Before casually clicking on that "Install Adobe Flash Player/Reader" button, think twice. Then don't do it! You'll be inviting every cracker and his dog to invade your network.

This week’s edition of The Linux Week in Review maintains a focus on one of the core principles of success: keeping it simple and stupid. Every situation does not call for us to have a PhD in computer science, or Bill Gates’ bank account. Often times, simple is better. Libreoffice can perform what most businesses need at a great price: free.

The Linux utility sed provides a great way to substitute text strings in a file. Using the "s" option and by listing the current string and the string to use as the new text allows sed to perform this task.

Free software evangelists take pride in spreading the news about freedom and open source. They inform those that still feel locked into the old software distribution systems. The days of computer users being bogged down with virus-infested, bloated, and locked down systems are quickly coming to an end.

The last of the pre-releases of Mandriva Desktop 2011, Mandriva Desktop 2011 RC 2, was made available for download yesterday, just one day behind schedule. It, of course, looks better, runs better, than the previous pre-release, which I previewed here.

There are three ways to start applications when the Ubuntu server starts; upstart jobs, backward compatible system-V scripts and using rc.local. This article will provide examples of how to make it work.

ufw, the Uncomplicated FireWall, is Ubuntu’s user-friendly, command line frontend to IPTables, the command line utility for managing Netfilter, the firewall application built into the Linux kernel. It is installed not just on Ubuntu, but also on all Ubuntu-based distributions. As simple to use as ufw is, a graphical interface is even better, especially for new users.

When you want to reuse functions in multiple scripts you can create a library which allows you to access those created functions.