Many new admin or Linux users get frustrated when their remote Linux box is not accessible dues to network connectivity.

In this article I will try to provide tools and information about how to diagnose network configurations. You can try these tips/tools to diagnose an issue of Linux network connectivity to remote or local servers.

Source: cyberciti

The Linux Documentation Project (LDP) is working on developing good, reliable documentation for the Linux operating system. The overall goal of the LDP is to collaborate in taking care of all of the issues of Linux documentation, ranging from online documentation (man pages, HTML, and so on) to printed manuals covering topics such as installing, using, and running Linux.

Source: linux.com

Almost everything, you might ever need to know “howto” do!

Source: linux.com

Slackware Linux is the oldest surviving Linux distribution. Late last year the project marked 13 years of non-stop development with the release of Slackware 11.0. The distribution is best known for its no-frills, minimum customizations approach to applications like KDE. It’s also notorious for its reluctance to switch to new version of several popular applications like Apache or GCC. No surprise then, that its package management system has seen little change over the years and is still available in just one flavor — vanilla.

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Slackware is designed for users who prefer to be in complete control of their system. They swear by Slackware’s package management system and will have it no other way. However, another other group of users, spoiled by the one-click installation systems of newer distributions, fail to understand Slackware’s lack of dependency resolution.

An excellent explanation of Slackware.

Source: linux.com

After years of delays and billions in development and marketing efforts, it would seem that Microsoft Corp. would want anyone who possibly can to buy its new Windows Vista operating system. Yet Microsoft is making it hard for Mac owners and other potentially influential customers to adopt the software.

Microsoft says the blockade is necessary for security reasons. But that is disputed. The circumstances might simply reflect a business decision Microsoft doesn’t want to explain.

Source: Globe and Mail

One of the most prestigious prizes in computing, the $100,000 Turing Award, went to a woman Wednesday for the first time in the award’s 40-year history.

Frances E. Allen, 75, was honored for her work at IBM Corp. on techniques for optimizing the performance of compilers, the programs that translate one computer language into another. This process is required to turn programming code into the binary zeros and ones actually read by a computer’s colossal array of minuscule switches.

Source: Globe and Mail

This short article describes how you can search for missing packages with apt-file on Debian and Ubuntu systems. apt-file allows you to search for a file name, and it gives back the name(s) of the package(s) containing that file so that you can install the appropriate package.

Source: How To Search For Missing Packages With apt-file On Debian and Ubuntu

At a recent news conference, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sought to impugn the character of the free/open source world by implying that it had no respect for the intellectual property rights of others. It’s not just the enormous ignorance embodied by this duplicitous braggadocio that caught my eye, it’s the fact that the claim is coming from a man associated with Microsoft, which is far and away the most notorious IP thief of all time.

Source: Ballmer impugns the character of the free/open source world

Dell has launched a Web site where users can submit and vote on ideas for new products and enhancements to older products. The mechanism behind Dell IdeaStorm is similar to that of social book-marking services such as Digg and Del.icio.us. Users can submit ideas to the service, and other users can vote and comment on those suggestions. In the first few days of the service, users urged Dell to promote open source software more aggressively. A suggestion that Dell should “preinstall Linux” to cut the price of new PCs attracted more than 45,000 votes.

Source: Dell Users Seek Linux, OpenOffice

A new vulnerability in Snort, an open source intrusion-detection system, enables hackers to inject hostile code into exposed systems. Sourcefire, the company behind the Snort package, said hackers could remotely gain control of systems running the software and execute malicious code, as well as gain access to confidential data. The primary flaw, which was discovered this week, is in Snort’s DCE/RPC processor, which is vulnerable to stack-based buffer overflow attacks.

Source: Flaw Found in Snort Intrusion Detection Product