Discovering the New Gnome

Gnome starts to reinvent itself, cautiously

The last few years have been troubled for the Gnome Project. Once a premier desktop environment for Linux, it has seen its market share diminish amid user dissatisfaction over Gnome 3 and accusations that the project was ignoring users. Yet, over the last six months, something important has been happening: Slowly and quietly, the members of Gnome have started trying to turn the situation around.

IPv6 Penetration Testing

Pen testing on IPv6 networks: In Through the Back Door

If you have enabled IPv6 on your network without considering basic security issues, you might have opened up a hole for attackers. In this article, we demonstrate a successful attack on a server via IPv6 and explain how the popular security tools handle IPv6.

Tune Your Hard Disk with hdparm

Disk Inspector: Retrieving and setting hard drive parameters with hdparm

Hdparm is the tool to use when it comes to tuning your hard disk or DVD drive, but it can also measure read speed, deliver valuable information about the device, change important drive settings, and even erase SSDs securely.

OpenSSL with Bash

Using the OpenSSL toolkit with Bash

Cryptography is an important part of IT security, and OpenSSL is a well-known cryptography toolkit for Linux. Experts depend on OpenSSL because it is free, it has huge capabilities, and it’s easy to use in Bash scripts.

Tails Secure Distro

Amnesiac Incognito

These days, security and privacy issues are increasingly making the news, but where can the average free software user learn more about safer practices? One of the best answers I have found is Tails, a Debian-based distribution that seems as much about teaching users to make informed decisions as about the software itself.

Filesystems Benchmarked

Linux Filesystem Performance Tests

Choosing the right filesystem for a particular job can be a difficult task. We tested seven candidates and found some interesting results to make an administrator’s choice easier.

Rescue Me

When I was thinking about ways you could rescue your system with Linux, the thought occurred to me: Why not rescue your life? Because that’s what Linux can do for you.

Linux Small Business Server Distros

Linux Small Business Distros

Admins of small businesses who want to cover all their infrastructure requirements with a single server are the target group of small business servers. In this article, we introduce three Linux distributions that meet this requirement.

The Coming KDE

An Interview with Aaron Seigo

Aaron Seigo discusses KDE’s new approach to managing change and the changes coming up in the next few years.

Software-Defined Networks

Even as the tech world works to figure out just what to do with the potential of cloud computing and big data, along comes a new bit of technology fueled by open source software: software-defined networks.