Miriness

Last weekend, we looked at how to enable your Web site to accept OpenID logins. But accepting OpenID authentication is only half of the issue — if you care about online privacy and identity, the chances are that you will want to control your own OpenID. Fortunately, setting up your site to serve as an OpenID provider is not that difficult — and makes a great weekend project.

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Are you a budding artist? Or are you already a professional graphic artist looking to expand the hardware you have to use? And are you hoping to shed the last remnants of either the Windows or Mac operating system? If any of these are true you might be looking at one of the many drawing tablets that can be connected, via USB, to your laptop or PC. These tablets make for a far superior graphic experience, giving the artist much more control over the cursor than with a standard mouse. Unfortunately tablets can quickly become a hurdle for Linux users. In some cases the installation is a snap; just plug in the tablet, install a simple application, and go. In other cases, the process can be a real nightmare. 

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A little while back I blogged about wanting to reconnect with our ethos. In a continuation of that theme I am keen to talk about stories. I have talked about stories quite a bit in my writings on community management (particularly so in my book The Art of Community). Stories are important entities in communities – they are vessels in which we share ideas, lessons we have learned, our experience and more. Many stories come laced with these underlining nuggets of wisdom that we then take aware and help us to refine and improve how we interface with the world and the people around us. Stories…

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For the longest time I saw KDE as a distant third, or fourth, on the Linux desktop usability scale. For me, first came GNOME, then came Enlightenment E17, then came XFCE4, and then came KDE. This was a change from when KDE 3.5 — one of the most user-friendly desktops around. The KDE development team rolled out 4.0 and everything was turned on its head. KDE was no longer much use on the desktop, due to bugs, poor performance, and instability.

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OpenID is a critical piece of "Open Web" infrastructure. The ability to authenticate users without relying on a single gatekeeper entity puts every site on an equal playing field. As a result, community-driven, decentralized networks can enjoy all the same advantages as closed-source, proprietary players, and end users retain more of their autonomy and privacy. All of that sounds well and good, but it is not much use if you don't enable OpenID on the sites that you maintain. This weekend, why not add support for OpenID logins to your web service? You might be surprised how many LAMP and LAMP-like frameworks have a straightforward solution.

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The next best thing to being there is being able to log into your systems remotely. One of the great things about Linux is the variety of tools you can use to remotely administer your Linux desktop and server systems. From the command line to GUI tools, you can take control of it all right from the comfort of your very own desktop anywhere you happen to be.

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Welcome back to Linuxables, where Linux.com makes you very "able" to use Linux! We resume our series with my favorite text editor Nano. Nano is an ncurses-based editor (which means it must be run from a terminal window) that focuses on simplicity. Nano is a clone of the aging Pico text editor,  the editor for the Pine email client that was very popular, back in the early '90s, on UNIX and UNIX-like systems. Pine has now been replaced by Alpine and Pico by Nano, but some things haven't changed — like the simplicity of editing with Nano.

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Port knocking is an authentication system that allows a server to keep ports closed by default, and open them up only when clients send a pre-determined sequence of connection requests aimed at particular TCP or UDP ports. as a result, you can, for example, keep SSH both invisible and inaccessible to passersby, but still allow clients armed with the secret knock to connect. setting up port knocking on your Linux system is easy, but make sure you set aside time to familiarize yourself with the security and practical risks.

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GNOME and KDE may be the first desktops that come to mind when you think of the Linux desktop, but they're not the only ones. From the overly minimalistic Rat Poison window manager to the eye candy of the Enlightenment E17 desktop, Linux has just about every type of desktop you can imagine. Want a desktop that's lean and resource friendly without giving up features? It's time to take a look at Xfce.

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