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Every now and then, it's nice to break out of your bubble, to really get outside your comfort zone and see how things are "on the other side of the fence."I love Chinese food. Could eat Chinese food every day of the week. But, once in a while, it's a good idea to mix things up. You know. And order a pizza. This is that time for me. Only instead of Chinese food, it's Linux. Instead of pizza, Windows 10 (Technical Preview). That's right. I'm a full time Linux user, and I just spent a few days trying to live...

Remember the most talked about story of 2014? It was Microsoft loves Linux. It looks like Microsoft’s love for Linux is more like Mark Wahlberg’s love for Reese Witherspoon as we saw in the movie Fear.If reports are to be trusted Microsoft’s survival mechanism may kick in again, with the new release of Windows. The legacy software maker may resort to ‘secure boot’ to block alternative operating systems on Windows PCs.At Microsoft’s hardware conference WinHEC, new slides were shown which could mean bad news for Linux users. Machines shipping with Windows 10 may see OEMs enforcing Secure Boot without an option...

The long reigning king of the desktop OS is in trouble. Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, is rapidly steering the company into the back office and service spaces, while their nascent mobile and desktop platforms are crumbling around them. Microsoft is putting on a brave face continuing to heavily advertise the 2-in-1 Surface debacle, but Nadella is only buying time, as he must surely know that Apple and Google is the two-headed beast that Microsoft can not stop. In less than a decade, Microsoft will be associated with IBM or Oracle, not Apple or Google. Apple’s iOS is poised for...

I grew up in rural West Virginia, and I don't remember learning how to shoot. All I know is I was certainly shooting well before the time I was 8. I grew up in a gun culture, with many relatives in the military, and I went to school at West Virginia University, which won its 16th NCAA Rifle Championship in 2014. In short, I know guns and I know just how hard it is to shoot accurately at extreme ranges such as 1,000 yards. Even at my best, I was never able to do it reliably. (Image: TrackingPoint) Or rather,...

The perfect desktop is undoubtedly the one you would design yourself. However, lacking the necessary time and expertise, many users hop instead from desktop to desktop desktop with the same enthusiasm as others hop between distros, hoping to find the ideal distribution.In many cases, they never find their ideal, and for good reason -- even the simplest Linux desktop is a mixture of advantages and disadvantages.Here, for example, are some core reasons for both accepting and rejecting the seven leading desktops of today:Cinnamon Leading Advantage: Like MATE, Linux Mint's other desktop, Cinnamon is a classic desktop for GNOME-based applications. However,...

Don’t Let the Grinch Steal Christmas December 16, 2014 Posted by: Stephen Coty, Chief Security EvangelistLeave a comment Blog Contributions by Tyler Borland, Sr. Security Researcher and Stephen Coty, Chief Security Evangelist, Alert Logic Since we are in the thick of the holiday season, we are analyzing which operating systems support the needs of e-commerce and brick and mortar retail shops. Due to the lower cost of ownership and efficiencies such as a non-resource heavy operating system that allow for applications to run more smoothly, we found that Linux is dominating when it comes to e-commerce site deployment. According...

The latest monthly report from internet security specialist Doctor Web shows that whilst Windows and Android users have no cause for complacency, November saw substantial numbers of malicious programs aimed at Mac OS X and Linux platforms. Trojans remain the most popular form of attack making up 8.7 percent of all malware detected. Trojan.InstallCore.12, which installs different adware, toolbars and browser extensions, ranks first. BackDoor.Andromeda.404, which downloads other malicious programs into an infected system when commanded to do so by intruders, ranks second. In November BackDoor.Andromeda.404 was distributed in large quantities by email thanks to a mass spam campaign. It...

Microsoft is planning to open source the full server-side .NET core stack and to take that open-sourced .NET core to Linux and Mac OS X, alongside Windows.Microsoft officials announced the company's latest .NET programming-model plans on the opening day of the Connect(); developer-focused event on November 12.In April 2014, Microsoft announced plans to open source a number of its developer technologies, including ASP.NET, the Roslyn .NET compiler platform, the .NET Micro Framework, .NET Rx and the VB and C# programming languages. Microsoft officials said they planned to make these technologies available via a newly created .Net Foundation.Today, the company is adding...

Image by :  Opensource.com Maybe you’ve heard about Linux and are intrigued by it. So intrigued that you want to give it a try. But you might not know where to begin.You’ve probably done a bit of research online and have run across terms like dual booting and virtualization. Those terms might mean nothing to you, and you’re definitely not ready to sacrifice the operating system that you’re currently using to give Linux a try. So what can you do? If you have a USB flash drive lying around, you can test drive Linux by creating a live USB....

Gone are the days when Linux was considered just “a cancer” by Microsoft’s big honchos, as the new CEO of the Redmond-based company says the open-source platform is quickly gaining ground on its Azure platform. Speaking at a cloud event in San Francisco, Nadella has suggested that “Microsoft loves Linux,” pointing out that the company is working to offer support for more Linux distributions through its Azure cloud service. Nearly 20 percent of Azure is Linux-friendly, he revealed, adding that starting this week, CoreOS is also supported. CentOS, Oracle Linux, Suse, and Ubuntu were already working on Azure. What’s...

Since its inception, there has always been a base level of friction within the Linux community.For the most part, this friction has led to new ideas that have provided ease of use and in some instances, improved functionality. Distros such as Ubuntu best showcase this example, despite the grief it gets from parts of the Linux community. Digging deeper beyond the surface, however, some of this friction has proven to be more divisive than productive.Extreme views from software titans One of the most divisive situations I've seen in the Linux space is how proprietary code within the Linux space is...

In the olden days the topic of software freedom was central to Linux and free/open source software. Software freedom needs to remain front and center. Remember Richard Stallman's Four Freedoms?"Nobody should be restricted by the software they use. There are four freedoms that every user should have: the freedom to use the software for any purpose,the freedom to change the software to suit your needs,the freedom to share the software with your friends and neighbors, andthe freedom to share the changes you make." Another way to say this is we should always have the freedom to tinker.We used to take these freedoms...

Red Hat is aware that the patch for CVE-2014-6271 is incomplete. An attacker can provide specially-crafted environment variables containing arbitrary commands that will be executed on vulnerable systems under certain conditions. The new issue has been assigned CVE-2014-7169. ...

A remotely exploitable vulnerability has been discovered by Stephane Chazelas in bash on Linux and it is unpleasant. The vulnerability has the CVE identifier CVE-2014-6271 and has been given the name Shellshock by some. This affects Debian as well as other Linux distributions. You will need to patch ASAP. Bash supports exporting shell variables as well as shell functions to other bash instances. This is accomplished through the process environment to a child process.  The major attack vectors that have been identified in this case are HTTP requests and CGI scripts.  From Akamai:  Akamai has validated the existence of the vulnerability...

Credit: Thinkstock RHEL/CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, and OpenSuse have far more similarities than differences, but choosing the wrong one for the job can make life much harder Unlike most other desktop and server operating systems, Linux comes in a wide variety of flavors, each based on a common core of the Linux kernel and various GNU user space utilities. If you're running Linux servers -- or Linux desktops, for that matter -- you should understand the important differences and be discerning about which flavor of Linux is best suited to any given situation. This article will help you do...

The Windows 9 OS will finally get a very coveted feature, multiple desktops, but the Microsoft developers are still pretty far away from what you can get on Linux. The Linux platform has always taken pride in this cool feature. Having multiple desktops is a great way to increase the productivity and there are numerous means to implement it. Lots of Linux distributions have this option, which is used in various ways. Ubuntu has had multiple desktops (or virtual desktops) for many years, and this particular option has been refined over time. Basically, users can add as many desktops as...

Over the years, we've heard from countless Microsoft Windows fans as to why they believe using Linux was nearly impossible. These folks would cite everything – from poor hardware compatibility to a lack of popular software. And I suppose at one time, some aspects of this were true. But in 2014 when people still claim that using newbie friendly distributions like Ubuntu are too difficult, this nonsense needs to be put to rest once and for all. This article is but a small step in what I hope will be a wake up call for naysayers.Linux Myth #1: Most people...

One of the most common expressions that you will hear in the Linux community is platform fragmentation, and it's also one of the contra arguments that people spout when citing reasons not to get a Linux OS. I'm here to tell you why platform fragmentation is actually a good thing. First of all, let’s explain what people mean by platform fragmentation, which is also sometimes referred to as desktop fragmentation. The Linux ecosystem is populated by hundreds of active Linux distributions, some of them more popular than others. There are lots of different desktop environments and some of them might...

The Linux project has just turned 23 and it's now the biggest collaborative endeavor in the world, with thousands of people working on it. Back in 1991, a young programmer called Linus Torvalds wanted to make a free operating system that wasn't going to be as big as the GNU project and that was just a hobby. He started something that would turn out to be the most successful operating system on the planet, but no one would have been able to guess it back then. Linus Torvalds sent an email on August 25, 1991, asking for help in testing...

Windows Phone cracks, Blackberry's out of juice and even Apple's squeezed The Google spawn's market share is up a third compared to the same quarter in 2013. Every other mobile operating system is not even eating Android's dust – they're so far back on the road they can see the plume of dust Android throws up are falling behind and don't even look to have a chance of choking. We offer that analysis because, as the chart below shows, Android's nearest rival – Apple's iOS – now has just 11.7 per cent market share.Top Five Smartphone Operating Systems, Worldwide Shipments,...