Slashdot

Adobe has released Adobe Reader for Linux, version 8.1.1. What's important is that it now fully works with GTK 2.0, so the interface is consistent with the rest of the GTK apps. It has subpixel rendering, unlike every other PDF reader out there for Linux (Poppler has an experimental patch that is very bad. Someone told me kpdf has this feature, but the one from the Feisty repository does not). Read an article about it.

The downside is that it's bloated and slow, but I would trade fast response to a slight lag for superior text rendering any day. This is wonderful for Linux users with LCD screens.

jom42 writes "Does a double helix structure mean that life is afoot? This article touches upon the search for 'weird life' and how some dust out there just may be a bit more than inert particles."

An internet connection is not always at hand... I wanted to install Wikipedia on my laptop to be able to carry it along with me on business trips... After trying and rejecting the normal (MySQL-based) procedure, I quickly hacked a much better one over the weekend, using open source tools. Highlights: (1) Very fast searching (2) Keyword (actually, title words) based searching (3) Search produces multiple possible articles, sorted by probability (you choose amongst them) (4) LaTEX based rendering for Mathematical equations (5) Harddisk usage is minimal: space for the original .bz2 file plus the index built through Xapian (6) Orders of magnitude faster to install (a matter of hours) compared to loading the "dump" into MySQL — which, if you want to enable keyword searching, takes *days*. Enjoy!
http://www.softlab.ntua.gr/~ttsiod/buildWikipediaOffline.html

Scott Ainslie Sutton writes "Enterprise GNU/Linux Resource Linux.com have highlighted a newly created GNU/Linux distribution named Damn Vulnerable Linux, built upon Damn Small Linux. The distribution, headed by Thorsten Schneider, aims to deliver the Operating System in such a way that it allows Security Students first hand insight and hands on experience with Security issues within GNU/Linux in order to teach them protection and mitigation techniques The project's website describes the distribution as 'the most vulnerable, exploitable Operating System ever' and it's true, the developers have ensured that it contains outdated, ill-configured, flawed code and contains GNU/Linux 2.4 Kernel which is known to have many exploitable avenues in itself. Damn Vulnerable Linux's website can be viewed here."