Mencoder is part of the MPlayer media player package. While MPlayer can play audio and video files, mencoder converts and manages multimedia files. The application has a ton of graphical user interfaces, but you can use it from the command line to produce video files in almost any format you want. Here’s how.

Nearly five months after the release of the third version of the GNU General Public License (GPL), the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has completed the updating of its key licenses by the release of the GNU Affero General Public License (GAGPL). The GAGPL is designed for use with software distributed over a network, such as a Web application or software as a service.

According to its developers, "Mercurial is a fast, lightweight Source Control Management system designed for efficient handling of very large distributed projects." Dozens of projects already use the software. Here’s how you can get started with some basic version control tasks using Mercurial.

Rather than choose her current career, it almost seems as if Cathy Malmrose’s career chose her. Malmrose is CEO of ZaReason, an OEM that manufactures and sells desktop and notebook systems with Ubuntu, where she deals with everything from talking with the US Department of Commerce concerning export issues to inspecting the hardware for quality assurance purposes.

Fedora’s Pirut is a useful tool for basic software installation and package searches. However, if you really want to take control of package management, you need to get back to basics with yum. Just as, on Debian systems, dpkg is the back end underlying apt-get and graphical tools such as Synaptic, so on RPM systems, yum is the hidden power behind Pirut and the Pup updater. Not only does yum have more options than Pirut, but you can enhance it with additional plugins and utilities, many of which work only with yum.

Many organizations face a productivity problem with employees who abuse chat programs like MSN Messenger. Some IT departments are instructed to block this kind of traffic for users who either abuse or simply don’t require the software. You can block applications like MSN Messenger in your proxy server, but some clients may still have access to the applications, because there are many versions of MSN Messenger in use, making blocking the application with a proxy server difficult. Instead, block MSN Messenger traffic more easily with iptables.