Till the middle of 1990’s the basic aim of FSF was the hiring of software developers who had to create free software for the GNU Project. Since that time, the employees and volunteers of FSF were engaged in developing of legal and structural issues for this movement and community.

It should be noted that only free software is to be used on computers of Free Software Foundation.

November 25, 2002 the Free Software Foundation started a program of FSF Associate Membership for private individuals. March 5, 2003 FSF also ran a program Corporate Patron for profit organizations. For instance in April, 2004 the Foundation included 45 of corporate patrons.

The FSF disposes of copyrights on different indispensible pieces which belong to the GNU system, such as GNU Compiler Collection. Being the copyright holder, it is empowered to enforce the GNU General Public License in case there copyright infringement on software takes place. Beginning with 1991 till 2001, GPL enforcement was put into effect unofficially usually by Richard Stallman. In March 2003, SCO registered a claim against IBM, asserting that the contribution on the part of IBM infringed the rights of SCO. On the 5^th of November, 2003 FSF received a subpoena to appear in court. FSF managed to refute its negative influence on the promotion of free software.

From 2003 to 2005, FSF organized legal seminars that aimed to clarify the GPL and the law. Most of these seminars were given by Bradley M. Kuhn and Daniel Ravicher. This was the fist measure taken to provide official legal education on the GPL.

In 1999, FSF received Linus Torvalds Award for free software. In 2005, FSF was honored with Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction in the category “Digital Communities”.

Related posts:

1. Free Software Foundation Activity
2. Free Software. Why Is It Free?
3. Free Software: How Did it Appear

One of the main missions of this Foundation is the educating on behalf of programmers from every corner of the globe. Millions of people from the whole world give preference to free software which they install on their computers.

Year after year free software developers gather a great number of copyright assignments from individuals and corporations who work on free software.

Free Software Foundation records the collected copyrights together with US copyright office and issue the license, which enables the users to distribute the software in question. This process guarantees that free software distributors work in compliance with the main obligations to convey freedom to other users, and to share, modify and study the code. This work is possible thanks to free software licensing and Compliance Laboratory. The GNU General Public License, being the most popular free software license in the world is published by FSF. The main object of the world recognized license is the conserving and promoting software freedom. Other licenses, published by Free Software Foundation are the GNU Lesser General Public License, the GNU Free Document License, the GNU Affero General Public License and the GNU Free Document License.

The Foundation supports the freedom of software, being against proprietary software. It is also presents significant resources to the public that include the FSF/Unesco free software directory.

Related posts:

1. Free Software Foundation History
2. Free Software. Why Is It Free?
3. Richard Stallman

During his years of studies at Harvard University, Richard Stallman worked as a programmer at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. After graduating from Harvard University, Stallman became a student at MIT. Soon he refused from his plans to continue his scientific education. In 1984 Stallman gave up working at the Laboratory, to set to work on GNU project, which was founded by him in September, 1983. Beginning with the middle of 1990’s, Richard Stallman developed less software, as he devoted his time to the developing of free software concepts.

Stallman is the author of a great number of essays written on software freedom. He has regularly made speeches which are entitled “The GNU project and the Free Software Movement”, “The Dangers of Software Patents”, and “Copyright and Community in the age of Computer Networks”. In 1999 Stallman suggested developing a free on-line encyclopedia, by inviting people to contribute articles.

Over the time of many years, Richard Stallman has supported the exactness of his terminology. Stallman does not accept the term “open source software” because it does not render the value of the software such as freedom. He asks people to use the term “free software”, because of the freedom issues of this software. He also affirms that one has to say “proprietary software” instead of “closed source software”, in the event if, the software can not be distributed, used or modified freely. It is noteworthy that Richard Stallman takes the terminology most seriously. For instance, he agrees to give interview only to those journalists who will use his terminology in the article.

Related posts:

1. Free Software Foundation Activity
2. Free Software. Why Is It Free?
3. Free Software Foundation History

The name “free software” had been previously used in the Unix world. Not long ago it was accepted in the general computer community. Free software is also called as Freed Software, Liberated Software or freely redistributable software.

In 1983 Richard Stallman set up free software movement. The goal of the given movement was to provide the “software freedom” to computer users. It is noteworthy that the notion itself was introduced by Richard Stallman and it reflects the principles of open software engineering in the scientific community, which was formed in American universities in 1970’s. Richard Stallman formulated the principles of free software. These principles mention authors’ rights, which are transmitted to the computer users:

Freedom 0: the software can be used freely for any purpose;

Freedom 1: freedom to study the way the program operates and adapt it to your purposes, on condition that the incoming text of the program is available;

Freedom 2: you may redistribute the copies of the program freely, to help your neighbors;

Freedom 3: the program may be modified and improved freely. The improvements may be released to the public as well, to profit the whole community.

The main condition of the third freedom is the availability of the incoming text of the program and the possibility to make modifications and corrections in the program.

If the software satisfies the requirements of these four principles, it can be considered free software. Thus it is free and available for modifying and revising.

As opposed to “freeware” which does not have a fee, free software may be redistributed by collecting payment for it, or it can be absolutely free of charge. However, the main thing concerning the software in question is to follow four principles of freedom.

Related posts:

1. Free Software Foundation Activity
2. Free Software Foundation History
3. Richard Stallman

If the original developing company puts an end to its activity, you can always address another software company to find the necessary support. Moreover a user has unrestricted freedom to decide on the software and to use it for his/her purposes as long as s/he wishes. All the users have the possibility to share with experience with each other.

The Variability Advantage
Free Software is developed to be adapted to the computer user’s needs. A computer user is given the freedom to revise and make changes in free software. Such freedom of revising and redistribution increases the variability of the program, making it available for the other users. The changes are usually accepted by the package maintainers. When the corrections do not present great interest, they can be rejected. They can also exist in the limited niche, for which they were developed.

As opposed to free software developers, proprietary software companies search for a niche beforehand. A computer user is not allowed to modify the software for the other niches. In spite of the fact, that a great number of proprietary software copies can be sold, still their software is distinguished by reduced variability in comparison with the free software companies.

Related posts:

1. Free Software Foundation Activity
2. Free Software. Why Is It Free?
3. Free Software: How Did it Appear

Being the public organization, OSI runs the project Open Source Definition. It reviews and approves licenses as OSD-Conformant. The organization takes an active part in Open Source community building and education.

The members of OSI Board go on travels around the world in order to visit Open Source Conferences and to see Open Source users and developers. Thus OSI Board members have also the possibility to discuss private and public issues with bodies of executive power. These issues have to do with Open Source technologies, licenses and development of models which can ensure economic and strategic benefits.

The initial period of the open-source movement concurred with the dot-com phenomenon that was booming in 1998-2000. At that time the computer operating system Linux enjoyed wide popularity. It was also the period of open-source-friendly companies foundation. The open source movement drew the mainstream software industry’s attention. This lead to open source software offerings, received from software companies, which included Corel (Corel Linux), Sun Microsystems (OpenOfficeorg), IBM (Open   AFS). In 2001 when the dot-com era was booming, Open Source Initiative lived up the expectations of its advocates. Thus its activity was continued. The current status of OSI is “Active”. It is worth mentioning that open-source related movements of OSI include Iranian Free /Open Source users Community(Iran), MyOSS (Malaysia), IGOS (Indonesia) and Ma3bar (Arab Region).

Related posts:

1. ULTEO OPEN VIRTUAL DESKTOP 2.5
2. Free Software Foundation Activity
3. Free Software. Why Is It Free?

Unlike the original antivirus programs that were based solely on the treatment of computer viruses, a modern antivirus program is designed to protect the system from a great number of different possible malicious programs (worms, viruses, Trojan horses, rootkits, spyware , adware), phishing attack etc.

It is known that the first antivirus programs have appeared in 1983.

Antivirus programs have independent and proactive way of functioning. Most antivirus programs with proactive mode can not work simultaneously on a single computer. Some antivirus programs come with built-in firewall, spyware detection tools and related security tools.

Recently, on various forums there have been a lot of discussions whether to install antivirus software on Linux or not. Many people do not understood what exactly do these antivirus programs and whether they have ever needed them.

Well, here is the list of most popular antivirus softwares you can use on your Linux.

Avast! Antivirus

Avast! Antivirus is a freeware antivirus software, produced by Czech company ALWIL Software, operating since 1991. The first version was published in 1988. It is currently available in 27 languages. Its effectiveness has been confirmed by ICSA certified and it was awarded with many prizes like Virus Bulletin 100% Award. The program is available in two versions: Home Edition and Professional.

Simple user interface is available when you run scans on demand. It allows you to easily define the basic parameters and functions to access files in quarantine, preview, and the event log to update virus signatures. Extended interface is available only in Professional version.

The program integrates with the operating system layer, allowing access to critical system functions from the context menu.

The Linux version of the user interface requires GTK + 2.x. If  it’s not present in the system, it will be added during installation.

The last stable version is 4.8.1356, released 2009-09-25.

Main features:

Antivirus kernel:
- Almost 100% detection
- Outstanding performance
- Reasonable memory requirements
- ICSA certified

User Interface:
- Intuitive Simple User Interface
- Independent on installed graphic libraries
- Testing of whole disks or just selected folders
- Defining and running of antivirus tests
- Working with the scan results
- Actions with infected files
- Storing the scan results (history)
- Virus encyclopedia
- Command-line scanner with STDIN/STDOUT mode

Updates:
- Non-incremental updates
- Updates can be completely automatic
- Standard updates are provided 2 times a week

Related posts:

1. What are Computer Viruses and its Types?
2. Choosing a Linux Live CD
3. Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring

• User account binding to the physical line, for example, using MAC-address of the network interface. Linux user has to configure network interfaces to establish such a connection;
• VPN-technologies allowing user authentication and secure connection. For example, PPTP, L2TP or IpSec;
• PPPoE (Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet) which this article is about.

PPPoE represents a network protocol for encapsulating Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) frames inside Ethernet frames. PPPoE expands the capability of PPP allowing a virtual Point-to-Point connection over a multipoint Ethernet network architecture. Given protocol was published by IETF in 1999 and its specification is RFC 2516.

In fact PPPoE does not have important advantages in comparison to the above mentioned alternatives. However the following ones can be emphasized:

• It’s significantly more secure than MAC-binding and allows user to change network interfaces connected to the provider without appealing to provider’s customer support; still it slightly reduces the bandwidth of the network interface;
• Its configuration is simpler that the one of VPN-connection and requires less parameters to be introduced by user. In particular there is no need to configure IP-address or to specify the address of VPN-server.

Thus, most likely you will encounter PPPoE just because you ISP will provide the Internet via this technology. Although provider’s technical support generally can help you just with Windows, you can easily connect your PC with Linux operating system following our instructions.

The best way to use PPPoE on Linux is to do it with the help of pppd (Point-to-Point Protocol daemon) package, which supports PPPoE since version 2.4.2, and is usually pre-installed (in case it’s not, you can easily get and install it). PPPD is used to manage network connections between two nodes on Unix-like operating systems. The role of pppd is to manage PPP session establishment and session termination.

In addition to that there must be in-kernel PPPoE support. Most likely you already have it because it’s included in all modern distributions by default. However if you don’t, we will discuss how to add it a little bit later.

For now let’s see how you can set up a PPPoE connection using graphical interface (in this certain case we will use Ubuntu 9.04, though Ubuntu 9.10 beta is already available). Open: System – Preferences – Network Connection. Choose DSL tab and press “Add”:

Fill in the “Connection name” (anything you want), “Username” and “Password” fields, check or leave uncheck “Connect automatically”, “Show password” and “Available to all users” boxes:

NOTE: In case you are going to use this connection just for the Internet, you can leave “Service” field empty.

Choose Ipv4 Settings tab and make sure that the Method is Automatic (PPPoE):

That’s it! Now you can connect to the Internet without any problems.

However if you don’t really like using graphical interface or simply haven’t it (for example, on the server), there is another way to configure it.

First of all you need to check if there is in-kernel PPPoE support:

modprobe pppoe

In case the module wasn’t found, we need to create a kernel module. Make sure that you have kernel sources by going to the source directory – /usr/src/linux-x.x.x and run the following command:

make menuconfig

In the configuration window that will appear after the previous command open Network device support -> PPP over Ethernet (Experimental) and set “M” value there;

Or you can directly change .config (that can be found in the source directory - /usr/src/linux-x.x.x/):

CONFIG_PPPOE=m

Now we need to compile modules:

make modules

In case you get some compile errors like “field pppox have not defined in union…”, just as I did, try to make some changes in the following two files:

/usr/src/linux-x.x.x/drivers/net/pppoe.c

/usr/src/linux-x.x.x/drivers/net/pppox.c

- Add just after the comments (before any of #include directives) the following line:

#define CONFIG_PPPOE_MODULE

- Save the above mentioned files and retry compiling with

make modules

After successful compiling copy files

/usr/src/linux-x.x.x/drivers/net/pppoe.o

/usr/src/linux-x.x.x/drivers/net/pppox.o

(pay attention to “.o” extention!) to /lib/modules/x.x.x/kernel/drivers/net

Refresh the file with dependencies:

depmod -a

Now check one more time if the following command is working:

modprobe pppoe

In case it’s ok, we can go ahead with pppd configuration.

1) We need to add to /etc/ppp/chap-secrets our login and password.

If you plan to use pppd for more than one connection, than there is a necessity to introduce a unique ID along with login and password. For example, “PROV”:

ourlogin PROV ourpassword *

(of course, instead of “ourlogin” and “ourpassword” we need to write true values)

2) We have to create a file (let it be “myprov”) in /etc/ppp/peers.

Here are the things we need to write in this file:

user ourlogin (ourlogin – the same login as we introduced in chap-secrets)

plugin rp-pppoe.so

eth0 (your interface via which you want to receive pppoe)

noipdefault (in case your ISP provides dynamic IP)

usepeerdns (to receive DNS from provider)

defaultroute (while connecting to the Internet the provider’s router will be used as a gateway by default)

persist (fixed connection)

remotename PROV (PROV – an ID we introduced in chap-secrets)

3) Finally we need to save everything. To call the connection we use the command:

pppd call myprov

If pppd displays that it can’t load, for example, /usr/lib/pppd/2.4.3/rp-pppoe.so, we need to check where pppd is:

whereis pppd

-  After that we should make a link in /usr/lib/pppd/2.4.3 to our rp-pppoe.so:

ln –s [our rp-pppoe.so] [/usr/lib/pppd/2.4.3/rp-pppoe.so]

If pppd loads, but fails to create PPPoE socket, check log, maybe there are some messages like:

modprobe: can’t locate module net-pf-24

-  If there are, we need to write in /etc/modules.conf:

alias net-pf-24 pppoe

No doubt using PPPoE in Linux is as simple as it is in other operating systems. Graphical interface allows you to connect it in a very fast and intuitive way. However if you want be able to solve different kind of problems that may appear, it’s a great idea to make use of command line. Anyway it won’t take you more than 5-10 minutes to setup the connection, so check it out right now in order to see how easy it is.

Related posts:

1. Setting Up Network Interfaces in Linux
2. Setting Up SSH clients on Windows Mobile Devices
3. IPv6 advantages and its configuration in OS Linux

There are multiple compression algorithms available to compress data. You should remember that some kinds of data can be highly compressed and some kinds of data do not benefit from compression. At the moment archive formats are also used to package software files for distribution, installation, and execution.

Let’s see what the most popular archive formats are and what they are used for. All of them are divided into 5 different types:

1. Archiving only formats (only combine files):

- ar, cpio, tar and etc.

2. Compression only formats (only compress files):

- gzip, bzip2, LZMA, compress and etc.

3. Multi-function formats can combine, compress, encrypt, create error detection and recovery information, and repackage the archive into self-extracting/self-expanding files:

- 7z, ACE, ARC, cpt, dmg, GCA, kgb, LZX, RAR, qda, ZIP and etc.

4. Software Packaging formats are used to create software packages that may be self-installing files:

- deb, pkg, RPM, MSI, JAR and etc.

5. Disk Image formats are used to create disk images or optical disk images of mass storage volumes:

- OEB Package Format, OEBPS Container Format, Open Packaging Conventions and etc.

If you would like to learn more about archive formats, please visit this page.

Most likely you’ve already understood that in the given post we are not going to review all the archive formats, but the most popular one – RAR.
As it was mentioned before RAR is a multi-function archive file format that supports data compression, error recovery, file spanning and etc. Though at the moment it’s licensed by Win.rar GmbH, it was originally developed by Russian software engineer – Eugene Roshal (RAR comes from Roshal ARchive).

You should know that RAR files can be created only using commercial software and the one that has permission from the author. In fact the only freeware that can be used to create RAR files is RAR for Pocket PC.

The most popular software for creating RAR files is WinRAR, which you probably are familiar with. Of course, it’s available only for Windows, so we won’t discuss it in detail. However there is WinRAR’s command line counterpart – RAR. It’s also commercial software but is available for WIndows, Linux, Mac OS X, MS-DOS, OS/2 and FreeBSD. In addition to that there is a multi-platform unrar tool from the same distributor that is used just to extract RAR files but not to write them.

Let’s try to figure out the advantages of RAR in comparison to other file archivers. Here are the most important ones:

• RAR uses 128-bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) algorithm that is significantly better than the cryptographic algorithm used in Zip 2.0. This means that RAR encryption is much safer.
• RAR has a better rate of compression than early compression algorithms like ZIP and gzip (still it generally compresses the data a little bit slower)
• RAR has a recovery record function: archive formats contain redundant data embedded in the files in order to detect data storage or transmission errors, and the software used to read the archive files contain logic to detect and correct errors. Thus it allows you to restore a damaged file.
• Multi-volume archive support: ability to break a RAR-archive into many smaller files
• RAR allows you to work with any files as far as their size is concerned (till 8 EB = 8,000,000,000,000,000,000 B = 8 x 10¹⁸ bytes or 8 billion gigabytes), while popular ZIP format is limited to 2 GB.
• RAR offers an optional compression algorithm highly optimized for multimedia data.

Now we are going to discuss how you can use RAR in Linux. First of all let’s see what should you do to open RAR-archives.

Due to the fact that there is no RAR support in Linux by default, we will need to install unrar command:

a) If you use Debian Linux, you need to type apt-get as follows to install unrar program:

# apt-get install unrar

b) In case of Fedora use yum command:

# yum install unrar

c) If you none of the above mentioned works for you, please do the following:

- download binary package from official rarlab site:

$ cd /tmp
$ wget http://www.rarlab.com/rar/rarlinux-3.6.0.tar.gz

- untar file:

$ tar -zxvf rarlinux-3.6.0.tar.gz

- go to rar directory (both unrar and rar commands are located in rar sub-directory):

$ cd rar
$ ./unrar

- copy rar and unrar to /bin directory:

# cp rar unrar /bin

In case you get glibc error, you need to use rar_static (you can find it in the same installation package) instead of rar and copy it to /bin under rar name.

d) You can also install it using Synaptic: System – Administration – Synapric Package Manager – find both rar and unrar – install them

For now everything should work fine. Here are some of the examples how you can use unrar command:

1) Suppose we want to open music.rar in the current directory:

$ unrar e music.rar

2) If you want to extract files with the full path, type the following command:

$ unrar x music.rar

3) In case you need to check the integrity of the file, use the command:

$ unrar t music.rar

4) To list the file inside RAR archive, use command:

$ unrar l music.rar

If you are searching for a GUI utility to extract and handle rar files with, there is PeaZip for Linux which may be very useful.

Let’s check how we can create archives using rar command. The list of rar options for Linux is pretty impressive, so we will mention just the most important ones:

-  Add files to archive (add all *.mp3 files from the current directory to the archive.rar):

rar a archive *.mp3

In this case the .rar extension will automatically append to the archive (the full name will be             archive_file.rar). If archive.rar already exists in the present working directory, then the         file you are trying to add to archive.rar will be simply added to the existing archive.           Just in case archive.rar already contains a file with the same name the old file will be replaced with the new one. Other files stored inside the archive will be unaffected. Please remember that this action is blind, meaning that RAR does not check the time stamps of files.

- Add files and check time stamps (denoted by «-u») using the command:

rar a -u archive *.mp3

- Archiving all files and directories in current directory:

rar a archive

- Archiving the content of a particular directory:

rar a archive  /music/korn

- Archiving groups of files (according to the type):

rar a archive '*.jpg'

- Deleting files from archive (all .png files in from the current directory):

rar d archive '*.png'

- Locking archive so that any command which intends to change the archive will be ignored:

rar k final.rar

- Renaming archived files. Here is the command syntax:

rar rn <arcname> <srcname1> <destname1> … <srcnameN> <destnameN>

rar rn data.rar readme.txt readme.bak info.txt info.bak

Thus it will rename readme.txt to readme.bak and info.txt to info.bak in the archive data.rar

-  Creating recovery volumes – .rev files.

They can be later used to reconstruct missing and damaged files in a volume set. This command makes sense only for multivolume archives and you need to specify the name of the first volume in the set as the archive name. For example:

rar rv3 data.part01.rar

This feature may be useful for backups or, for example, when you posted a multivolume archive to a newsgroup and a part of subscribers did not receive some of the files. Reposting recovery volumes instead of usual volumes may reduce the total number of files to repost.

Each recovery volume is able to reconstruct one missing or damaged RAR volume. For example, if you have 30 volumes and 3 recovery volumes, you are able to reconstruct any 3 missing volumes. If the number of .rev files is less than the number of missing      volumes, reconstructing is impossible. The total number of usual and recovery volumes must not exceed 255.

«N» parameter specifies a number of recovery volumes to create and must be less than the total number of RAR volumes in the set.

- Encrypting files with the password (using «-p») while archiving. The password is case-sensitive. If you omit the password on the command line, you will be prompted with message “Enter password”.

rar a -pfcfcfc archive '*.txt'

This command adds files *.txt and encrypt them with password «fcfcfc»

- Creating SFX – Self-Extracting archives:

If you use this switch when creating a new archive, a Self-Extracting archive (using a module in filedefault.sfx or specified in the switch) would be created. In the Windows version default.sfx should be placed in the same directory as the rar.exe, in Unix – in the user’s home directory, in /usr/lib or /usr/local/lib.

rar a -sfxwincon.sfx myinst

Create SelF-eXtracting (SFX) archive using wincon.sfx SFX-module.

Of course all the above mentioned options represent just some of the available ones. If you would like to learn more, please check «rar.txt» file from the installation package (User’s manual).

Conclusion

As you can see RAR for Linux is an extremely powerful tool that represents very decent replacement for WinRAR. As far as the functionality is concerned you get absolutely the same software. The only thing that may be a little bit difficult in the very beginning is the necessity to use command line. However it’s not as hard to use, so in some time you will find yourself using it without any problem.

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2. System and File Backup on Windows and Linux
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