I'm amazed at all the technical people living here in Lawrence, Kansas, so I've decided to do a series of interviews to highlight what our small college town has to offer the international tech community. Recently I sat down with local author Stephen Figgins at a coffee shop to talk about what's new in the latest release of the popular Linux in a Nutshell book.

The Zenoss Core free monitoring suite is available in a new version 2.5.

A boot time test as a rule brings more criticism than praise for the tester, seeing that the tests are usually considered flawed. A new test has fixed all that.

The current discussion in the Ubuntu forums is about a possible security hole in GNOME, specifically about GNOME registered users having their passwords appear as cleartext on the keyring. Not a bug, say its defenders, but the security concept behind the GNOME keyring.

Mobile specialist Palm strengthens its team by hiring Matthew Tippett, the Linux graphic driver developer since 2003 at ATI, to be in charge of Linux kernel development.

The latest version of the Austrian pocketknife Linux distribution was released just in time for Halloween.

At the beginning of August, the KDE project released the third major update of KDE 4 – reason enough to put KDE 4.3 through its paces and study the new features.