Marvel! as a shiny brand new ticket appears in RT.