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The release of Ubuntu 16.04 last week is good news for computer users who are upset over the recent development of Microsoft turning Windows into an operating system that is essentially spyware. As an open-source Linux distribution, Ubuntu is a great operating system for users concerned about privacy.This marks the 24th release of the Ubuntu operating system, which has become perhaps the most popular Linux distribution in the world. Ubuntu 16.04 — codenamed Xenial Xerus — is also the sixth Long Term Support (LTS) release, meaning it will receive free security updates and support for five years. Canonical — the...

... Telstra has invested $10.3 million in San Francisco-based open source web developer Nginx, the telco revealed today. Telstra Ventures chief Mark Sherman said the decision to invest was driven by Nginx's increasing global popularity, and technology leadership in the web application delivery and deployment market. Telstra's websites run on Nginx currently. Nginx was developed by Kazakhstan-born, Russian developer Igor Sysoev, and can be used to serve web pages, and act as a reverse proxy and load balancer for sites. The server runs on the Unix, Linux, BSD, Apple OS X, Oracle Solaris, IBM AIX and Microsoft WIndows operating systems.

The Xubuntu team is pleased to announce the immediate release of Xubuntu 16.04. Xubuntu 16.04 is an LTS (Long-Term Support) release and will be supported for 3 years. The final release images are available as Torrents and direct downloads from http://xubuntu.org/getxubuntu/ As the main server will be very busy in the first few days after release, we recommend using the Torrents wherever possible.

Asked to recommend a Linux desktop, users respond in a number of ways. Many recommend their own preferences. Others suggest the desktop environment that they believe is closest in appearance and function to Windows or OS X.A while ago, though, I realized that the seven major Linux desktops can be ranked on a spectrum from the highly customizable to those that are little more than launchers for their applications.Starting with the customizers, my rankings along this spectrum are:7. KDE Ever see a Windows users' reactions to all the options on a Linux desktop? Well, KDE produces the same look of...

Linux is all grown up. It has nothing left to prove. There's never been a year of the Linux desktop and there probably never will be, but it runs on the majority of the world's servers. It never took over the desktop, it did an end-run around it: there are more Linux-based client devices accessing those servers than there are Windows boxes.Linux Foundation boss Jim Zemlin puts it this way: "It's in literally billions of devices. Linux is the native development platform for every SOC. Freescale, Qualcomm, Intel, MIPS: Linux is the immediate choice. It's the de facto platform. It's...

FOSS Force has learned that we shouldn’t write obituaries until we actually see a death certificate. SCO intends to file an appeal over the dismissal of its case against IBM. On Feburary 29, we told you that SCO was “undeniably and reliably dead” after the company signed off on Judge David Nuffer’s dismissal of what remained of its case against IBM. Guess what? We were wrong. The once upon a time Linux and Unix company, which developed and distributed the Caldera GNU/Linux distribution, evidently has not yet been pulled from life support. On Tuesday, the company filed notification that it...

Today at BUILD in the Day One keynote Kevin Gallo announced that you can now run "Bash on Ubuntu on Windows." This is a new developer feature included in a Windows 10 "Anniversary" update (coming soon). It lets you run native user-mode Linux shells and command-line tools unchanged, on Windows. This isn't Bash or Ubuntu running in a VM. This is a real native Bash Linux binary running on Windows itself. It's fast and lightweight and it's the real binaries. This is an genuine Ubuntu image on top of Windows with all the Linux tools I use like awk, sed,...

Short Bytes: Microsoft and Canonical, Ubuntu Linux’s parent company, are partnering to allow you to use Ubuntu on Windows 10. The official announcement is expected to be made at Microsoft’s BUILD 2016 developer conference later today. This partnership is expected to integrate Windows and Linux on the developer desktop.

Google in 2012 sought to help insurgents overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad, according to State Department emails receiving fresh scrutiny this week. Messages between former secretary of state Hillary Clinton's team and one of the company's executives detailed the plan for Google to get involved in the region.

Browse the web with privacy and security with these best secure browsers. Protect your privacy online with the eight best secure browsers you can use in 2016.What does the idea of a secure browser mean in 2016? The world is now more complex than it was in 2010 when we last looked at the contenders. People are more oriented to mobile devices running under very different conditions while a range of security features such as URL filtering, download protection and do not track have transformed mainstream desktop browsers such as Chrome, IE and Firefox. In a sense all browsers could...

Microsoft has ported its SQL Server software to Linux and has promised to release it in full by next year. From today, the Windows giant, which once likened Linux to cancer, will show off to a lucky few a preview of its SQL database's core engine for the open-source operating system. The full SQL Server 2016 for Linux will be made available by mid-2017, we're told. Scott Guthrie, exec veep of Microsoft's cloud and enterprise group, said in a blog post on Monday that the Linux port "will enable SQL Server to deliver a consistent data platform across Windows Server...

Ok good linuxian folks, Here's what I'd like to do IF possible- Dual boot windows 10 and linux mint cinnamon BUT have windows 10 run again in linux under a virtual machine (yes I know it sounds redundant, but i have a reason for this setup if possible) I'm not sure if I coudl install windows 10 twice on one machine or not, but let's for now just assume i could- (windows 10 is 'free' and you can download the iso for it and use it without activating it legally- the iso is direct from MS- and while I don't...

Over the years, I've heard some people claim that Linux is finally ready for the masses. I would suggest that outside of a completely locked down OS such as ChromeOS (which is Linux powered), no OS is genuinely ready for the masses. Instead, it has been my experience that the masses should stick to tablets and Chromebooks. Smartphones make us dumb I can see how my view of most computer users would seem a bit harsh. But I'd also be the first to point out that using smartphones have made all of us "dumb" in the sense that our complacency...

Last night, the Linux Mint team announced that someone had hacked their servers and started pointing user downloads to malicious ISO images for the Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon edition. Our Linux editor already covered the initial details of the attack, which we recommend reading before going forward with this article. Since then, in the last ten hours, the Linux and infosec communities have been working hard to investigate what happened and how the hackers operated. Linux Mint Team: They hacked us via our WordPress site The first to provide an answer was Clement Lefebvre, leader of the Linux Mint project,...

The Linux Foundation has launched the Zephyr Project, to foster an open source, small footprint, modular, scalable, connected, real-time OS for IoT devices. Normally we think of the Linux Foundation as being all about Linux. But as the organization has matured, it has expanding its scope to embrace an ever-wider range of open source standards and software. Despite the existence and widespread use of minimalistic Linux implementations including uClinux, OpenWrt, Brillo, and Ubuntu Core, the exponential proliferation of smart, connected devices -- such as light bulbs, thermostats, security cameras, sensors, and many others -- has fueled intense interest in minimizing...

In 2003 Sreenivasa Rao Vadalasetty helped write a report for the SANS Institute that was titled "Security Concerns in Using Open Source Software for Enterprise Requirements." To some that title today is almost laughable. The report stated:"Though the open source has potential to be more secure than its closed source counterpart, it should not be taken for granted that open source is more secure because there are some constraining factors. Despite the fact that the source code is available for everyone, several vulnerabilities in open source remain undiscovered ...." In a survey done by Black Duck Software last year, the...

My buddy David Gewirtz recently wrote about the question of whether you should move from Windows 7 to Windows 10 or a Mac. I have another suggestion: Linux. Specifically Linux Mint 17.3, Rosa, with the Cinnamon desktop. Linux Mint 17.3 is a great replacement for Windows 7. In fact, it's a great desktop operating system period. sjvn Yes, I'm serious. I use all the above desktops -- yes I'm a Windows 7 and 10 user as well as a Linux guy -- and for people I think Mint 17.3 makes a great desktop. I've been using Mint as my main...

With its engineers involved in more than 2,000 open source projects, you'd have to agree that open source has more than a foothold at Microsoft these days. Most recently, for example, the browser team made the Chakra JavaScript engine that powers both Edge and Internet Explorer open source, for a very practical reason. Node, the popular JavaScript runtime, currently works only with Google's V8 JavaScript engine. With Chakra now open source, Microsoft can take the fork of Node that it created to run on Chakra and contribute it back to the project -- which means developers who use Node will...

The flaw is said to affect "tens of millions" of Linux PCs and servers, and most modern devices running the latest Android KitKat 4.4 software and later. A new, previously undiscovered flaw that allows an attacker to escalate local user privileges to the highest "root" level is said to hit "tens of millions" of Linux PCs and servers. Because some of the code is shared, the zero-day flaw also affects more than two-thirds of all Android devices. Israeli security firm Perception Point disclosed the flaw in a blog post Tuesday, but it wasn't immediately clear if the bug had been...

Are there any Linux gurus here? I've looked around online and asked some questions in various forums, but I'm not getting anywhere. I've found explanations of how to set it up, but no examples. I have yet to get it working. I am trying to configure an environment with several Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 virtual machines. All of these machines need to be NTP clients of my NTP server. The NTP server uses MD5 authentication, and I need to have the Linux clients authenticate the NTP traffic. Can someone please post a working "ntp.conf" and "keys" file so that...