W.I.L. Tech-News Highlights for October 2005

Operating Systems

Is Microsoft capable of honesty? – link. OSS in the enterprise? Show me the money (Eric Raymond responds to Microsoft) – link.

UK open source software solutions consultancy provides services for free – link.

Linux, Unix

Free Standards Group launches Linux Standard Base Desktop Project – link.

A pair of Linux desktop initiatives – link. Tango project announced – link.

A Linux distributions guide – link.

How many Linux distributions is too many? – link.

The Dyne:bolic multimedia platform on a bootable CD offers a vast range of software for multimedia production, streaming, 3-D modeling, photo editing, Web browsing and publishing, peer-to-peer file sharing, and networking. Third beta of the upcoming dyne:II – review.

Linux kernel 2.6.14 released – link.

Linux in a Nutshell, 5th Edition is a desk reference, not something you would read cover-to-cover, that is handy to have around if you use Linux on a regular basis – book review.

Linux.com’s “CLI Series” latest – Logrotate, CheckInstall, Trojan Scan, lsof, GNU find. Series index here.

A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming is not only a complete tutorial but also an invaluable resource that will be referenced time and again – book review.

Advanced Bash-scripting guide – link.

Essentials for using Linux, an FTP howto – link.

After roughly 12 years of work, the Wine Project is about to take its widely used Windows translation layer to a place it has not been in all that time … beta – link 1, link 2.

Open Graphics Project status updated – link.

Introduction to the CUPS common UNIX printing system – link. Ricoh USA is encouraging linux support for one of its color laser printers (the CL4000DN) – link.

CapitolAdvantage.com started out as a paper directory of members of Congress that founder Bob Hansan sold to corporations. Today, the entire operation runs on Red Hat – link.

Userful Linux multi-station software suits general desktop users – link.

Rhode Island’s Bryant University, ranked the the “second most connected campus in America” by the Princeton Review in October 2004, standardizes on Linux – link.

The return of Minix – link.

Other OS’s

Using open source software on Mac OS X – link.

BeOS rises from the grave, takes the name ZETA – link.

10 years ago, the legendary BeBox computer was introduced by Be, Inc. at Agenda ‘95 – link.

ReactOS 0.2.8 released – link.

New official AmigaOS 4.0 Website unveiled – link.

eComStation demo cd released to the world – link.

Pixel, the image editor that works on just about every platform imaginable, has been ported to SkyOS, – link.

Applications

This year’s sold-out Web 2.0 Conference had so much open source going on that one’s OSSdar receptors went into overload mode – Day 1, Day 2, Day 3. Open Source and Web 2.0 – link 1, link 2. Web 2.0 launchpad roundup – link. What is Web 2.0? – link.

What exactly is free software? – link. On single-company free software – link.

The GNU Bayonne project is a telephony server that is used for a wide range of voice and telco applications – link.

Cacti, a graphing program for network statistics, is designed to be easy for relatively inexperienced systems administrators to use while at the same time being powerful enough to be used in complex networks – link.

Hardware emulation with QEMU – link.

Suggestions for software for a virtual office sought – link.

Databases

OpenOffice packs a powerful new database punch – link.

Report from a PostgreSQL bootcamp at the “Big Nerd Ranch” – link.

User companies pool on PostgreSQL enhancement – link.

Sun eyes PostgreSQL – link.

Oracle to announce a free version of its Oracle 10g Database – link.

The Definitive Guide to MySQL 5 3rd Edition contains nearly everything you would want and expect, not only about MySQL itself but about the software that interacts with it or web servers – book review.

Internet applications

Opera 9.0 Technical Preview 1 includes support for XSLT, Web Forms 2.0 and Canvas 2D. Also fpr rich-text editing, site-specific preferences, find highlighting, default useragent ID as Opera, and almost 100% Acid2 test compliance – link.

Flock is a browser based on the Mozilla Gecko HTML rendering engine, like Firefox, is designed for bloggers – link.

Galeon browser developers have decided to join up with Epiphany, implementing Galeon’s special features as Epiphany extensions – link.

Improved Thunderbird 1.5 beta still fails enterprise test – link.

Mutt is an easy-to-use text-based messaging client – link.

Hacking Gmail – link 1, link 2.

Liferay OSS portal package provides lifeline for corporate housing firm – link.

Three reasons why Internet-based applications are a bad idea – link.

Shopping cart comparison: Drupal’s E-Commerce vs. Mambo’s mambo-phpShop – link.

Lightweight Web serving with thttpd – link.

Office applications

The human-readable, text-based format (not binary) RTF format is suitable for documents that are just page after page of words. More complicated stuff is either beyond RTF’s functionality, or within it, but risks problems of cross-platform portability – link.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 released – link.

4 great OpenOffice.org macros – link.

Toolbars in OpenOffice.org 2.0 – link.

KOffice 1.4.2 released – link 1, link 2.

AbiWord 2.4 released. New features include on-the-fly grammar checking, equation editing, OpenDocument support – details. AbiWord 2.4.1 released – link.

AbiWord beats OpenOffice to an integrated grammar checker – link.

Gnumeric 1.6 released. “Win32 build is now quite stable and very usable” – link.

Desktop-oriented applications

Xara X vector graphic program released under GPL, Linux and Mac versions being worked on – link. Discussions here, here.

A first look at GIMP 2.4 – link. Discussion here. GIMP 2.4 moves toward better usability – link.

The Create initiative at freedesktop.org is bringing together developers from Inkscape, Scribus, Krita, the Open Clip Art Library, and the GIMP, among others, along with interested individuals. Together they are collaborating on a set of specifications they believe will simplify work for developers and distributions, and usability for end users – link.

FONTpage is a quick and easy font viewer – link.

Managing digital photos with Album Shaper – link.

Release 26 of PythonCAD has been announced – link.

Studio to Go is a Knoppix-based CD that allows Windows users to access a wealth of open source music creation and notation software without installing Linux – link.

Editing audio in Linux – link. Music notation software for Linux – link.

Developer of Blinkbid invoicing software for photographers choses an open source customer relationship management package to keep track of contacts and payments – link.

Vim 6.4 released – link.

The Battle for Wesnoth, a popular GPL-licensed game, hits 1.0 – link.

Programming

Developers are finding platform lines blurring – link.

The art of metaprogramming – link.

An introduction to artificial intelligence – link.

So now I’m a software architect. What do I actually do? – link.

Graphical user interface/Web

Web analytics is the process of collecting data about the activities of people accessing your website (visitors) – how they found you, when they visited, what pages they looked at, what they bought or downloaded, and so on – and mining that data for information that can be used to improve said website – link.

A survey of Linux Web development tools – link.

Assessing Web application security with Mozilla – link.

How to implement a browser-based SOAP Web services client using AJAX – link.

C/C++/Java family

When C is the best tool for the job – link.

SWIG, the Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator, interfaces C and C++ with numerous high-level programming languages, releases version 1.3.26 – link.

EasyBMP, an easy cross-platform C++ library for reading and writing Windows bitmap (BMP) files, version 0.70 announced – link.

A look at four technologies that may challenge Java’s development dominance – link.

Scripting and high-level languages

An introduction to OpenOffice.org Basic – link.

Learn how to use AJAX with PHP, and meet Sajax (Simple Ajax Toolkit), a tool written in PHP that lets you integrate PHP with JavaScript – link.

The hottest new thing in Web development these days is TurboGears (TG), a “full-stack” Web development framework implemented in Python – link. TurboGears = Python on Rails? – link.

Continuations and Stackless Python – link. Multithreaded game scripting with Stackless Python – link.

What is Ruby on Rails? – link.

Using Ruby Development Tools plug-in for Eclipse – link. Discussion here.

Sockets programming in Ruby – link. Sockets programming in Python – link.

An introduction to extending applications with LUA – link.

Marc Andreessen predicts that PHP will be more popular than Java for building web-based applications – link.

Zend Technologies is rallying vendors and the open source community to promote industry wide consistency in PHP and promote greater developer uptake – link.

PHPSurveyor, a set of PHP scripts for developing and publishing online multi-question surveys, version 0.99 has been announced – link.

Web application framework Xaraya 1.0.0 RC4 addresses compatibility issues with php versions 4.4 and some 5.1 versions, as well as important bug fixes – link.

LispM (Lisp Machine) source released under “BSD Like” license – link.

Data munging for non-programming biologists (using Perl) – link.

Security & Privacy

Darik’s Boot and Nuke is a great tool for obliterating your data – review.

How to keep instant messaging totally off the record – link.

The Tor project, which designs tools for anonymous Internet communications, is running a public user interface design contest in two phases – link.

With the news that network vulnerability scanner Nessus will not open source the next version, the (soon to be renamed) GNessUs project is attracting attention – link.

Advanced Linux LDAP authentication – link.

Protecting files at home using encrypted containers – link.

Getting to the digital identities promised land – link.

Miscellaneous

Innovation in the web space – link.

Business

Trolltech, a case study in open source business – link.

Blizzard Entertainment, maker of the popular Warcraft and Diablo videogame titles, reverse engineering ruling may stifle innovation – link.

Library of Congress opens DMCA exemption comment period – link.

Why is Microsoft afraid of Google? – link.

Microsoft FAT patents get thumbs down – link.

Europatents to return in 2006? – link.

Telecommunications

Phone buy puts Adobe head-to-head with Microsoft – link.

The broadcast flag returns, surprisingly quickly – link.

Does Open-Source software make the FCC irrelevant? – link.

Radio’s next generation: Linux-powered device Radii “tunes in” to Internet radio – link.