SR Education Group’s Guide To Computer Training site just published a series of “best of” lists all featuring tech blogs. The topics range from Apple Blogs to Web Development Blogs and Linux Insight was featured on the Top Open Source Blogs list. All of these lists were carefully researched and handpicked by the SR staff. The informative commentary, fantastic insight and great guest bloggers on Linux Insight were some of the many reasons that the blog was chosen for our list. Head over and check out the rest and let us know if you have any suggests or requests for future iterations of these lists!

I started Buntfu.com a few years ago now. I had the idea well before that but had not had the opportunity to launch it. I started off with the idea that with Linux being at the point of everyday usability and the learning curve to do so had diminished so dramatically, which made Linux more accessible to the average user. Also taking into account not needing a license to load the OS on any computer, it really opens the doors to the small company and average person who has one or a few old or new computers to sell.

They can now sell a complete working PC with a beautiful stable OS that handles everyday tasks no problem and has equivalent software for just about everything most users will ever need. Not needing to bank roll licensing fees or buying individual copies of an operating system to load on a computer you have for sale allows you to compete on price and still make a profit. Regardless of the business side of the idea, I really wanted to figure out a way an average guy like myself could really help contribute to the promotion and use of open-source software. Totally from a moral and ethical standpoint this is something I'm not only passionate about but something that I believe needs to be done for the good of everyone and our digitally dependent future. I've always appreciated the listings from the current companies that have trusted myself and the site enough to showcase their Linux or BSD computers for sale here.

Authors: Remo Suppi Boldrito, Josep Jorba Esteve
Coordinator: Josep Jorba Esteve
Licenses: GNU Free Documentation License, Creative Commons Attribute ShareAlike License

The GNU/Linux systems have reached an important level of maturity, allowing to integrate them in almost any kind of work environment, from a desktop PC to the sever facilities of a big company.

In the module called "The GNU/Linux operating system", the main contents are related with system administration. This book is the main documentation for the module.

We will learn how to install and configure several computer services, and how to optimize and synchronize the resources.

The activities that will take place in this module cover the studied topics in a practical approach, applying these concepts in real GNU/Linux systems.

Version 3.1.0 is a major update with the following major new features:

• Teleportation (aka live migration); migrate a live VM session from one host to another
• VM states can now be restored from arbitrary snapshots instead of only the last one, and new snapshots can be taken from other snapshots as well ("branched snapshots")
• 2D video acceleration for Windows guests; use the host video hardware for overlay stretching and color conversion
• More flexible storage attachments: CD/DVD drives can be attached to an arbitrary IDE controller, and there can be more than one such drive
• The network attachment type can be changed while a VM is running
• Complete rewrite of experimental USB support for OpenSolaris hosts making use of the latest USB enhancements in Solaris Nevada 124 and higher
• Significant performance improvements for PAE and AMD64 guests (VT-x and AMD-V only; normal (non-nested) paging)
• Experimental support for EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface)
• Support for paravirtualized network adapters (virtio-net)

Current default for X servers as shipped in various distributions is to not enable the traditional Ctrl-Alt-Backspace key combination to kill the X server. If you would like to re-enable this feature, you may do so in your desktop's Keyboard Preferences application. You may also enable it for the current session using the command "setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp".

Over the years I have had to harden a great number of LAMP boxes, I have found some methods work for better than others. I will now share with you all my favorite 10 along with methods to implement them on Debian/Ubuntu.

10. Lock SSH access right down. I do this by disabling root logins, disabling password authentication and using denyhosts.

To disable root logins do this: vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config and look for the following line: PermitRootLogin yes and change it thus: PermitRootLogin no

To disable password authentication (you will have to use public/private keys) do this: vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config and look for the following line: #PasswordAuthentication yes (note its commented out) and change it thus: PasswordAuthentication no

To install denyhosts do this: apt-get install denyhosts once installed it shouldn't need any configuration, but you can tweak the settings if you wish in /etc/denyhosts.conf

9. Always use Sudo for root access, This is one of the things Ubuntu does really well and its about time other distros did the same.

No comment. :)

Eclipse + EPIC, Perl Express, Padre, Kephra, Open Perl IDE, Perl Code Editor, Perl Studio, visiPerl+, Perl Scripting Tool, EngInSite-Perl, PerlEdit, PerlWiz, DzSoft Perl, OptiPerl, Perl Builder, SciTE, Notepad++, NEdit, Vim (or vi or gvim), Kate, FTE, Emacs (or xemacs, with or without extensions), KDevelop, Joe, Jed, Gedit, Anjuta, JEdit, Komodo IDE, Komodo Edit, Prof. Notepad, Ultra Edit (plain or Studio), EditPlus, ED for Windows, TextPad, Editeur, TextMate, Notepad2, Pico, Geany, nano, PSPad, Smultron, SlickEdit, mcedit, BBEdit, TextWrangler, KEdit or something else?

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Appeared as a full page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal. You have to admit Larry Ellison that he has a sense of humor. Anyway, I'm glad that Oracle will continue work on improving Sun technologies, both hardware (SPARC) and software (Solaris). But it remains to be seen what happens with other products that Sun acquired (before Oracle bought Sun) that are not mentioned explicitly in the ad. Stuff like MySQL database, VirtualBox virtualization and so on...

Mark Jason Dominus' absolutely great Perl book is now available for free download in PDF format by virtue of special permission from the publisher.

Higher-Order Perl is about functional programming techniques in Perl. It's about how to write functions that can modify and manufacture other functions. Why would you want to do that? Because that way your code is more flexible and more reusable. Instead of writing ten similar functions, you write a general pattern or framework that can generate the functions you want; then you generate just the functions you need according to the pattern. The program doesn't need to know in advance which functions are necessary; it can generate them as needed. Instead of writing the complete program yourself, you get the computer to write it for you.

Preface by Damian Conway, Co-designer of Perl 6

As a programmer, your bookshelf is probably overflowing with books that did nothing to change the way you program... or think about programming.

You're going to need a completely different shelf for this book.

While discussing caching techniques in Chapter 3, Mark Jason Dominus points out how a large enough increase in power can change the fundamental way you think about a technology. And that's precisely what this entire book does for Perl.