W.I.L. Tech-News Highlights February 2006

Versora’s Progression Desktop utility is designed to copy a user’s settings and files from Windows to Linux, mitigating the hassles that come with migration – link 1, link 2.

Introduction to package management in Linux – link.

Parallels Workstation for Desktop offers similar features and performance to VMware Workstation, but at only $49, compared to VMware’s $189 price – test drive.

Win4Lin announces major upgrade version 2.6 to 2000/XP desktop product. Now virtually any legacy Windows XP application can be run on Linux at or above native speed, sound playback and recording is now available, and networking performance is improved. Cost for new users is $90, upgrade for existing users is free – link.

SUSE Linux 10 Unleashed is a solid and useful book to have around, scoring highly in terms of convenience, range of material and readability. It is not for the computer illiterate – book review.

Linux Distribution News & Reviews
Fedora Core Linux’s evolution – link.
Gentoo 2006.0 released – link.
Fixing Windows with Knoppix – link.
Kororaa is Gentoo-made-easy – link.
Mandriva PowerPack 2006 gets a quick plug – link.
MEPIS may be going Ubuntu – link.

SimplyMEPIS 3.4-3 – review.
Slackware 10.2 – quick look.
SUSE 10 as a desktop OS – link.
SUSE Linux 10.1 – What’s New.
SUSEWatcher is a great openSUSE feature – link.

Linux distributions for older hardware surveyed – link. Discussions here and here.

VectorLinux SOHO 5.1.1 Deluxe is a breath of fresh air in the desktop Linux space … fast, stable, full featured. Highly recommend to anyone using mainstream desktop distros that are tired of the bloat and performance problems that plague them (probably not for total newbies) – review. Discussion here. VectorLinux releases LiveCD edition – link.

Tools to roll your own Linux distribution – link. Building a custom live CD with Linux-Live – link. Creating a Live CD with Kadischi – link.

Novell Shows Off Linux Desktop 10 – link.

Ubuntu takes on Windows XP in the gadget (camera, camcorder, printer/copier/scanner) arena – link.

Why Ubuntu is not for New Linux Users – link. Interview with Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth – link.

Repairing Windows PCs with live Linux CDs – link.

Ease package management with SUSE’s y2pmsh, a shell interface for the YaST2 package manager – link.

Testing Linux patches before installing them on production computers – link.

Linux.com’s “CLI Series” latest – ifup, ifdown, ifstatus, MultiTail follows files in style, Patching the differences, Getting into Motion. Series index here.

Openbox is a super-fast standards-compliant window manager with a small memory footprint – link. Discussion here.

VMware cuts VMware Server price to zero, in a sign that the virtualization market is being commoditized by projects like Xen and OpenVZ – link. Running VMware Player under Linux – link.

Free VMware Server beta (Linux and Windows) released – link.

Setting up international character support in Linux – link.

Disk usage analysis and cleanup tools for Linux – link.

The $80 D-Link DWL-922 Wireless G Network Starter Kit works with Linux clients, but it has some problem areas that Linux users need to be aware of – link.

Instalinux lets you build a custom Linux boot image and perform network installs quickly, especially when you have several machines with the same requirements – link.

Free Mesh networking with Metrix Pebble, a variant of Pebble Linux distribution – link.

Understanding memory usage on Linux – link.

Two ways Microsoft sabotages Linux desktop adoption – link.

Linux is running on … – link.

X graphics get a boost – link. Looking a Novell gift horse, its contributions to the X.org and GNOME projects, in the mouth – link.

Windows gaming on Linux desktops gets a boost – link.

KDE and GNOME collaborating on free desktop promotion – link. KDE at Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) 2006 – link.

BSDs, other Unixes

PC-BSD brings BSD to the desktop. A good desktop OS, and a great way to introduce BSD to new users, with a few rough edges … and you better like KDE – link 1, link 2.

PC-BSD reviewed – link.

How to look like a Unix guru – link.

Sun is making a quiet software push to make the Linux and BSD operating systems a serious option for buyers of Sparc-based computers – link.

Linux is a better Linux than Sun Solaris10, contrary to Sun’s claims – link.

Windows and DOS

Windows Registry management tools assessed – link.

Why XP will never officially work on a Mac – link.

Why Windows Vista won’t suck – link. Why Windows Vista will suck – link. Vista sucks, no it doesn’t, yes it does … – link.

Other OS’s

What the Other Steve Is Saying About Apple – link.

Free and open source software for OS/2: Keeping the flame alive in the face of discouraging circumstances – link.

AerolitheOS a successor to OS/2 Warp? – link.

Syllable on a roll – link.

The ReactOS team has suspended development to do a code review amid concerns that stolen code from Windows found its way into the project – link.

Top 20 reasons why Haiku is still relevant – link.

Copying vinyl to CDs using RISC OS – link.

Paul Leroux of QNX Software Systems interviewed – link.

Applications

Novell survey results on most-wanted Linux applications – link.

CalDAV is a set of calendaring and scheduling extensions to the WebDAV protocol that is part of the open source assault on Microsoft Outlook – link.

Chandler is a personal information manager (PIM) suite, designed to cater to “info-centric” users, and to sidestep the entrenched thinking about PIM applications that derive from the dominance of Microsoft Outlook – link.

Asterisk is free software that lets you create a fully functional, easily customizable, private branch exchange (PBX). Now there is a version of Asterisk that runs on OpenWrt, a Linux distribution designed to run on your wireless router – link.

Databases

Newly free databases validate open source pioneers – link.

Open source vs. the database vendors – link.

SQLite “blunder that might cause a deadlock on multithreaded systems” means you should update to version 3.3.4 – link.

Internet applications

IE7 Beta 2 preview vs. everyone else (Firefox 1.5, Opera 8.5, and Maxthon 1.5) – link.

Internet Explorer: No catching up with Firefox now – link.

Opera releases second preview version of version 9 – link. Opera starts weekly builds program, where every week until the final version of Opera 9 is ready, a weekly updated version of Opera 9 will be made available here. Opera preview puts widgets on stage – link.

Opera’s CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner interviewed – link.

YubNub, a command line for the Web – link.

Must-have Firefox and Thunderbird extensions – link.

GPL-licensed VoIP client WengoPhone is now available as an extension for Mozilla Firefox – link.

Firefox Lead Engineer Ben Goodger has some reflections on the history of Firefox – link.

3D browser built upon Firefox 1.5 – link.

Sylpheed-Claws is a branch of the Sylpheed project, a lightweight email client – link.

Songbird is out, and quite cool. Firefox + music + Winamp brains = Good – link 1, link 2.

Nail is a lightweight console-based mail client – link.

Lighttpd is a lightweight HTTP server that can help alleviate Apache’s load by serving static content or CGI scripts – link.

Must-have plugins for WordPress blogging software – link.

Brim is a Web-based information manager that allows you to manage your personal items like bookmarks, contacts, calendar and tasks online, written in PHP and using MySQL – link.

Move files securely between home, work, and Web hosts in OS X – link.

MyDNS is a domain name server that is an alternative to the dominant BIND, designed to work with an external SQL database, specifically MySQL or PostgreSQL. The most recent version of MyDNS was released last month – link.

Office applications

OO.o Writer and Scribus combined provide a powerful end-to-end desktop publishing solution – link.

Working wonders with OpenOffice 2.0’s Web Wizard – link.

How to get reports on OpenOffice 2.0 Base – link.

Interview with Robin Miller, author of Point and Click OpenOffice.org – link.

The Elephant in the Living Room … OOo and MS Office – link.

Hacking OO.org dictionaries – link.

Sun urged to give up OpenOffice control – link.

For a serious bibliography tool that works with Writer, Bibus has many of the advanced features that OpenOffice.org lacks – link.

Microsoft Office 2007 beta 1 reviewed – link.

Desktop-oriented applications

Using accounting software package SQL-Ledger in a small business – link.

GnuCash 1.9.0 released – link.

Corel’s latest graphics suite, X3, a would be Corel Draw 13 is gets a quick review – review.

Gnash is a free player for Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Shockwave/Flash (SWF) files – link.

Blender 3D: Noob to Pro is a collaboratively written textbook available through wikibooks.org that does a good job of addressing this need for training – book review.

Libre Graphics Meeting will bring together developers and users of the best of free software graphics applications: GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, Blender and more – link.

U.S. grants patent covering all rich-media technology implementations, including Flash, Flex, Java, Ajax, and XAML, when the rich-media application is accessed on any device over the Internet, according to the patent holders – link 1, link 2.

A survey of free font licenses – link.

Among Linux music players, Banshee really wails – link.

Shuffle your music the smart way – link.

Last.fm makes Internet music social – link.

Health, nutrition, and diet apps for Linux – link.

Programming

Top ten of programming advice to NOT follow – link.

Introduction to metaprogramming – link. Metaprogramming using Scheme – link.

Everything your professor failed to tell you about functional programming – link.

Programmers get their own search engine, “Krugle” – link.

Eclipse, open source’s best-kept secret, is fast becoming a serious threat to the part of Microsoft’s software empire that seemed safest from attack – link.

Turbocharged awk – link.

A whole site just about regular expressions (tutorials, resources, quick starts, etc.) – link.

Graphical user interface, Web

KDE 4 (likely release is late 2006 or early 2007) developers look toward new desktop possibilities. One developer likens the difference between KDE 3 and 4 to the leap in applications for Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 – link.

XULRunner is a Mozilla runtime package that can be used to bootstrap XUL+XPCOM applications that are as rich as Firefox and Thunderbird. Developer preview release is available – link.

Using XML to track U.S. government legislation – link.

COMET is the next stage of AJAX, improving user responsiveness still further – link.

Open Ajax project promotes common tools – link.

Advanced requests and responses in Ajax – link.

Yahoo! releases OSS Ajax and design tools – link.

Ajax Foundations and Ajax at Work books reviewed – link.

Web site user annotations with Ajax – link.

Status update on some of the work going into the upcoming JavaScript 2, aka ECMAScript Edition 4 (ES4) – link.

The best of Web 2.0 – link.

For Web editors with relatively simple needs, Nvu is the ticket – link.

C/C++/Java family

Learning the basics of the C programming language – link. Discussion here.

O’Reilly’s C In A Nutshell is recommended as a C reference – book review.

OpenWatcom team looking for help – link.

Borland to sell off Delphi, C++ lines – link. Discussions here, here, and here.

A look at GCJ, the GNU Compiler for the Java programming language, version 4.1 – link.

SWT, Swing, AWT: Which Java GUI tool kit is right for you? – link.

NetBeans, the cross platform, extensible, Java IDE, version 5.0 released – link.

Head First Java, 2nd Edition is great for learning Java, even if it is not very good at teaching people how to program with it – book review.

Scripting and high-level languages

ActiveState will go back to its open-source roots and continue development of ActivePerl, ActivePython and ActiveTcl – link.

Introducing Lua – link.

Managing Rich Data Structures with perl – link.

Going dynamic with PHP version 5 – link 1, link 2.

Why not Python? – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

No programming language offers what Python does philosophically – link.

Building decision trees in Python – link.

Urwid is a terminal-based user interface library for the Python language that is reminiscent of the old Unix curses terminal control library – link.

Learning Ruby? Try this – link.

David Heinemeier Hansson talks about Ruby on Rails – link. Rails 2/17/06 – link.

Using Ruby on Rails for Web development on Mac OS X – link 1, link 2.

Security & Privacy

The security moat and castle model, whereby a strong perimeter is established that divides the network into a trusted interior and untrusted exterior, is a model that has served well in the past, but due to the emergence of two new market trends, it now represents a significant liability – link.

Security versus security: There is more than one kind – link.

Do you want your search history disclosed? – link.

Cracking passwords with John the Ripper – link.

P2P pirates, passwords, IPTV, encryption becomes Morgan – link.

AJAX poses security risk – link. AJAX security tips – link.

How to use MD5 checksum to verify data integrity – link.

Open source ID management puts users in control – link.

Active cookies aim to thwart cyber-crooks – link.

“First” Mac OS X Trojan sighted – link.

crypt_blowfish helps make the front door to Linux systems a little more secure a little easier – link.

Fortifying Linux against common malware – link. The seven deadly sins of Linux security – link.

Virus shuts down Russian main stock exchange – link.

Exploit turns up heat for Firefox flaw, increasing the urgency for people to upgrade to 1.5.0.1 – link.

How to stop Zone Alarm from phoning home – link.

The Grumpy Editor’s guide to bayesian spam filters – link. Followup here.

Miscellaneous

The Africa Source II (AS II) conference was an 8-day hands-on workshop aimed at building the technical skills of those working with and within NGOs on the continent – link.

Parallel universes: open access and open source – link.

New initiative aims to improve the quality of patents – link.

Business

Why offshoring fails (when it does) – link.

RIAA et al says CD ripping, backups not fair use – link.

Fraunhofer has developed prototype technology which digitally watermarks MP3s – link.

Chris DiBona talks Google – link.

Google’s slogan “do not harm” is complete bull – link.

The two faces of Microsoft: Pervasive brand recognition – link.

The Internet

Blogging for Dummies gets the thumbs up because,if you are prepared to spend time searching through the text, you should be able to find all the answers to those questions about blogs you have been afraid to ask in case you look foolish – book review.

U.S. politicians have been caught defacing entries on Wikipedia which they do not agree with, or say nasty things about them – link.

ICANN approves dotcom contract. All hell about to break loose – link.

China gives itself its own top-level domains – link.

The secret cause of flame wars – link.

How one eBay newbie got scammed – link.

The Patriot Act is bad for internet users. Here is why – editorial.

Telecommunications

How to beat the cellular cabal – link.

IBM claims they have fashioned a tiny low cost chipset which will receive and transmit data 10 times faster than the most advanced Wi-Fi nets available today – link.

XG Technology claimed it has transmitted a 3.67Mbps signal for over 18 miles using 35 milliwatts of power, vs. typical 802.11 WLAN technology which “transmits up to three million times more power”. Products forthcoming in Q2, claims firm – link.

Western Union has quietly canned the delivery of telegrams, ending a 145 years tradition – link.

The next battleground for VoIP – link.

OpenZoep is an open source VoIP engine – link.

Previous	Tech-News Highlights Home	Next
Back to top