Mercurial 1.3 released

The new version 1.3 of distributed version control system Mercurial has added experimental support for subrepositories. The new feature will allow developers to take a set of repositories and treat them as a group. Other changes include a share extension to make creating working directories faster and less expensive.

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FreeBSD: PmcTools merged to RELENG_7

The PmcTools is merged to RELENG_7.

You can now enjoy the same level of features / hw supported as in head:
- Callchain in capture
- Core 2 support
- Core i7 support
- pmcannotate: source code annotation using pmc capture
- bug fixes

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SysInfo: a set of scripts which document your FreeBSD system

As part of my bachelor thesis, I am developing a script that automatically documents settings of particular FreeBSD box.

The point of this script is to provide some descriptive information about unknown system’s configuration (hardware and software) for administrator who has no idea about the given system.

I would greatly appreciate if you guys could test it in your environment and provide some feedback. I would also like to hear your opinions on what kind of information would you be interested in, in the above described situation. If your ideas happen to be reasonable, I will gladly implement them and include in the next release of SysInfo.

pkg_trans progress

Ivan Voras, wrote:

"Some time ago I've written about an idea to extend the standard
ports/package infrastructure with "transactions". Here are some notes on it:

http://wiki.freebsd.org/IvanVoras/PkgTransProposal

I've been working on it, and the code itself appears to have severely
bad karma, being twice almost completely lost in hardware or software
failures, so I'm publishing it now so it doesn't get lost again :)

The build tree is at

http://people.freebsd.org/~ivoras/big/pkg_install.tgz

To use it:

* Extract it somewhere
* Run make in the created directory
* su to root
* Run make install"

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5 Most Popular Firefox Web Development Extension

My primary reason of using Firefox, besides that it is a great browser, is the extensions. I’m so dependent on these extensions that I can’t even imagine developing and designing a website without it.

Here’s my Top 5 extension list.

Bordeaux for FreeBSD coming soon

Over the last couple day's I have been working on the Bordeaux for FreeBSD 7 port. We now have everything compiling and running but a lot more testing needs to be done before it's ready for a final release. Internet Explorer, Steam and Office 2003 are the only applications ive gotten around to testing thus far. The good news is everything that I have tested works fairly well on FreeBSD.

If you're a FreeBSD user and need to run any of the software that we currently support on the Linux client you might be interested in helping beta test this build and future builds up to the final stable release.

PartedMagic: An Open Source Alternative for Partition Editing

"If you want to add space to a drive, store personal data on a separate partition from your operating system, or run multiple operating systems from the same hard drive, then you need a partition editor.

Traditionally, this is a field where alternative operating systems have always lead in the available tools. PartitionMagic, the first partition editor, started life as an OS/2 program for users who wanted to dual boot, and GNU Parted brought partition editing to the GNU/Linux command line in 1999. Since then, various interfaces -- most notably, GParted -- have tried to bring GNU Parted's functionality to the desktop.

However, from what I've seen, by far the most successful of these efforts is the newly released PartedMagic version 3.0. The name suggests that PartedMagic is meant as a free alternative to proprietary tools like PartitionMagic -- a goal in which it easily succeeds, despite a mildly eccentric desktop."

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TrueCrypt 6.0 Released

"The new version touts two major upgrades. 'First, TrueCrypt now performs parallel encryption and decryption operations on multi-core systems, giving you a phenomenal speedup if you have more than one processor available. Second, it now has the ability to hide an entire operating system, so even if you're forced to reveal your pre-boot password to an adversary, you can give them one that boots into a plausible decoy operating system, with your hidden operating system remaining completely undetectable.'"

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Top 10 Linux financial tools

Many people don’t realize the wealth of applications available for Linux — and that includes financial software. Jack Wallen introduces 10 Linux apps that will meet your financial needs, whether you just want a digital replacement for your checkbook or you’re looking for a full-blown accounting package for your organization.

Security Audit Tool for Linux (must have) - Lynis

Lynis is an auditing tool for Unix (specialists). It scans the system configuration and creates an overview of system information and security issues usable by professional auditors.

This software aims in assisting automated auditing of Unix based systems and can be used in addition to other software, like security scanners, system benchmarking and fine tuning tools.

Examples of audit tests:

- Available authentication methods
- Expired SSL certificates
- Outdated software
- User accounts without password
- Incorrect file permissions
- Firewall auditing

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IPlist Protects Torrent Traffic in Linux

Free IP-filtering application IPlist protects your BitTorrent downloads from third-party snoopers and blockers by controlling which IP addresses can and cannot connect to your system.

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AcetoneISO 2.0 Makes Disk Mounting Simple

AcetoneISO2, a free, open-source application for Linux systems, gives you complete control over your disk images and CD/DVD mounting without having to touch the command line once.

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Network Measurement Tool Detects Reset Packets

"If you think your ISP is sniffing packets, or worse yet, sending reset packets to stop torrents, there's now a beta Network Measurement Tool to detect them, courtesy of Lauren Weinstein of the Net Neutrality Squad."

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Monitor bandwidth with vnStat

Keeping track of bandwidth usage is a good thing for a variety of reasons, particularly in situations where bandwidth accounting is required, such as paying for Internet services that are dependent upon the amount of bandwidth used.

One great tool for Linux is vnStat, which is available from http://humdi.net/vnstat/. Some Linux distributions may bundle vnStat, but it is more likely that you will have to build it from source.

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Don't buy any download accelerator

PLENTY OF users moving from Windows to Linux ask about ways to run their familiar "download accelerator" for Windows on Linux. The good news is that there is a hidden gem for Linux that does the job, is open, and of course, free of cost.

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Linux System Information Gathering Tool

Linux Explorer ( LINUXexplo ) is a script that collects information about a linux server for support purposes, similar to the Solaris explorer ( SUNWexplo ) , Redhat's "sysreport" and SuSE's "siga" script.

RarCrack Opens Protected Archives Without Passwords

Open and extract files from ZIP, RAR and 7Zip archives you've forgotten the password to, or never found at the download location, with RarCrack, a free Linux/BSD command line utility.

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Tools to access Linux Partitions from Windows

If you dual boot with Windows and Linux, and have data spread across different partitions on Linux and Windows, you should be really in for some issues.

It happens sometimes you need to access your files on Linux partitions from Windows, and you realize it isn’t possible easily. Not really, with these tools in hand - it’s very easy for you to access files on your Linux partitions from Windows...

Linux backup software. The old standby and the scrappy new kid.

Backing up Linux isn’t any different then backing up any of it closed source counterparts. The options range from simply writing a script to copy your most critical files to a CD to making a complete copy of the system with an imaging program such as ghost. These options are great if you are backing up an end user system, such as your laptop but, don’t really meet the requirements of a sound backup strategy when a production server is the concern.

To answer that question I thought I’d compare and contrast the two open source Linux backup software options I use day to day. Amanda and Bacula.

SpamAssassin Installed in 10 minutes.

The easiest way to install third parties software on FreeBSD is to install the from the ports. This can't be easier, become root, go to the directory of the software you want to install and type make install. That's all! Your software is installed. The Makefile take care of everything. From fetching the source, and the patches, to the installation into the right place. Then you are ready to use your new installed software.

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