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Red Hat has proven many times that it can acquire and oversee open source projects without tainting them with commercial efforts or otherwise fouling them up. I expect most CentOS users, like the project itself, stand to gain from wearing Red Hat. As for Red Hat, joining with CentOS represents a net win in terms of growing community, ecosystem and paying customers. There was a somewhat quiet, cost-free acquisition of sorts in the Linux world earlier this year when Red Hat announced it was joining forces with Red Hat Enterprise Linux community clone CentOS. The move, which effectively brings organization,...

In this follow up to Replace the Retiring Windows XP with Linux we're going learn the easiest and most foolproof way to install and run Xubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS on your old Windows XP computer. The only requirements are that your old computer has USB ports, and that it supports booting from a USB stick. If your computer is too old for USB, then it's pretty darned old and you really need to think about getting a newer one. There are but four steps: one, go to OSDisc.com and order Xubuntu Linux on a 32-gigabyte USB stick. Then insert the USB stick into your computer,...

Microsoft officially ended support for Windows XP on April 8, 2014. That means the company is no longer patching newly discovered security vulnerabilities in the operating system, and people who continue to use it are opening themselves up to security risks. However, according to NetMarketShare, more than a quarter of all PCs (27.69 percent) were still running Windows XP in March of this year.Why would people continue using a twelve-year-old operating system that would put them at risk?No doubt, many are home users who simply aren't very technology savvy and/or may not have the desire or the money to upgrade...

WASHINGTON – People who have accounts on the enrollment website for President Obama's signature health care law are being told to change their passwords following an administration-wide review of the government's vulnerability to the confounding Heartbleed Internet security flaw. Senior administration officials said there is no indication that the HealthCare.gov site has been compromised and the action is being taken out of an abundance of caution. The government's Heartbleed review is ongoing, the officials said, and users of other websites may also be told to change their passwords in the coming days, including those with accounts on the popular WhiteHouse.gov...

Apple said Thursday that its mobile, desktop and Web services weren’t affected by a major flaw in a set of security software used by hundreds of thousands of websites. The flaw, codenamed “Heartbleed” and first reported by Web security firm Codenomicon, was discovered in a technology called “OpenSSL” — a set of encryption software used by Web companies to safeguard user information. Sites that use OpenSSL will display a small “lock” icon in the top left-hand corner of your Web browser’s address bar (though not all sites showing this lock use OpenSSL); the technology is used on more than two-thirds...

It’s been my experience that, despite any progress, Ubuntu and distros like it have made in gaining new users, those in the tech media continue to get it wrong. In this article, I’ll examine how the tech media continues to spread misinformation about Linux on the desktop, why it happens and what we as users can do about it. Linux is difficult to install Years ago, merely installing and configuring Linux for the desktop could be extremely difficult. And while recent technologies such as UEFI have added some extra hurdles for distribution developers, the end user is able to install...

A serious vulnerability in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic library has been discovered that allows attackers to steal information unnoticed. Known as the Heartbleed bug, the vulnerability allows anyone on the Internet to read the memory of systems that run vulnerable versions of OpenSSL, revealing the secret authentication and encryption keys to protect the traffic. User names, passwords and the actual content of the communications can also be read. ... OpenSSL recommends that uses immediately upgrade to version 1.0.1g. If that's not possible, users should recompile OpenSSL with the -DOPENSSL_NO_HEARTBEATS flag to remove the the heartbeat handshake. The 1.0.2 version of...

I got an older Compaq Presario Laptop and I've been toying with the idea of putting Ubuntu on it. I was wondering if I would need to totally wipe the HD to get Ubuntu to run properly or can I install it while leaving Windows 7 on and it will still run OK. I am going to get a new laptop eventually but am in no hurry so it would be nice to still keep windows But I can manage for now without it being I use my Entertainment System Computer most of the time. Thanks in advance for any...

Linux can't be understood in terms of hierarchy. Neither can the Internet. That's because both are examples of heterarchy at work. Flatland, an 1880 novella by Edwin A. Abbott, is about a world with just two dimensions, inhabited by lines and polygons. Trouble starts when a sphere shows up. For business, the same kind of trouble started when Linux and the Internet showed up in the mid-1990s. No matter how useful Linux and the Internet prove to be, business still has trouble getting its head around a virtual world composed of end points that are all autonomous, self-empowered and at...

The big news from Microsoft today was that it has finally launched Office for iPad, which will give users full access to the popular productivity suite if they sign up for the Office 365 subscription service. But under the surface of the announcement, we got our first look at CEO Satya Nadella's broader vision for Microsoft's future. Nadella has only been CEO for 52 days, but we're already getting a sense of how he plans to expand the company's offerings beyond its core products like Windows. In short, Nadella sees Microsoft powering all sorts of devices through services and apps...

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- I saw a promo the other day for Google (GOOG) Work. Sadly, I can't locate it or I would have inserted it here so you could see it for yourself. However, it might be fitting that you can't see the promo. Because Google's assault on Microsoft (MSFT) continues to fly under the radar. For whatever reason, it's the most under covered story in tech ... in finance ... and for the sake of extraneous ellipses ... the world. But it's real and it's happening. And Microsoft has no idea what to do in response. How could...

There has been a lot of talk in the past month over the looming doom of Windows XP. Microsoft will be pulling the life support plug on XP on April 8th this year. There are plenty of folks a bit jittery about this and those jitters are justifiable. Microsoft Windows XP has undoubtedly been the longest running Windows operating system to date. Microsoft has extended the deadline for killing XP a couple of times. Now it appears there will be no stay of execution for the aging OS. Even with all the publicity and news about the demise of XP,...

According to some reports you'd think the security sky was falling. Yes, GnuTLS, an open-source "secure" communications library that implements \Secure-Socket Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS), has serious flaws. The good news? Almost no one uses it. OpenSSL has long been everyone's favorite open-source security library of choice. Red Hat discovered the latest in a long-series of GnuTLS bugs .Latest? Yes, latest.You see, GnuTLS has long been regarded as being a poor SSL/TLS security library. A 2008 message on the OpenLDAP mailing list had "GnuTLS considered harmful" as its subject — which summed it up nicely. In it, Howard...

For much of the Linux operating system's history, patching a kernel has been a process that has typically involved downtime. In 2014, that's no longer the case as there are now at least three distinct efforts that offer the promise of zero-downtime kernel patching to Linux servers.The most recent entrant into the zero-downtime patching parade is Red Hat with the kpatch effort. Red Hat first revealed its efforts on Feburary 26th in a blog post detailing how kpatch works. Red Hat was unable to directly comment about any aspect of kpatch to ServerWatch for this article.Red Hat is a relative...

A source code mistake in the GnuTLS library – an open-source software building block used in a large number of different Linux distributions to handle secure Internet connections – could prove a serious threat to the privacy of Linux users, as developers rush to patch the vulnerability. Nikos Mavrogiannopolous, the developer of GnuTLS, announced Monday in a mailing list message that he had implemented a fix to the source code that closes the loophole. The flaw would have enabled an attacker to spoof GnuTLS’ system for verifying certificates, exposing supposedly secure connections to stealthy eavesdropping. By creating a specific type...

The Linux Foundation and tech recruitment firm Dice pair up each year to produce the Linux Jobs Report, where around 1,000 corporate hiring managers and 4,000 Linux professionals are surveyed to learn what's been going on in the Linux job market.The 2014 edition of the report makes clear that Linux is not only an in-demand job skill for IT, but one that commands better pay and more job perks than other jobs in the same field.The first and most striking claim in the report is how the search for Linux talent has intensified, with both recruiters and Linux pros reporting...

Microsoft sold more than 200 million Windows 8 and 8.1 licenses during the controversial OS's first 15 months, Tami Reller, the company's executive VP of marketing, revealed Thursday at a Goldman Sachs technology conference.Sounds impressive, right? Not exactly.Sure, 200 million is a big number -- that's about one license for every 35 people on the planet, a level of ubiquity most companies would kill for. But Microsoft isn't most companies. Put into historical or aspirational context, Windows 8 and 8.1 have underwhelmed.Not convinced? Here are five reasons not to be impressed.1. Windows 8 sales can't keep pace with Windows 7's precedent.In...

Introduction The “Everyday Linux User” website is dedicated to the average, ordinary, everyday, computer user who has a basic working knowledge of computers and who uses their computer for common tasks such as listening to music, playing games, watching videos, writing documents and editing photos and video clips. Quite a common question asked at sites such as Reddit and Yahoo answers is “Which distro should I use?” and it is usually followed up by a brief set of requirements and the names of distributions that the user has heard of. Users are confused when they first come to Linux about...

The Windows XP death clock is ticking away. While Microsoft has extended support for malware protection, do not be fooled -- XP will be officially unsupported on April 8. If Microsoft has its druthers, these XP users will upgrade to Windows 8 and maybe even buy a new computer. However, there is a problem with this -- the Windows 8 UI is radically different from XP and people do not like change (especially people clinging to an operating system from 2001). Also, they may not need to buy a new computer, because their existing is probably fast enough... for...