While the Internet still retains some of the “wild wild west” feel, increasingly Internet activity, and particular blogging, is being shaped and governed by state and federal laws. For US bloggers in particular, blogging has become a veritable land mine of potential legal issues, and the situation isn’t helped by the fact that the law in this area is constantly in flux. In this article we highlight twelve of the most important US laws when it comes to blogging and provide some simple and straightforward tips for safely navigating them.

(A good read for all bloggers including myself,Baldy)

Read the Rules

Now that we have open source beer, open source cars, and open source photography, a social networking service run by Red Hat and based around open source software comes as no surprise. The name of the project is Mugshot, and the official definition describes it as “an open project to create live social experiences around entertainment.” That may sound vague, but it’s actually a useful service, and there are quite a few things you can do with it.

Source: Mugshot: Social networking open source style

Have you ever wondered what would have happened if all the important data have been stolen from your mobile PC? For example the information about a confidential project you have been working on for the last 2 years in your company … A horrifying vision, isn’t it? If you don’t want it come true, please consider encrypting your home drive. Here is how to do this in Linux.

 

Technorati tags: Security, Software

Source: Encrypted home partition in Linux

A couple of times I’ve encountered problems with the sound card on Debian boxes. Some notes I’ve found that may help others having difficulties: Check the permissions on /dev/dsp, and make sure that the relevant user(s) are in the audio group in /etc/group. You may need to log out & back in again for this to take effect. If using the alsa sound daemon, install the alsa-utils package and run alsaconf. This should pick up your sound card. You may need to run alsamixer to check the volume levels are correctly set afterwards. Blindingly Obvious (but easy to overlook) Note: make sure that the volume control on xmms (or other media player of choice), and on your headphones/speakers is sufficiently up. (I once spent ages prodding at a user’s sound config before realising that the headphones had their own volume control which I hadn’t noticed, and it was all the way down.) With KDE, I found recently that to get sound running it was necessary to run the KDE sound control utility, turn off KDE’s sound management and click Apply, close the utility down, reopen it, turn the sound management back on, & click Apply again. Then it worked.

Source: Sound problems

Today, we have released Skype for Linux 1.4 Alpha, a test version which will give you a sneak-peek into how the next major release for Linux will function.

Alpha means that this version is still under development and only experienced users should try it out.

As we have already done with Windows and Mac we are opening things up a bit for you. So we have created a public issue tracker for Skype for Linux.

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One of the more overlooked, but very useful features of KDE is its text editors. In a full standard install of KDE there are 3 of them. Kate, Kedit, and Kwrite. Each has its advantages, disadvantages, and general uses. Let’s look at each of these and what each one offers the end user in terms of features, usability, and functionality.

Source: The Text Editors of KDE