W.I.L. Tech-News Highlights for July/August 2007

FreeTechBooks.com lists free online computer science, engineering and programming books, textbooks and lecture notes, all of which are legally and freely available over the Internet – link.

Operating Systems

Many Linux users work with multiple OS platforms, survey finds – link.

Linux, Windows can share a computer – link.

If you find yourself working on Windows but wanting to use Linux apps at the same time, Xming can do the job – link.

Dual-booting Windows XP or Vista and Ubuntu 7.04 – link.

Linux

Second-rate Vista has Windows fans looking to Linux – link. Vista aiding Linux desktop, Dell strategist says – link.

Linux desktop revolution – link. Linux is not just for servers anymore – link.

2007 Desktop Linux Survey results revealed – link. How many Linux desktop users are there? – link.

Ottawa Linux Symposium 2007 summary – link.

Linux kernel 2.6.22 released – link. Kernel Summit 2007 preview – link.

Dark horse of the business Linux market Xandros is buying Scalix, an open, cross-platform groupware and messaging system competitor of Microsoft Exchange Server with email, calendaring and scheduling, shared diaries, etc. – link.

All you wanted to know about Linux certification but were afraid to ask – link.

• • Help for Linux newcomers • •

Migrating to Linux? Use these open source applications – link.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 SP1 is simply the best business desktop around, period – review.

Apt-get remove SUSE; apt-get install Etch – link.

Do we still need Linux User Groups? (Yes) – link.

coLinux allows you to run Linux on Windows natively – link.

hardware4linux.info is a new web site that allows you to browse systems and components to find the ones that work or do not work with Linux. Find out if you hardware is Linux-compatible – link.

The APTonCD utility allows users of Debian-based distributions to create backup CDs and DVDs of as many Debian packages as they can download. Used with the apt-mirror utility, APTonCD can back up an entire package repository, spanning several CDs or DVDs – link.

Openbox 3.4.2 has the twin advantage of being a customizable window manager and a lightweight desktop environment. Regular users will hardly notice any difference feature-wise between Openbox and GNOME + Metacity or KDE + KWin – link.

How to configure Ion3, a tiling tabbed window manager designed with keyboard users in mind, to work with ROX – link. Ion3 RC3 released – link.

Customize your laptop keyboard with X and KDE – link.

On GNOME’s 10th anniversary, de Icaza and Waugh look back and ahead – link.

An “online desktop” for GNOME? – link.

A first look at KDE 4 beta 2 – link.

Recompile your kernel for a perfect fit with your machine – link.

Managing wireless connections seamlessly with wicd, which is a lot like the Windows wireless network connection tool in both appearance and ease of use – link. Two tools for enabling wireless cards on Linux – link.

Nero Linux 3.0 supports CD and DVD burning, and claims to be the first Linux application to support Blue-Ray and HD DVD recorders as well – link. LightScribe disc labelers for Linux – link.

Migrating to Linux in the enterprise using vendor-independent formats – link.

Who needs Windows Home Server with Linux around? – link.

An Introduction to Linux audio – link. Troubleshooting Linux audio – link.

A sysadmin toolbox for running a home Web server – link.

Editing basics for the xorg.conf file – link.

Collection of tutorials to get started on Linux administration – link.

Pain-free disk space management using the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) tools – link.

A Linux PC can outperform the same computer running Windows XP or Vista. Even so, you may be able to make your Linux system even faster. Here are three optimizations, at different levels – link. Linux tool points out power-wasting applications – link.

The terms of Linspire’s agreement with Microsoft betrays a deal “worse” than that between Microsoft and Novell, according to Pamela Jones – link. Mark Shuttleworth: Microsoft fracturing the open-source community – link.

5 Linux companies that did not deserve to die – link.

Linus candid and blunt, and at times diplomatic, answers some questions – link.

BSDs, other Unixes

SCO goes down in flames: Novell owns Unix! – link. A bad day for the SCO Group – link.

Linux vs. BSD, what is the difference? – link.

Linux has DTrace envy of Solaris, understandably – link.

Apple bought CUPS (the Common Unix Printing system) and hired Michael Sweet, the project’s primary developer – link.

What is cooking for FreeBSD 7? – link.

PC-BSD 1.4 beta offers 3-D desktop support via Beryl as well as late-model components such as KDE 3.5.7, FreeBSD 6.2, Xorg 7.2, a selection of fresh GUI tools and utilities, and a variety of optional components – link.

OpenBSD Foundation opens its doors – link.

Matthew Dillon, creator of DragonFly BSD, interviewed – link.

Sun OpenSolaris to become more “Linux-like” – link.

Windows and DOS

Is Windows XP the OS that won’t die? – link.

Windows XP tips and tricks – link.

Once applications begin to push the 2GB addressing space limitation of Win32 (something we expect to hit very soon with games) or total systems need more than 4GB of RAM, then Vista x64 in its current incarnation would be a good choice – link. Windows XP, Vista, and the 2GB barrier – link.

Vista upgrade costs force enterprises to contemplate ... Apple – link.

Vista leads to boom in XP sales – link.

Vista SP1’s delay is Desktop Linux’s good news – link.

The failure of Microsoft’s anti-piracy servers would seem an easy entree to some Redmond-bashing, but there are far more important issues to consider – link.

Other OS’s

Steve Wozniak interviewed – link.

From BeOS to Haiku: the once and future OS contender? – link.

Prominent Haiku developer Axel Dorfler short interview – link.

Syllable 0.6.4 released. Is available on a live CD – link. Kristian “Vanders” van der Vliet, one of the primary developers behind Syllable, short interview – link.

QNXZone shuts down – link.

A look at the RISC OS Open (ROOL) project as it celebrates its first birthday – link.

RISC OS development charity taking shape – link.

Robert Szeleney, driving force behind SkyOS, short interview – link.

ReactOS project has released a new newsletter – link.

Applications

“The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities” offers well-considered choices for 46 different categories – link.

Norton Ghost 12.0 backup application enables OS and file backup, Virtual imaging, remote restore, and supports Vista – review.

Manage partitions and disks with GParted-Clonezilla live CD – link.

Databases

Oracle Berkeley DB XML is an embeddable XML database specifically designed for storing and retrieving XML documents. It has advantages over an RDB for storing complete XML documents that may be queried, modified, and updated without having to retrieve the documents from the database – link.

PHPList is a free and open source newsletter manager that relies on MySQL databases for storing information – link.

Searching database content with Sphinx – link.

MySQL stops distributing Enterprise Server source code – link.

Internet applications

eyeOS is an impressive and surprisingly useful open source Web-based OS – link.

Mozilla begets WebRunner, a stripped-down version of Firefox that allows you to run a single site at a time in its own process. The UI is minimal with no toolbars or navigation, just a window with the bare minimum needed to use a Web-based application like Google Reader or any Webmail client – link.

Opera desktop team reveals browser usage findings – link.

Keeping Opera bookmarks in sync with oSync – link.

Opera 9.22 released – link.

New Firefox support site targets your mom – link.

Firefox 1.5.0.12 is the last release from the 1.5 Branch – link.

Back up and restore your Firefox environment with Firefox Environment Backup Extension (FEBE) – link.

Hit-a-Hint is a Firefox plugin that aims to create a faster Web surfing experience by letting you use the keyboard to click links – link.

Preview hyperlinks with Firefox plugin Interclue, which uses algorithms to intelligently construct a summary of the target page and displays it in a window with lots of other information and statistics about the page – link.

Firefox has made dramatic gains on IE throughout Europe in the past year – link 1, link 2.

Mozilla is pushing Thunderbird out of the nest, announces it is seeking “a new, separate organizational setting” for the email client – link 1, link 2.

FileZilla 3 brings formerly Windows-only FTP goodness to Linux – link.

Mozilla’s Sunbird calendaring application is slowing maturing into a reliable tool worthy of the Mozilla brand. It supports Outlook meeting requests, can use shared Google Calendar calendars, supports calendar printing and nearly 50 new public calendars available at the project’s Web site – link 1, link 2.

IM client Pidgin 2.1.0 released with UI improvements – link.

Pan is a feature-rich newsreader for Linux. Its simplicity and usability make it suitable for all types of users – link.

Fine-tune RSS feeds with ListGarden – link.

Two of the most popular BitTorrent clients for Linux, Azureus and KTorrent, compared – link.

Google embarasses MapQuest with its new Maps service, which lets you adjust routes with a simple drag and drop – link.

Office applications

LyX new version 1.5 release includes a revamped interface, big improvements in multilanguage support, and enhanced tools for incorporating math, tables, and outlines – link. LyX 1.5.1 released – link.

Mind mapping tools kdissert (now Semantik) and VYM (View Your Mind) add new dimensions to old technique – link.

Siag Office is an office suite for Unix systems that covers the basic tasks reasonably well in a very small package – review.

OpenOffice.org charts undergo cosmetic surgery in upcoming version 2.3 – link.

Options in OO.o Calc – link.

Migrating a corporation to OO.o – link.

An ingenious version tracking solution for OO.o – link.

OpenXML standard war grows heated – link. Emerging consensus in favour of a unified document format standard? – link.

Linspire to help develop ODF-to-OpenXML translators – link. Microsoft twists and turns over ODF – link. Sun’s OpenDocument filter for MS Office is finished – link. Game over for ODF? – link.

Google adds StarOffice 8 to its free software package, Google Pack – link.

Wyneken is a powerful, flexible notetaking program, which uses LaTex – link.

GnuCash 2.2.0 released, the first version to run on Windows – link.

PostBooks, a Qt-based accounting package seemingly aimed at winning over QuickBooks users, is now available under an open source license – link.

Buddi is a Java-based personal finance and budgeting program, aimed at those who have little or no financial background – link.

GPL Ghostscript 8.60 major release announced – link.

Desktop-oriented applications

Open source Semantic Desktop is coming – link. Discussion here.

Katapult yourself to keyboard productivity – link.

Zim looks, feels, and almost works like a common text editor, but it mixes editing features like spell checking with the page cataloging features of wikis – link.

You can stop computer-based slacking using Lockout, a tool designed to enforce discipline and increase productivity – link.

Sample sections available from The Artist’s Guide To GIMP Effects – link.

Instrumented GIMP (ingimp) to identify the GIMP’s usability flaws. More generally, it is designed to develop the software and practices to put FOSS usability testing on a professional footing – link 1, link 2.

Synfig is a 2-D vector graphics animation program. Although it has only just released version 0.61.06-1, it is already approaching early maturity, with enough tools and innovations that professionals might seriously consider using it – review, link.

Making the GIMP’s UI suck less – link.

Tux Paint gets a face lift – link.

In what promises to boost video quality in desktop, mobile, and embedded devices, Adobe announced that it has added H.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10) support to Flash Player 9. With this update, Flash Player also branches out from its native .FLV file format. However, relatively new (2+ GHz CPU) hardware will be required – link. Flash Player 9 for Linux arrives, looks great – link.

UFRaw 0.12 could make new converts to open source RAW photo conversion – link.

Power up your photo sharing with Desktop Flickr Organizer – link.

Poster printing tool PosteRazor, now at ver. 1.4, coming to the Linux desktop, after having enthused Windows and OSX users – link.

PCAL a nifty command-line program which produces a standard one-month-per-page calendar with each day in a separate box – link.

GTKtalog scans every file and folder on your storage media and saves the captured information in a single-file searchable database – link.

Miro is a Mozilla-based, cross-platform, open source video player now in public release – link.

Version 1.2.0 of FLAC, the Free Lossless Audio Codec, is out – link.

Mind-blasting Japanese language learning tools – link.

Battle Tanks is a blast – link.

Programming

Windows developers begin slow defection to Linux – link. Windows loses ground with developers – link.

A Mono progress report – link.

Google offers free teaching materials for computer science instructors – link.

Fuzz testing uses random input to test software for bugs. It throws anything and everything, and sometimes nothing at all, at applications expecting data of a certain size, shape, or format, and has been the biggest thing to happen in IT security in quite awhile. Now you can quickly and easily direct your own fuzz testing ops, thanks to zzuf – link.

Linux developers considering move to Eclipse – link.

New book from O’Reilly, Beautiful Code, published – link.

Emacs 22.1 enhancements make venerable editor flashy again – link.

Parsing arguments for your shell script – link.

Getting started with revision control system Git – link.

Graphical user interface, Web

An interview with the author of platform-independent GUI Fox toolkit – link.

Qt 4.3.1 allows for more free software licences – link. PyQt v4.3 released – link.

GAMBAS BASIC language environment a fantastic IDE approaching the levels of Delphi/VB – link.

Firebug is a a Firefox extension that can be thought of as a sort of interactive debugger for HTML and CSS. It is a tool which gives a highly useful view into just how the browser is rendering a document – link.

Introduction to using Adobe’s Flex framework using PHP, as an alternative to Ajax. Flex provides a rich cross-platform toolkit that make it easy to build highly interactive user interfaces, and there are many advantages to having the PHP pages return XML instead of (or in addition to) HTML – link.

RESTful Web Services not only informs, but challenges your perceptions – book review.

Ways one could traverse and map what the community is building inside del.icio.us – link.

Speed up your Ajax applications while dodging Web services vulnerabilities – link.

Google Gears allows one to continue to use Ajax-driven applications even after one’s internet connection is lost – Part 1, Part 2.

How to do a few commonly requested advanced features using nothing but bare JavaScript – part 1, part 2.

Version 3.0 of Plone, a Zope-based content management system, has been released – link 1, link 2.

Scripting and high-level languages

Developing Web services using PHP – link.

Distutils is a Python module that provides a standard way of distributing and installing Python apps that can help you simplify the process of installation – link.

Guido van Rossum has published the Python 3000 FAQ – link.

Jython 2.2 has been released – link.

Behavior driven development using Ruby – part 1, part 2, part 3.

Cooking with Ruby on Rails: designing for testability – part 1, link 2.

LinRails = Ruby On Rails for Linux. Its goal is to make it easy to get a Rails development environment running in no time – link.

Using the Digg API with Ruby on Rails – link.

What is new in the Ruby World – link.

XQuery and data abstraction – link.

Security & Privacy

Malware has become a serious business – link.

Comprehensive integrity verification with md5deep – link.

Zero-day security flaw leaves Firefox wide open. Vulnerability is also present in IE – link.

5 essential laptop security tips – link.

Security researchers have a hard job, with vendors often ignoring their research, or even slapping them with a lawsuit or criminal charges for finding bugs – link.

Seeing yellow over color printer tracking devices – link.

Bastille is a software tool that eases the process of hardening a Linux system, giving you the choice of what to lock down and what not to – link.

More people busted with credit-card numbers from TJX breach – link.

Black Hat USA 2007 was fast-paced, fun, and informative. It demonstrated that security is big business. Now time to get ready for Defcon – link. Defcon 15: Secrets and discontent uncovered – link.

Holes, patches, defenses

It is time to blacklist blacklists – link.

Two open source email virus scanners for Linux – link.

SE-PostgreSQL uses SELinux for database security – link.

SmoothWall Express 3.0 is the first release of this FOSS firewall-router distribution in some time – link.

Spam, advertising

Open source filtering solutions and the spam problem – link.

Storm worm gains strength, creating the most robust botnet yet – link

Microsoft has filed a patent that threatens to breathe life into the Windows Live “vision”, unveiled in November 2005, for putting annoying, in-your-face internet adverts inside your most important Windows applications – link.

Miscellaneous

The Family Guide to Digital Freedom June 2007 now available – link.

Teach yourself celestial navigation – link.

On the impermanence of proprietary data formats – link.

FSF celebrates release of GPLv3 – link. The conclusion of the GPLv3 process – link.

An interview with Larry Lessig student and pioneering embedded Linux company Lineo employee Matt Asay – link.

A report from O’Reilly’s 2007 annual OSCON 2007, which stands nearly alone in the U.S. as a conference that spans across all of the open-source world – link.

IBM visionary Irving Wladawsky-Berger retires, shares his thoughts – part 1, part 2.

IBM pledges patent peace for interoperability – link.

Medwiki is a multilanguage wiki about Medicine and human health driven by Linux – link.

Google not evil, just arrogant – link.

15 uses for WD-40 – link.

Business

Dot-com work culture making a comeback? – link.

Easy TV Data promises TV listings for Myth TV users – link.

Behind the Apple vs. Universal breakup – link.

Craiglist part-owner eBay launches Craigslist rival – link.

Open source and the “Xen” of Xen 3 – link.

Open source is changing how companies make software and how they sell it – link.

Red Hat beats estimates and doubters – link. Red Hat High introduces junior high school students to free software tools – link.

Serial entrepreneurs find migrating from Microsoft to OSS “a no-brainer” – link.

Microsoft’s “big win” in China – link.

Linus explains why open source works – link. FOSS and the philosophers – link.

Academia’s Open Access movement mirrors FOSS community – link.

“Open source business model” takes on a new meaning with the Open Business Foundation – link.

The Internet

Nielsen revamps system for measuring website popularity, emphasizing how long visitors spend on websites, rather than page-views – link.

Where are your site visitors? GeoIP knows – link.

Speeding up the net - is it possible? – link.

How to mash together the ultimate search engine – link.

Telecommunications

The Skype outage – link.

Another telco says municipal WiFi is OK only if it is providing it – link.

Is SunRocket, the 2nd-biggest independent VoIP company, in its death throes? – link.

A green light for free-software defined radio? – link.

The Linux-based OpenMoko phone may yet prove to be the revolutionary device that some of its backers have promised – link.