Sam is an installable livecd based on Mandriva Cooker and uses xfce4 as its desktop. I tested Sam about a year ago back when it was still a mini distro of approximately 200mb. At that time it wouldn't stay running long enough to permit us taking some screenshots. They released a full 700 mb preview of their upcoming 2006 release and we at Tuxmachines thought we'd check it out. How did Sam do this time?

Reaching the closed testing environment just hours ago has been the third BETA candidate for X2 - The Threat, which is presently being ported to Linux by the developers at Linux Game Publishing. This third candidate delivers many performance improvements and is the focus of our benchmarking today to see how the second and third BETA updates fair, after we had tampered with the initial build late last year.

Cleveland's Key Bank is keeping its own bank balance healthy by moving much of its back-end infrastructure to Linux. "In the last year, Linux has gone from 'unapproved for use in the building' to our platform of choice."

Eben Moglen's life just got a lot busier. The Columbia Law School professor and attorney representing the Free Software Foundation has the new role of explaining and overseeing the update to the General Public License (GPL). That document, being revised for the first time in 15 years, is not only the embodiment of the free software movement's principles but also the legal foundation for thousands of open-source software programs from Linux to MySQL.

Linux kernel is susceptible to a local denial of service vulnerability. Linux kernel 2.4 versions on 64-bit x86 architectures prior to 2.4.33-pre1 are affected.

Apple Computer Inc.'s iMac desktop PC, introduced by CEO Steve Jobs at last week's MacWorld Expo, is the latest target in iSuppli Corp.'s teardown analysis.

The U.S. government is asking a California court to force Google Inc. to turn over information about usage of the company's search engine for finding pornography on the Internet.

SourceForge.net, the world's largest collaborative development environment and download repository of Open Source applications, announced today that it will provide support for the Subversion Software Configuration Management (SCM) system in addition to the CVS (Concurrent Versions System) SCM services currently provided.

If you're like me you'll most likely use a wide variety of desktop applications, and spend a lot of time setting up your desktop first thing in the afternoon when you login. Minimising some applications, setting others up to be visible upon all virtual desktops, etc. Even if you have a basic window manager you can automate this activity using Devil's Pie.

Ready to synchronize your Palm OS-based PDA with your Linux desktop? Here's a trio of GUI-based options and a command-line tool for you to try.

This document describes how to install the GNU/Linux GPL IPCop firewall and create a small home office network. In the second installment we cover creating a DMZ for hosting your own web server or mail server and the Copfilter proxy for filtering web and email traffic.

The book is not specifically for system administrators or programmers, but for anyone who wants to understand how things really work inside the machine. "It explains the theoretical underpinnings for why Linux, and many other operating systems, do things the way they do," Cesati explains. "We try to go beyond superficial features and offer a background, such as the history of major features and why they were used."

Taking music along with you can be a hassle, even in the iPod age. You have to bring along either CDs or your MP3 player with you everywhere you go; and then you have to spend time sorting your music manually at each location, which I find to be a huge time waster. Even though the iPod Nanos and other similar MP3 players are very small, it still is a bit of a bother to have yet one more device in my brief case. The Oboe service from MP3tunes.com has helped me address these issues.

Browster, Inc., a California-based company geared toward Internet search technologies, on Wednesday launched its Open Design Project, which will involve the general public in shaping the design for its flagship Browster plug-in -- with cash.

Google has announced it has opened up its new instant messaging service, Google Talk, to all other IM networks that utilize the XMPP protocol, which originally was developed for Jabber. This enables Google users to communicate directly with users of Linux IM clients GAIM and Psi, Apple's iChat, Jabber, Gizmo Project, Tiscali, Netease, Chikka, MediaRing, and several others.

There are times when you're looking for a particular library, or file, which you know is available to Debian but you cannot find the package which contains it. This is the kind of job that the Debian packages site helped with in the past, but given its current unavailability we'll look at another approach.

I'm sure we will see Windows running on a Mactel... someday. It may be when Vista finally shows up, since it should run with EFI, or perhaps when they get Virtual PC 8 out, but long, long before then, we'll be able to run Linux and Mac OS X on the same Mactel box.

Buffer overflow proofs of concept are produced with routine regularity, demonstrating how easy it can be to leverage unsafe coding practices into successful attacks and system takeovers. Thus, it's imperative to follow a layered methodology to fortify applications against the perils of unchecked code.