It was about 16 years ago that Ian Murdock came upon the idea to design a new Linux distro. He named it Debian after Debra and Ian.

Three recent problems with packages in the last stable release of Debian GNU/Linux (“Lenny”), brought me face-to-face with what is still a major obstacle for acceptance of free software on the desktop: contempt for the values of the people who use it.

The reason I mention all this stems from an offer made by Ubuntu head honcho Mark Shuttleworth to put some of his staff to work on the Debian distro, to help Debian developers get ready for a proposed code freeze in December.

This document describes how to install a PureFTPd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota and upload/download bandwidth limits with this setup. Passwords will be stored encrypted as MD5 strings in the database.

If you are a Network Administrator some time you need to assign more than ONE ip address (second ipaddress) to your network card of Ubuntu machine. For this you need to edit the /etc/network/interfaces file by adding the following lines . See the example below and make change according to your ip address settings

The Debian project is planning a whole series of enhancements for Debian 5.0 "Squeeze." A few results of the currently running Google Summer of Code are beginning to creep into it.

In September 2006, an article titled "Debian and Ubuntu: uneasy coexistence" appeared in these columns, outlining why these two projects were not exactly the best of bedfellows. Nearly three years later it is evident that nearly as much bad feeling and suspicion still exists.

This tutorial will explain you how to boot from a BTRFS filesystem with kernel 2.6.31-RC4 and BTRFS 0.19. BTRFS is a new filesystem with some really interesting features like online defragmenting and snapshots. BTRFS is an experimental filesystem, use at your own risk. The kernel used is also experimental.