Don’t Bother Waiting for the Linux Revolution: It’s Already Here

Do you remember a time when Linux was a niche OS? Beyond college kids and a few converted Unix nerds, Linux was something for hackers, Ham radio operators and ivory tower dwellers. No one would ever put a Linux-based computer into a data center. How times and attitudes have changed. Once known as the “little OS that could,” today Linux could take over your data center. No bands will play. No tickertape will fall. And, no pomp or circumstance will surround the event. Linux will seep quietly into your data center through the “cracks” other OSes leave agape.

Fedora 13 praised for security and permissions enhancements

The community-driven Fedora 13 Linux distribution has been reviewed by eWEEK, which was highly impressed with its cutting-edge enterprise features. The review praises Fedora security and permissions features such as the AccountsDialog user management utility, and it also likes the new command line interface for NetworkManager.

As was noted in our coverage of the beta release of Fedora 13 in April, the new Fedora release has introduced a key features including automatic print-driver installation, the Btrfs filesystem, and enhanced 3D driver support. Released last month in final form, Fedora 13 has now been given the once over from the enterprise angle by Jason Brooks at our sister publication, eWEEK.

Linux Trojan Raises Malware Concerns

I’ve got good news and bad news for those of the misguided perception that Linux is somehow impervious to attack or compromise. The bad news is that it turns out a vast collection of Linux systems may, in fact, be pwned. The good news, at least for IT administrators and organizations that rely on Linux as a server or desktop operating system, is that the Trojan is in a download that should have no bearing on Linux in a business setting.

Daily Tips: Forgot the Crontab MAN

For some reason many admins forget the field order of the crontab file and alway reference the man pages over-and-over. Make your life easy. Just put the field definitions in your crontab file and comment (#) the lines out so the crontab file ignores it.

#minute (0-59),
#| hour (0-23),
#| | day of the month (1-31),
#| | | month of the year (1-12),
#| | | | day of the week (0-6 with 0=Sunday).
#| | | | | commands
0 2 * * 0,4 /etc/cron.d/logchecker

The Very Best Open Source Tools For Video, Audio and Graphics

If you cycle back 10 years, the sophistication of and available tools for working with video, audio, and graphics–including working with them online–lagged far behind what is available today. The improvement in the available tools has hardly been lost on the open source world, where some best-of-breed tools are available at absolutely no cost. In this post, you’ll find a roundup of our most significant posts on open source tools for video, audio and graphics. There are many gem applications to be found here.

Full Story: ostatic

Best features of Fedora 13

A new release of Fedora is always a highly anticipated event on the Linux distro calendar and this week’s arrival of version 13 will be no different. What innovations can we expect to find in “Goddard”?

For those readers who have missed all the excitement of testing the preview releases, here are the five best things coming in Fedora 13, according to Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: “When Fedora 13, Goddard, is released on May 25, it’s not going to be your usual Fedora release. In the past, Fedora has been seen as a great Linux distribution for Linux experts. Paul W. Frields, the Fedora Project leader, told me though that this release is more new-user-friendly and that is no longer just for experienced Linux users. Based on my early look at this Red Hat community Linux distribution, I agree.

Daily Tips: Commenting our directory

Here is one way to comment your directory.

$ cd theDirectory
$ touch “zzz*** THIS IS THE DIRECTORY COMMENT! ***zzz”

Whenever you type ls, you’ll see your comment at the bottom. That’s why you type “zzz …”. The asterisk is to decorate.

BSD Release: OpenBSD 4.7

Bob Beck has announced the release of OpenBSD 4.7: “We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 4.7. This is our 27th release on CD-ROM (and 28th via FTP). We remain proud of OpenBSD’s record of more than ten years with only two remote holes in the default install. As in our previous releases, 4.7 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system. Install and upgrade process changes: take more care to ensure all file systems are umounted when restarting an install or upgrade; if no possible root disk is found, keep checking until one appears; the default FTP directory for -stable is now the release directory instead of the snapshot directory. Some highlights: GNOME 2.28.2, KDE 3.5.10, Xfce 4.6.1, MySQL 5.1.42, PostgreSQL 8.4.2, Postfix 2.6.5….” Read the detailed release announcement for a complete list of all changes and improvements. Download: i386/install47.iso (244MB, SHA256), amd64/install47.iso (272MB, SHA256).

Daily Tips: Use du to find files

Normally:

find . -name *.txt -print

is the command to find a file. But you can locate find more efficiently using du and grep

Use:

du -a |grep *.txt

This will locate all the files with the extension .txt in the current directory.

VI Editor / Linux Terminal Cheat Sheet (PDF)

We’ve been releasing many icon sets and WordPress themes on Smashing Magazine, yet today we are glad to announce the release of a bit different freebie. This post features a VI Help Sheet, a cheat sheet for the VI Editor, for all web-developers out there who are working on Linux. The help sheet was designed by GoSquared and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

Full Story: Smashing Magazine