W.I.L. Tech-News Highlights for November/December 2006

Operating Systems

Microsoft hiring “open source evangelist”? – link.

On Novell and Microsoft – link. Red Hat downplays Novell/Microsoft deal – link. Why Microsoft will not assault Linux – link. Samba team asks Novell to reconsider – link. A visual timeline of the Microsoft-Novell controversy – link.

VMX Builder is an easy-to-use desktop tool for creating VMware virtual machines – link.

Linux

2006 was the year the Free Software Foundation reached out to the community – link.

Desktop Linux 2006: The year in review – link. A 2006 retrospective – link. Linux Desktop 2006, better than ever – link.

Linux interoperability in a mixed Linux and Windows environment takes center stage at TechX World – link.

Help for Linux newcomers

Online class “An Introduction to Linux Basics” teaches basic Linux for free – link.

3 Linux desktops (Linspire, Xandros and SLED) put to the test – link.

Userfriendly Linux Shoot-out: Xandros Home Edition Premium and Linspire Five-O compared – link.

Linux desktop domination “just a matter of time”, according to Mark Shuttleworth – link.

A database of vendors that offer reasonably-priced desktops and/or notebooks for home and office users, and either offer Linux only, or as an installation option on the system configuration page of their sites – link.

What is up next in Linux desktop standardization? – link.

Installing Popular Applications On Your Ubuntu Desktop With Automatix2 – link.

Making a distribution secure – link.

Resisting pressure to include priprietary code in Linux distributions – link.

Special report: Linux security – link. Interview with Linux security expert Kurt Seifried, author of the Linux Administrators’ Security Guide or proprietor of the popular security mailing list – link.

Lintrack is a new distribution for routers, firewalls, network access servers and more – review.

Linux desktop architects map out plans for 2007 – link.

How to prepare a CentOS 4.4 server for OpenVZ virtual machines – link.

How to set up a server on Ubuntu 6.10 with LAMP in about 15 minutes – link.

KDE 4 the ultimate business desktop? – link.

Tweaking KDE 3.5.5 – link.

Show us your desktop! Screengrabs galore – link.

GNUstep project gets new chief maintainer – link.

The state of Linux printing is getting better, but there is further to go – link.

Beryl debuts a dazzling community-built 3-D desktop – link.

A survey of Linux file managers – link.

The Friendly Interactive Shell (fish) is an alternative command line that is designed to be easy to learn and use. fish turns on by default options that are available in shells such as Bash or tcsh and develops them far beyond other shells – link.

Bring back deleted files with lsof – link.

Get top-quality scans from your scanner with Lprof – link.

Searchmonkey is a graphical search tool whose main page describes it as the combining of Beagle’s simplicity of use with the exactness of the find and grep commands – link.

Linux Administration Handbook, Second Edition is not perfect. But, for a large part of the system administration space, the book has the best combination of “how to do it” (technical details) and “how you should do it” (what works well in the real world) – book review.

Can commercial gaming thrive on Linux? – link.

Bernard Leach interviewed about the iPodLinux project – link.

Behind the upsurge in Chinese open source communities – link.

Deep into Munich’s Linux FOSS migration – link.

Convert file names to a different encoding with convmv – link.

Get the most out of Z Shell – link.

The LinuxBIOS is a project designed to work out any perceived shortcomings from existing BIOS options distributed on today’s motherboards – link.

BSDs, other Unixes

PC-BSD 1.3 released – link.

OpenBSD 4.0 released – link. Several BSD developers interviewed about the OpenBSD 4.0 release – link.

Windows, Other OS’s

Free Software Foundation has launched BadVista.org, a campaign with missions of exposing the harms inflicted on computer users by Vista and promoting free software alternatives that respect users’ security and privacy rights – link.

How Vista lets Microsoft lock users in – link.

Never mind Vista, here are Fiji and Vienna – link.

Amiga OS 4 “The Final Update” released – link.

Applications

The “Children’s Machine 1” from the One Laptop Per Child project and the software it will run – link.

PortableApps Suite = portable computing with style – link.

10 online “operating systems” reviewed. Among the works-in-progress, a couple of gems emerge – link.

An introduction to Salesforce.com’s AppExchange – link.

AsciiDoc is a handy program that can produce formatted HTML documents and manpages from plain text files. With it, you can produce general purpose documents or specialized output such as mathematical formulae and musical notation – link.

Databases

Firebird 2.0 released – link.

PostgreSQL vs. MySQL comparison (ca. 2005) – link.

Internet applications

Downloading bliss with Metalink – link.

Version 1.5.0.8 of both the Mozilla Firefox nd Mozilla Thunderbird released – link.

SeaMonkey 1.0.6 and SeaMonkey 1.1 beta released – link.

Greasemonkey is a browser extension lets Firefox users write and install scripts that change Web page features on the client side. Four useful scripts reviewed – link.

Del.icio.us bookmarks extension for Firefox – link.

A first look at Thunderbird 2.0 – link.

Take Mutt on a short trip to mail client obedience school and see how easy it can be to make Mutt handle mail just the way you want it to – link.

Blogging made easy with Drivel, designed for those who consider using a browser too tedious when making new blog entries – link.

Office applications

Scribus WYSIWYG page layout application core team interviewed – link.

Creating PDFs (on Windows) with GPL-licensed PDFCreator, built on top of Ghostscript. For most purposes, it is a great alternative to Acrobat – link.

A survey of Linux PDF viewers – link.

OpenOffice.org 2.1 released – link.

Pepping up OO.o Writer documents with sparklines, word-sized graphs embedded into text developed by infographic guru Edward Tufte – link.

Manipulating lists in OO.o Calc – link. OO.o Calc adds support for Excel VBA – link.

OOoBasic crash course: Multi-format document backup – link.

OpenOffice.org announces winners of its template and clipart contest – link.

O3Spaces takes on Microsoft Office SharePoint for document collaboration, with an integrated collaboration and document management application for workgroups and small businesses that use OpenOffice.org or StarOffice – link.

The next document format battleground – link.

SoftMaker Office 2006, a proprietary cross-platform office suite that retails for $70, includes word processor TextMaker, spreadsheet PlanMaker, and subsystems for databases and drawings. These tools are fast and robust, with features somewhat less than OO.o, but greater than KOffice or GNOME Office. While TextMaker is a full-featured with only a few areas where functionality is basic, PlanMaker is sparse to the point of often being inconvenient – link.

From XML to PDF – link.

BasKet is a multipurpose note-taking application that allows you to collect and organize text, pictures, files, and more – link.

Special Report: Managing your money with Linux – link. Accounting software has come a long way under Linux – link.

GnuCash, with version 2.0 now out, is a personal and small business accounting package that provides true double-entry accounting, the ability to set up automatic recurring transactions, and simple budgeting. If you are prepared to learn a subtly different way of doing things, you will find GnuCash a very powerful alternative for home or small business use – review 1, review 2. Using GnuCash 2.0 to balance your checkbook – link.

SQL-Ledger is a web-based accounting system aimed at the small business community, boasting multiple user support, multiple company support, point-of-sale entry, accounts receivable and payable, and stock tracking – link. SQL-Ledger has impressive capabilities, but needs polish – link.

Ledger is a command-line accounting application for the hardcore financial professional – link.

KMyMoney is coming along, but still not there – link.

Building customized financial documents with free spreadsheets – link.

Winzig is a free, low-resource PIM written in Python. It fits everything into one small, fixed-sized window ... perfect for embedded devices, and if you care about your screen real estate, good for desktop systems as well – link.

HylaFAX, a utility that can send and receive FAXes, 4.3.1 has been released – link.

Desktop-oriented applications

Xara LX may be hibernating, but it is not dead – link.

KOffice raster image editor Krita, now at version 1.6, is not a second-tier productivity accessory to the suite – review. A comparative look at GIMP and Krita – link.

Why Flash 9 for Linux is taking so long – link.

Top Linux photo managers side-by-side – link.

Raw Therapee 1.1 promises robust photo conversion – review.

Portrait of Rafe Levien, font-designer and free software contributor – link.

From video capture to editing to DVD authoring and encoding, you can create high-quality videos easily with free, open source software – link 1, link 2.

Grab online videos with the All-In-One Video bookmarklet – link.

Sound eXchange (SoX) is a command-line sound sample translator that can be used to convert file formats of your audio files, and to apply sound effects to jazz up your music with just a few keystrokes – link.

Major release 1.1.3 of FLAC, the Free Lossless Audio CODEC – link.

Enhanced learning of a second language with Audacity – link.

SIMchronise’s products can synchronize contacts, calendars, appointments, tasks, and notes across a wide range of devices, including mobile phones, PCs, Palm PDAs, and even iPods. After using proprietary software and finding it lacking, all of its products are now based on Funambol’s open source data synchronization software – link.

How to set up MythTV (0.20) on Ubuntu 6.10 – link.

QBrew is an open source application to aid you in developing a recipe for home brewed beer – review.

FlightGear is a multiplatform, GPLed flight simulator. It is sophisticated, realistic, and extensible. You can choose to fly more than 100 different aircraft, take off and land from thousands of airports, and you can fly over virtually any terrain in the world. It has suddenly become a very hot item – link.

Programming

Graphical user interface, Web

OpenLaszlo is an open source platform for creating zero-install web applications with the UI capabilities of desktop client software. Programs are written in XML and JavaScript and transparently compiled to Flash – link. Developing an OpenLaszlo app – link.

The Cocotron implements an Objective-C API very similar to Cocoa – link.

Version 4.1 of PyQt, the Python bindings for Qt v4, is available – link.

Discover the Ajax Toolkit Framework for Eclipse – link.

Cutting through the Ajax hype – link.

Mixed XML content processing – link.

Using XSLT for print formatting – link.

Music and Metadata – link.

Should Javascript get more respect? – link.

C/C++/Java family

Pointers and memory leaks in C – link.

Jepp lets you script your Java applications with Python – link.

Some notes on free Java – link.

Free Java community reacted positively, but cautiously, to the news that Sun Microsystems has released the code for Sun Java under the GPL – link. JBoss’s ounder and leader on the GPL, IBM, patents and Microsoft – link.

Scripting and high-level languages

PHP 5.2.0, “a major improvement in the 5.X series, which includes a large number of new features, bug fixes and security enhancements”, is out – link.

The state of PHP security (not great) – link. PHP security expert resigns – link.

The Python Journal lives again – link.

The initial release of PythonQt, a binding of the Qt4 framework to the Python language, is out – link.

Plone Conference 2006 coverage – link. Eben Moglen’s Plone Conference keynote address – link.

More on Ruby implementations – link.

JRuby developers interviewed – part 1, part 2.

The Ruby Way, Second Edition contains gems valuable for anyone who wants to program with Ruby on every page – book review.

Security & Privacy

How to bridge networks with OpenVPN – link.

Inside the Hacker’s Profiling Project – link.

Configuration, the forgotten side of security – link.

The many facets of Linux security – link.

Various ways of detecting rootkits in Linux – link.

Virtual Machines and memory protections – link.

Rainbow tables for password cracking – link.

PHREL beats back DNS server attacks – link.

GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) version 2.0.0 released. GnuPG-2 has a different architecture than GnuPG-1 (e.g., 1.4.5) in that it splits up functionality into several modules. Both versions may be installed alongside without any conflict, and GnuPG-1 remain very useful for small systems and for server based applications requiring only OpenPGP support – link.

Holes, patches, defenses

Firewall your applications with Novell AppArmor – link.

A severe, remotely-exploitable GnuPG vulnerability – link.

The Firefox password manager vulnerability – link.

Keeping current with SpamAssassin rules – link.

Miscellaneous

In Beautiful Evidence, Edward Tufte still manages to offer readers a combination of practical advice and theory in a style that manages to be both leisurely and challenging at the same time – book review.

Stop calling everything blogs! – link.

Art production and the open source paradigm – link. Can open source methodology make a movie? – link.

Open Shakespeare is a UK-based project to publish a fully open edition of Shakespeare’s works – link.

Microfinance and open source are natural partners – link.

What is open source? – link.

Why FOSS is not on activist agendas – link.

Degrees of openness – link.

2006: The year the FSF reached out to the community – link.

Librarians stake their future on open source – link.

Why we need an open source Second Life – link. Second Life and open source – link.

What can’t open source achieve in the next 10 Years? – link.

Queen Elizabeth II to release her 2006 Christmas speech as a podcast – link.

Business

Some ideas about ideas and venture capital – link.

Oracle’s Red Hat rip-off – link. With friends like these ... – link. Mark Shuttleworth on Oracle – link.

Linux start-up takes path to profits: Mark Shuttleworth interviewed – link.

Linux perks up the Espresso Book Machine, a $100,000 device that prints books right at the point of sale – link.