Mozilla spins off Thunderbird.
In July, Mozilla executives admitted that they weren't quite sure what to do with Thunderbird, the open-source e-mail client, since Firefox, the popular open-source Web browser, demanded most of the company's attention. On Sept. 17, Mozilla announced that it had decided to spin Thunderbird off into a company of its own: MailCo. more... and Top 9 Things Thunderbird Will Need to ‘Make It’.

Ubuntu Technical Board votes on Compiz for Ubuntu 7.10.
The Ubuntu Technical Board voted yesterday to ship Ubuntu 7.10 ("Gutsy") with Compiz enabled by default. Although Compiz has been featured in Ubuntu 7.10 Tribe prerelesases, the board has had difficulty determining whether or not it is reliable and functionally complete enough to warrant inclusion in the final release. more...

Google Summer of Code continues its record of success.
A musical notation system for KOffice, a cross-platform kiosk browser, a help system editor for GNOME -- these are just a few of the projects completed in this year's Google Summer of Code (SOC) event, during which Google paid students to work on free and open source software projects. more...

Xara Xtreme for Linux, a powerful graphics program.
Xara Xtreme for Linux is a powerful, general purpose graphics program for Unix platforms including Linux, FreeBSD and (in development) OS-X. Xara Xtreme is based on Xara Xtreme for Windows . The source code was made available open-source in early 2006, and is being ported to Linux. more...

Advanced SSH security tips and tricks.
In this article I'll show you some simple tricks to help you tighten security for your secure shell (SSH) service. The SSH server configuration file is located in /etc/ssh/sshd_conf. You need to restart the SSH service after every change you make to that file in order for changes to take effect. more... and Protect SSH from brute force attacks with pam_abl.

Dell spins customized Ubuntu.
Bad things can happen even to good computers. If something bad happens to a Dell PC with pre-installed Ubuntu, Dell is now providing a customized Ubuntu to make certain that everything returns to turn to tiptop shape. more...

Applications.
Nagios is a host and service monitor designed to inform you of network problems before your clients, end-users or managers do. more...
Hugin is a GUI tool for stitching photos together. more....
Dh-make allows you to take a standard (or upstream) source package and convert it into a format that will allow you to build Debian packages.

How To Tips.

See you next Thursday 7 P.M. at 420 Cafe, 420 Washington Ave, Eau Claire, WI.

EC_LUG