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It is customary for communities of every sphere to stand up occasionally, and take a good, long look at what's going on in the world around them. For us here at Linuxsecurity.com, we felt it was a great opportunity to put it all together. Since 1996, Linuxsecurity.com has been bringing open source news, HOW-TOs, Feature stories and more to the open source community with comprehensive coverage. As one of the veterans in this area, we'd like to see you chime in. With so much going on in Linux and security, what does the community really care about?

"The fact is, security people *are* insane. You just argue all the time, instead of doing anything productive. So please don't include me in the Cc on your insane arguments - instead do something productive and I'm interested."— Linus Torvalds, in anOctober 19th, 2007 posting to the Linux Kernel Mailing List.

Reconfiguring your laptop's wireless network settings every time you go to a new client's office or a friend's house can be tiresome, and carrying around little papers with notes about network names, keys, and IP addresses doesn't seem too professional. openSUSE's System Configuration Profile Management (SCPM) can help. SCPM lets you adapt your machine's configuration to different environments and hardware configurations. The need to reconfigure your settings is most common in laptops, where you may need not only several different network configurations (with or without DHCP, firewalls, gateways, and proxies) but also different hardware. For example, sometimes you may need to use a Wi-Fi USB device, and you may or may not always have a printer available.

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 106 for the week of October 15th.

Tectonic is compiling a directory of all South African suppliers of Linux distributions. If you are a supplier, or know of one, please let us know.

"It wouldn't be efficient for you to implement something new, only to have it criticized again. I'd suggest that you come up with a concrete design, describe to us what you propose to do and let's take it from there."— Andrew Morton, in anOctober 17, 2007 posting to the Linux Kernel Mailing List.

A file browser is a file browser. Unless it is Nautilus which has tons of plug-ins available for it that give it the edge. Perhaps the best of these for real tech-heads is the nautilus-actions plug-in which allows you to add items to the right-click context menu. If you're handy with scripts this could open up a whole new world for your desktop productivity.

If you weren't lucky enough to attend PodCamp Cape Town this past weekend (or perhaps you were too busy readying for the rugby?) then head on over to Zoopy where you can find some of the videos shot during the day.

There are literally dozens of plugins and extensions for Nautilus, the default file manager on the GNOME desktop environment, but there is just one that allows you to customize the Nautilus context menu items. The Nautilus-actions extension enables you to add customized entries to the context menu such that, when you right-click a file, the context menu will show options specific to that file.

Becta, the United Kingdom government's adviser on IT in schools, has taken Microsoft to the Office of Fair Trading over anti-competitive practices--but open source campaigners say Becta is still effectively promoting Microsoft.

LXer Feature: 22-Oct-2007

Welcome back! In part 4 we ranged all over the place, from how to manage and edit your photo archives with Linux, some discussion on choosing lenses, and finally getting down to the most important part of getting high-quality photographs: understanding aperture, shutter speeds, and ISO. Part 4 covered the fundamentals of aperture, so let's leap in to shutter speeds and ISO. This applies to point-and-shoot cameras as well as the fancy DSLRs with herds of different lenses; if you don't understand these three photography fundamentals, you won't understand how to get the best photos.

"Sometimes I'm tardy and miss things for weeks and need prodding, and sometimes I pull almost before you've sent the'please pull' message. I'm unpredictable. Or keeping you on your toes. Or incompetent. Pick whatever suits your mood ;)"— Linus Torvalds in anOctober 17, 2007 message to the Linux Kernel Mailing List.

To a business user of Linux, the development of its kernel may appear so Byzantine, with dozens of people maintaining different pieces and hundreds more volunteers submitting code, that it's hard to see where new features are headed.

What's Linux worth? The question has been a favorite of technology groups and cocktail party conversations ever since a character named Jeff V. Merkey offered $50,000 for a copy of Linux. The offer was a ploy. Merkey wanted it under the BSD license, which would have undermined the terms of the GPL. So he didn't get it. But we know, at least, that $50,000 proved to be a low bid.

Jeff Garzik posted a series of nine patchs to the lkml titled to "remove [the] 'irq' argument from all irq handlers", explaining, "the overwhelming majority of drivers do not ever bother with the 'irq' argument that is passed to each driver's irq handler. Of the minority of drivers that do use the arg, the majority of those have the irq number stored in their private-info structure somewhere." He noted that he had no intention to push the patches upstream anytime soon.

When asked how to best refer to kernels between official releases and release candidates, Linus Torvalds pointed to his automated git snapshots. "I still call them 'nightly snapshots', but they do in fact happen twice a day if there have been changes, so that's not technically correct," he noted. The latest snapshot is 2.6.23-git15, "this is an exact name, because you can go to kernel.org and look up the exact commit ID that was used to generate it (there's an 'ID' file associated with each snapshot there)."

LXer Feature: 21-Oct-2007

Some of the big stories this week include Linux vs. Windows Power Usage, Microsoft gets two licences approved by the OSI, Kevin Carmony switches to Ubuntu and on top of all that we have a slew of LXer features including a couple of reports from T-DOSE, Carla Schroder continues her series on Digital Photography and a reader submitted article with some advice for those trying to decide between Windows or Linux.

"Currently in mainline the balancing of multiple RT threads is quite broken. That is to say that a high priority thread that is scheduled on a CPU with a higher priority thread, may need to unnecessarily wait while it can easily run on another CPU that's running a lower priority thread," began Steven Rostedt, describing his patchset to introduce improved real time task balancing.

In a brief follow up to the earlier pluggable security discussion, Thomas Fricaccia reflected on the implications for the various security frameworks, "I noticed James Morris' proposal to eliminate the LSM in favor of ordaining SELinux as THE security framework forever and amen, followed by the definitive decision by Linus that LSM would remain."

Evgeniy Polyakov announced a new version of his distributed storage subsystem, "this release includes [a] mirroring algorithm extension, which allows [the subsystem] to store [the] 'age' of the given node on the underlying media." He went on to explain why this was useful:..