Today, Mozilla announced the availability of Firefox 3.0 Beta 2, the second beta of the Firefox 3 open source browser.

New features in this Beta 2 release include:

When you rent a dedicated server nowadays, almost all providers give you FTP backup space for your server on one of the provider's backup systems. This tutorial shows how you can use duplicity and ftplicity to create encrypted (so that nobody with access to the backup server can read sensitive data in your backups) backups on the provider's remote backup server over FTP. ftplicity is a duplicity wrapper script (provided by the German computer magazine c't) that allows us to use duplicity without interaction (i.e., you do not have to type in any passwords).

Either there really is no "average" computer user, or "Mrs. D" is just not your "average" average user.

Blue GNU has been essentially out of operation for the past two weeks, due to circumstances beyond our control. We appreciate Falko for providing our readers a little something of interest in the meantime. Please look for us to start posting again Friday morning.

This tutorial shows how to set up a CentOS 5.1 based server that offers all services needed by ISPs and web hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc.

The appearance in the past year of so-called "completely libre" distributions such as gNewSense and Gobuntu, especially against the backdrop of existing distributions, like BLAG, Dyne:bolic, Ututo and others, might seem to point to an increased interest in software freedom. Should we be looking for the "rise of the completely libre distros", or is there something more subtle that we should notice?

Blue GNU will be replacing Windows for a local user and is anticipating some interesting new toys, not to mention the possibility of reviewing a great guru's newest book.