AIDE (Advanced Intrusion Detection Enviornment) is a tool to check the file integrity. It is an opensource substitute for TRIPWIRE. It allows to take snapshots of all the major configuration files, binaries as well as libraries stats. It helps to find which binaries have been changed in case of compromisation of the system.

Nice little tool I have just started to play with it and so far no problems, Baldy

Linux Security Notes – AIDE File Integrity

Web video site Hulu has released a Linux version of its Hulu Desktop. Hulu Desktop for Linux is optimized for Ubuntu 9.04 and Fedora 11, offers search and playback controls, and includes publisher tools for locating and integrating content, says Hulu.

About time Hulu has some of the best reruns anyplace and you get to pick when and where, Baldy

Hulu comes to Linux

KDE 4.3.0 is out, and it is a great release. It is unlikely that any one specific thing will strike the user as the most noticeable improvement; rather, the overall user experience of KDE has improved greatly in KDE 4.3.0. The release’s codename, Caizen, is a Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life. That has been the goal of the KDE team for 4.3.0: polish, polish, polish. The statistics from the bug tracker speak for themselves: 10,000 bugs have been fixed. In addition, close to 63,000 changes were checked in by a little under 700 contributors. That is not to say that the KDE team did not add a large number of new features: 2000 feature requests were implemented in the past 6 months, meaning that any user’s pet feature might well be among the improvements KDE 4.3.0 brings.

Well so far not a bad point has emerged and it seems as if the growing pains have finally subsided. Even Dolphin has more features, (it is still no Konq, but it is really trying, Baldy

KDE 4.3.0 Released: Caizen

By default, Firefox (or Swiftfox) crashes when trying to view a full-screen video on say… YouTube. At least for me it used to crash until I found a fix. If that is the case for you also, you may want to read on.

Okay this has been a problem since the release of 3.5 (32 bit) so take a look folks, Baldy

How To Fix Full-Screen Flash Videos in Linux & Firefox (or Swiftfox)

Sometimes Firefox can become a real memory hog, especially if you keep it running for hours and have many tabs opened. In order to make Firefox a little more responsive and save some RAM memory, here are three tweaks I bumped into over time. Notice that most of these tips only free up some memory at the expense of (usually) loading speed for web pages. You won’t make Firefox 10 times faster, but you will surely make it use less RAM.

Yes Raven this is for you ma’am, Baldy

3 Tweaks to Speed Up Firefox and Free Some Memory

When it comes to the world of graphics, Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator and DTP applications such as Quark and InDesign, stand head and shoulders above the rest and are the defacto standards for graphics professionals. But they’re not open source, even if a little Wine hacking gets them running. If you’re committed to doing your graphics the open source way then we have a few suggestions, and a couple of handy tutorials to get you up and running.

Here are some great graphics programs and links to some really good tutorials to help the total noob to pro with just a little reading and a lot of practice, Baldy

Graphics on Linux: Eight great image image resources and tools

At the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver BC, hackers were invited to find and exploit holes in modern browsers. A popular target for hackers at this year’s conference was Safari on a Mac — definitely the lowest hanging fruit.

Charlie Miller explains that it’s not whether a product has holes (all of them do), its how easy it is to exploit those holes — and on a Mac, it’s very simple:

It’s clear that all three browsers (Safari, IE and Firefox) have bugs. Code execution holes everywhere. But that’s only half the equation. The other half is exploiting it. There’s almost no hurdle to jump through on Mac OS X.

Hummm now that is the first time I heard that statement, Baldy

Recent developments in the OpenChange and KDE open source projects are set to bridge a “missing link” in messaging and groupware compatibility from Microsoft’s Exchange to open source clients. Many open source groupware suites lay claim to this holy grail of interoperability, but the software to synchronise address book, task and calendar information with Exchange is sold as a proprietary extension.

OpenChange, KDE bring Exchange compatibility to Linux

After the tech bubble burst, E*Trade’s technology chief, Lee Thompson, needed to find a way to do more with less. In 2001 and 2002, the online stock trading company shrank its tech budget by one-third. “We had to go through and figure out every penny that we were spending and make alternatives to reduce those costs,” says Thompson, vice-president and chief technologist of E*Trade. So he began using software that can be downloaded at no cost via the Internet. By the end of 2002, he was saving $13 million a year thanks to use of these freely available applications known as open source software.

Now this is a topic that I have had the pleasure to witness myself, as numerous small to medium business’s in the area have contacted me interested in converting to open source software with it’s price advantage’s, Baldy

Cost-Conscious Companies Turn to Open Source Software

Picasa 3: Great Linux photo software | Computerworld Blogs

I have a confession to make. There’s no software on earth I can’t make dance and sing… except for photography programs. Whether it’s Adobe Photoshop CS4 on a Mac or GIMP 2.6.3 on Linux, I’m a klutz. So, when I need to make my holiday photos look halfway decent, I try my best with easy to use photo programs like Photoshop Elements 7 or Google Picasa. While I’d like to see more Adobe programs, on Linux with Google’s new release of Picasa 3 for Linux now here, I’m in no hurry to see Photoshop Elements on Linux.