Astaro Releases Free Edition for Small Businesses
Astaro Corporation, a leading network security vendor, recently announced the launch of the Essential Firewall edition of its flagship security solution Astaro Security Gateway (ASG), available for free to all organizations worldwide. The Essential Firewall edition is claimed to include all the necessary functionality that all organizations need to secure their networks and operate a successful business, but we found some limitations.
KDE 4.3.1 Released
The KDE team has released KDE 4.3.1. This is a bugfix release of KDE 4.3 with a few new improvements. So, users of KDE 4.3 or older versions may want to upgrade it to the new release.
From the changelog, a few significant bugs were fixed:
- More than 25 bugs fixed in KMail, KDE’s default email client (remember that KMail was the buggiest application in KDE 4.3).
- Many bugs in kwin, KDE’s window and compositing manager (something like Compiz, for those of you who doesn’t follow), most notably the bugs with the wobbly windows effect, has been fixed.
- The bug which caused konqueror to crash when doing “Close all other tabs” has been fixed.
- kio_fish, which allows for remote file manipulation through SSH, now works.
- Editing toolbar setup no longer results in a crash.
Users with KDE 4.3, who may want to upgrade will get it in their reccomended updates (Ubuntu and variants) and can just upgrade from there. However, for those with an earlier version, upgrade to the new version can be done by opening terminal/konsole and running the following commands one after the other.
sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/backport/ubuntu jaunty main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list"(this adds the ppa.launchpad.net to the sources list)
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 8AC93F7A(this adds the security key)
sudo apt-get update(this will update your file list and pull new files from the server)
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
(this will run the upgrade process)
How to repair a corrupt MBR in Windows Vista
I tinker with Linux a lot and in many cases, have computers that dual-boot with Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003, and Server 2008. What always happens is that sometimes I remove the hard drive containing the Linux partition and the GRUB boot loader. This inevitably leads to the error 5 message – “boot loader not found” when Windows starts back up. In Windows XP, it was a simple case of restarting the computer, booting from the CD and running the /fixmbr command. But, as with all things in Vista, there is a 10-point step in going about this relatively simple process:
- Start your computer from the Windows Vista Installation DVD
- Press a key when prompted to continue
- Choose your language, time, keyboard and click Next
- Next, click “Repair your Computer”
- Now, from the System Recovery Options dialog, select the
“Operating System” you want to repair, then click Next - From the “Choose a Recovery Tool” dialog menu, select “Command
Prompt” - Type the following into the “Command Prompt Window”:
bootrec.exe /fixmbr - Remove the Vista Installation DVD and restart your PC.
Now, this does not always work. Sometimes the computer goes into a loop and restarts over and over. When this happens, I usually just do a repair. With Vista of course, this process is done in the backgroung and you are not really sure if it’s working or not. At least, with Windows XP, you actually saw what was going on after you hit F8 and ”R” like “deleting files”, “copying files” etc. Windows Vista does not really give us the F8 option and only tells us that it is “repairing disk errors” which “might take over an hour to complete.”
If all else fail, you may have to re-install and re-activate. I have had to do so a couple of times simply because it was a lot faster than trying to mess with it.