Unixster

A recent case seems to show that we can lose access to our e-mail accounts and other cloud-based apps for simply avoiding the kinds of e-mails that pretty much everyone would assume were spam.
– Oh, well just another day in the
technology grind. I think Ill fire up my Gmail account to see if I have any
important e-mails in there.
One thing Im pretty sure about is
that there will be more spam and phishing e-mails. Gmail was pretty good about
catching these things, but lately I’ve been g…

My ambition was to implement a small (better tiny) appliance for monitoring network health and network resources, short and longtime trends, running under VMware Server or VMware ESX. So I had an eye upon all components which are implemented on the system, to be as leightweight as possible. This was also the reason why no SQL DBMS based software was used. The appliance is based on Ubuntu Jeos LTS (8.04.3 at the time of this writing). Almost all used components are from the related repositories. This tutorial shows how the appliance was implemented.

Plymouth, the nifty boot splash program developed by Red Hat to replace RHGB and leverages kernel-based mode-setting to provide a flicker-free experience, is in the process of picking up more features. Committed to the Plymouth repository is now a DRM plug-in.

In a posting on his FSF blog, Richard Stallman has apologised for "repeating a criticism of Mac OS which I cannot substantiate and must presume is false". The claim, that Mac OS X has a backdoor which could install changes without the user’s permission, is one that Stallman has repeated, but he now says there "is no basis to claim there is one".

Bletchley Park, the top secret code breaking hub that played a pivotal role in the outcome of World War Two, has finally been awarded development funding of some £460,500 ($735,500) from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

I loved Amarok 1.4 and even used it in Gnome. Then, I really hated all the 2.x series until this 2.2 RC1. It’s kind of slow, but it finally looks like a real music player and reminds me why I liked Amarok so much. I’m currently using it in Ubuntu Jaunty and since there are only .deb files for Ubuntu Karmic posted on the announcement download link (actually those are for version 2.2 beta), I thought I’d let you know how to install it in Ubuntu Jaunty (and Fedora, thanks to Fedora-ES).

Google Summer of Code has again been a huge success for KDE this year. 37 out of 38 projects were finished successfully. Much of the work done during these projects is already merged into trunk and will be available for the users with the KDE 4.4 release in January 2010. Thanks to all students and mentors for their great work! Below you will find a short interview with each of the students, asking them about the cool things they have been working on for the past few months.

"With the up coming release of GIMP 3.0, I think that GIMP should be renamed to simply “Wilber.” Though it would no longer be an acronym for “GNU Image Manipulation Program”, but it would totally eliminate any possibly offensive terminology in exchange for a name everyone can love, especially the young, and it would give GIMP a chance at the big times."

Exaile is a music manager and player for GTK+ written in Python. It incorporates automatic fetching of album art, lyrics fetching, artist/album information via Wikipedia, Last.fm scrobbling, support for many portable media players including iPods, internet radio such as shoutcast, and tabbed playlists.