LAS VEGAS — A popular laptop theft-recovery service that ships on notebooks made by HP, Dell, Lenovo, Toshiba, Gateway, Asus and Panasonic is actually a dangerous BIOS rootkit that can be hijacked and controlled by malicious hackers. The service — called Computrace LoJack for Laptops — contains design vulnerabilities and a lack of strong authentication  that [...]

Wildfire Games has decided to switch their development model for their real-time strategy title, 0 A.D., from closed-source to open-source. This 3D real-time strategy game is now having its code licensed under the GNU GPLv2 and the game content is going under the Creative Commons Attribute-Share Alike license. 0 A.D...

The Linux version of Chrome has been coming along fairly quickly, the latest build of Chrome for Linux now works with Flash and has extension support. It is also possible to configure the options (although there are still some TODO stubs so setting a proxy isn’t possible). Tested under Ubuntu 9.04 64bit. To install under Ubuntu: echo [...]

Here are the minutes of the meeting. They can also be found online with the irc logs here. ubuntu-tips nijaba added more rules to the server tips wiki page. The main rules are that tips should not be any longer than 2 lines of 80 characters and they should be [...]

I’ve realized that the one and only screencast of Lancelot I made was even before the 1.0 was released. So, I’ve decided to make a new one. This cast is meant as an introduction to Lancelot, rather than to show the new features. Unfortunately the recordmydesktop somehow blocked drag and drop, so the Parts applet couldn’t [...]

At SELF, Bethlynn Eicher made a bold prediction: Bug 1: Microsoft has a majority market share will be closed in the next 24 months. The date she named on her blog is 30 June 2011. She keeps pointing out in her blog that we're at GhandiCon 3. "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win."

I'm listening to Season 1 Episode 20 of the Ubuntu UK Podcast, and they had Matt Zimmerman on there. Someone asked Matt if he thought Bug 1 would be closed in the next 4 years ...

Recently on our forums, Frank Earl (who goes by the synonym Svartalf), has been seeking the input of Linux gamers as to what games they would like to see ported to Linux. Frank has been working for Linux Game Publishing for a few years porting various titles to Linux and has done work independently on bringing new software from Windows to Linux. Frank was overwhelmed by the response on our forums and it has even led to new Linux games with many other possible ports being looked into. To get his view as where Linux gaming is currently at, he ...

One of the benefits of moving the different graphics hardware drivers over to using kernel mode-setting, an in-kernel GPU memory manager (whether it be GEM or TTM), and other newer X innovations is the possibility of now running the X Server without root privileges. By doing so, this of course improves the security since this very large chunk of code is no longer running with all of these high-privileged rights. Due to now living in a KMS-enabled world, at least on the Intel and ATI side (the NVIDIA side is still slowly but surely coming via Nouveau), it's rather ...

Many KDE 3 users depended on Krun, a simple yet effective application used to execute commands. Executed simply by pressing “Alt-F2″, it was much easier to start applications using it, rather than navigating through a launch menu or opening a terminal window. The only catch with Krun was that you had to know the exact name [...] Related posts:

1. GNOME Do: A Fast Launcher For Your Linux Desktop
2. How to Get The Most Out Of KDE4’s Folderview Widget
3. Screen Recording With RecordMyDesk
4. Gnome-Do Docky: A New Dock On The Block
5. How To Setup Dual Monitors With XRandR

As the new version of Microsoft Windows 7 is nearing completion, many users are gearing up for the big upgrade. Since it is the most popular operating system, many people who use an alternative OS miss out on some good software made for Windows, such as Photoshop, many new games et cetera. Even though we [...]