nixCraft » GNU/Open source

Arrrggg: Open Source Users Are Pirates

Vivek Gite — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:36:21 +0000

US lobby group is trying to get the US government to consider open source as the equivalent to piracy i.e. if you use open source software you are a pirate and that makes you an enemy of the state.

Linux / Windows Application For Prevention Of RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury)

Vivek Gite — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:21:00 +0000

Repetitive strain injury (RSI) is occupational overuse syndrome, non-specific arm pain or work related upper limb disorder. RSI caused from overusing the hands to perform a repetitive task, such as typing, writing, or clicking a mouse. Unfortunately, most people do not understand what RSI is or how serious it can be. You can easily prevent RSI using open source software called Workrave.

20 Linux Server Hardening Security Tips

Vivek Gite — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 07:52:11 +0000

Securing your Linux server is important to protect your data, intellectual property, and time, from the hands of crackers (hackers). The system administrator is responsible for security Linux box. In this first part of a Linux server security series, I will provide 20 hardening tips for default installation of Linux system.

Download Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic koala) CD ISO Images

Vivek Gite — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:43:27 +0000

The latest version of the popular Linux desktop distribution Ubuntu 9.10 has been released and available from the official project web site. New features since Ubuntu 9.04 includes - Firefox 3.5, GNOME 2.28, an enforcing AppArmor profile, Linux kernel 2.6.31, ext4 file system (default), Empathy instant messenger instead of Pidgin, the Ubuntu One client, which interfaces with Canonical's new on-line storage system. It also includes a new application called the Ubuntu Software Center. A quick screen-shot tour of new features available here on our website.

How To: Upgrade Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 to v5.4

Vivek Gite — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:22:59 +0000

Red Hat Enterprise Linux v5.4 has been released and available via RHN for immediate update. The new version includes the kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) virtualization, next generation of developer features and tools including GCC 4.4, a new malloc(). Also included clustered, high-availability filesystem to support Microsoft Windows storage needs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Top 5 Email Client For Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows Users

Vivek Gite — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 08:41:12 +0000

Linux comes with various GUI based email client to stay in touch with your friends and family, and share information in newsgroups with other users. The following software is similar to Outlook Express or Windows Live Mail and is used by both home and office user.
Webmail interfaces allow users to access their mail with any standard web browser, from any computer, rather than relying on an e-mail client. However, e-mail client remains extremely popular in a large corporate environment, small business, home and power users. An e-mail client (also mail user agent (MUA)) is a frontend computer program used to manage e-mail. Mail can be stored on the client, on the server side, or in both places. Standard formats for mailboxes include Maildir and mbox.
The following are top five amazing piece of cross-platform software from various projects to make your life easy with wide variety of plug-ins / add-ons.

CentOS Linux Project In Trouble

Vivek Gite — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:55:47 +0000

CentOS is a community-supported, freely-available operating system based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Lance Davis created CentOS and now he goes absent without leave. In an open letter from his fellow CentOS developers:

You have long promised a statement of CentOS project funds; to this date this has not appeared. You hold sole control of the centos.org domain with no deputy; this is not proper. You have, it seems, sole 'Founders' rights in the IRC channels with no deputy ; this is not proper.

Top 10 Open Source Web-Based Project Management Software

Vivek Gite — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 19:18:10 +0000

Project management software is not just for managing software based project. It can be used for variety of other tasks too. The web-based software must provide tools for planning, organizing and managing resources to achieve project goals and objectives. A web-based project management software can be accessed through an intranet or WAN / LAN using a web browser. You don't have to install any other software on the system. The software can be easy of use with access control features (multi-user). I use project management software for all of our projects (for e.g. building a new cluster farm) for issue / bug-tracking, calender, gantt charts, email notification and much more.

Obviously I'm not the only user, the following open source software is used by some of the biggest research organizations and companies world wild. For e.g. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory uses track software or open source project such as lighttpd / phpbb use redmine software to keep track of their projects.

Google Announces Linux Kernel Based Chrome OS

Vivek Gite — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:49:05 +0000

Google has announced Google Chrome OS, which should be available mid-2010. This is a direct challenge to MS Windows operating systems. This is excellent news and it is going to tied tightly to its Chrome Web browser. Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS - said Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management, in a blog post.

Linux Find Out If PCI Hardware Supported or Not In The Current Running Kernel

Vivek Gite — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:05:04 +0000

From my mailbag:

How do I find out if a given PCI hardware is supported of by the current CentOS / Debian / RHEL / Fedora Linux kernel?

You can easily find out find out if a given piece of PCI hardware such as RAID, network, sound, graphics card is supported or not by the current Linux kernel using the following utilities under any Linux distributions.

OpenOffice.org Quick Introduction For New User

Vivek Gite — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 11:26:39 +0000

OpenOffice.org (OOo) is a freely available, full-featured office suite. OOo is both a software product and a community of volunteers that produces and supports the software. However, new users may get lost while finding help, support and productivity enhancing extensions. This blog post covers OOo new user orientation to to discover support, tutorials, community insights, templates, clip art, extensions, and blogs for OOo.

Linux Kernel Security (SELinux vs AppArmor vs Grsecurity)

Vivek Gite — Wed, 27 May 2009 22:29:17 +0000

Linux kernel is the central component of Linux operating systems. It is responsible for managing the system's resources, the communication between hardware and software and security. Kernel play a critical role in supporting security at higher levels. Unfortunately, stock kernel is not secured out of box. There are some important Linux kernel patches to secure your box. They differ significantly in how they are administered and how they integrate into the system. They also allow for easy control of access between processes and objects, processes and other processes, and objects and other objects. The following pros and cons list is based upon my personal experience.

Download of the day: Ubuntu Linux 9.04 CD / DVD ISO

Vivek Gite — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:38:24 +0000

Ubuntu Linux 9.04 has been released and available for download ( jump to download link ). Ubuntu Linux is a community-based Linux distribution. The latest release of Ubuntu brings the best open source technologies together on one platform, with the benefit of free updates for 18 months. Also announced were the simultaneous releases of Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition and Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix (UNR).

What Do You Use to Debug Linux / UNIX C/C++ Programs?

Vivek Gite — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:24:14 +0000

The purpose of a debugger is to allow you to see what is going on inside another program while it executes. It is useful to find out what another program was doing at the moment it crashed. I know most people will recommend GNU gdb, Nemiver, Valgrind or IDE such as Eclipse. I use gdb when it is really required; otherwise I debug the old fashioned way using printf() or cout statements.

Security Through Obscurity: MAC Address Filtering ( Layer 2 Filtering )

Vivek Gite — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 18:37:21 +0000

MAC Filtering (layer 2 address filtering) refers to a security access control methodology whereby the 48-bit address assigned to each network card is used to determine access to the network. Iptables, pf, and IPFW can block a certain MAC address on a network, just like an IP. One can deny or allow from MAC address like 00:1e:2a:47:42:8d using open source firewalls. MAC address filtering is often used to secure LAN or wireless network / devices. Is this technique effective?

Howto Upgrade Debian 4 Etch to Debian 5.0 Lenny

Vivek Gite — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 17:20:43 +0000

Debian version 5.0 has been released. It is recommended that you upgrade the system to latest version. Upgrading remote Debian server is a piece of cake. In this tutorial, you will learn about upgrading Debian Linux server from Etch to Lenny over ssh session.

How To Tail (View) Multiple Files on UNIX / Linux Console

Vivek Gite — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 19:28:32 +0000

tail is one of the best tool to view log files in a real time (tail -f /path/to/log.file). The program MultiTail lets you view one or multiple files like the original tail program. The difference is that it creates multiple windows on your console (with ncurses). This is one of those dream come true program for UNIX sys admin job. You can browse through several log files at once and do various operations like search for errors and much more.

Woman Blames Dell and Ubuntu For Missing Online School Classes

Vivek Gite — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 16:40:30 +0000

Another clueless woman has claimed that Dell computer and Ubuntu Linux have kept her from going back to school via online classes. According to a story - a woman bought a Dell computer and realized she ordered it with the Ubuntu Operating System rather than MS-Windows. She tried to change OS to Windows but Dell refused. Her Verizon High-Speed Internet CD won't load, so she can't access the internet. She also can't install Microsoft Word, which she says is a requirement for MATC's online classes. As a result, with no internet and no Microsoft Word, Schubert dropped out of MATC's fall and spring semesters. The full story is here including followup.

Now, I've no idea about Verizon's modem and DSL connection but most A/DSL provider modem (router) comes with an Ethernet port. There is no need to use wizard or CD based installer. Other software such as MS-Word can be replaced with OO (I submitted all my school work using OO office writer and no one noticed the difference... ). Further both Verizon and MATC ready to help:

Verizon says it will dispatch a technician to try to assist her accessing the internet without using the Windows-only installation disk. MATC also says it promises to accept any of Schubert's papers or class documents using whatever software she has installed.

So what is the problem here?

Tutorial: OpenOffice.Org Mail Merge

Vivek Gite — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 20:14:35 +0000

Mail merge is a software function describing the production of multiple documents from a single template form and a structured data source. This helps to create personalized letters and pre-addressed envelopes or mailing labels for mass mailings from a word processing document which contains fixed text, which will be the same in each output document, and variables, which act as placeholders that are replaced by text from the data source. The data source is typically a spreadsheet or a database which has a field or column matching each variable in the template. When the mail merge is run, the word processing system creates an output document for each row in the database, using the fixed text exactly as it appears in the template, but substituting the data variables in the template with the values from the matching columns.

This technique of merging data to create mailshots gave rise to the term mail merge. OpenOffice.Org has a in built software mail merge feature.

If you haven't tried OpenOffice.org's mail merge feature because you find it confusing or difficult to use, you are in luck. Mail Merges in OpenOffice.org and StarOffice provides a detailed description of the mail merge feature from start to finish. Among other things, it shows how you can use the mail merge to create letters, labels, and envelopes.

=> You can download this excellent PDF ebook for your persusal or read the article online - Mail Merge in Openoffice.org: Everything You Need to Know.

Important: Openssl Security Update [CVE-2008-5077]

Vivek Gite — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 21:58:45 +0000

Linux / BSD and UNIX like operating systems includes software from the OpenSSL Project. The OpenSSL is commercial-grade, industry-strength, full-featured Open Source toolkit implementing the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL v2/v3) and Transport Layer Security (TLS v1) protocols as well as general purpose cryptography library.

The Google security team discovered a flaw in the way OpenSSL checked the verification of certificates. An attacker in control of a malicious server, or able to effect a "man in the middle" attack, could present a malformed SSL/TLS signature from a certificate chain to a vulnerable client and bypass validation.

This update has been rated as having important security impact on FreeBSD, all version of Ubuntu / Debian, Red Hat (RHEL), CentOS, Fedora and other open source operating system that depends upon OpenSSL.