W.I.L. Tech-News Highlights for September - December 2007

Operating Systems

EasyBCD, a freeware tool used for dual-booting Windows Vista with Linux, BSD, OS X, and Unix using Vista’s own bootloader, has been updated to version 1.7 – link.

VMware open sources VMware Tools – link.

Cheap laptops bad for Vista, good for Linux – link.

VirtualBox is the best virtualization program you have never heard of. Native XP partition not needed anymore – link.

Forrester calls desktop Linux a credible threat to Windows – link.

Linux

VirtualBox 1.5.0 for Windows and Linux marks the first time seamless windowing, the ability to display a single Windows application on a Linux desktop, is available on Linux – link.

• • Help for Linux newcomers • •

A beginner’s romp through desktop Linux – link.  •  Is Linux really ready for simple users? – link.

Xandros 4, the best desktop Linux for Windows users – review. Discussion here.

CrossOver Linux 6.2 improves Windows applications support – link.

Why the Linux Desktop will succeed despite itself – link.

It is time to retire the Linux “mom test” – link.

13 reasons why Linux should be on your desktop – link.

Preliminary survey reveals where desktop Linux is used most – link.

Simple, fast Linux box administration with Webmin – link.

Solving resource contention problems with fuser – link.

GNOME 2.20 arrives on Linux desktops – link 1 , link 2, link 3.

Expert tricks for Nautilus GNOME desktop – link.

Benedikt Meurer, a developer of the Xfce project, is interviewed – link.

The Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment: A return to basics – link.

Secrets of the man command – link.

LinuxConf Europe wrapup – link.

Run Linux apps on other platforms with LINA – link.

“My Fabulous Geek Career”, by Carla Schroder, author of the Linux Cookbook – link.

How the backup process has changed – link.

Got more than a gig of RAM and 32-bit Linux? Here is how to use it – link.

Printing trends in Linux – link.

Fontmatrix: Font management for the Linux desktop finally arrives – link.

Adding extended character support to the Linux desktop – link.

Full speed ahead for Linux drivers – link.  •  Linux driver project gets a full-time leader – link.

SquidBee is a project that uses an open hardware design and open-source software as a platform for remote control and sensing. If you are looking for a convenient way to extend the reach of your system’s peripherals, SquidBee looks like the right project for the job – link.

LessWatts.org is a site dedicated to reducing power consumption by Linux systems – link.

Open BIOSes for Linux: Modern systems need not be held back by a legacy boot process – link.

BSDs, other Unixes

PC-BSD 1.4 released – link.

NetBSD 4.0 released – link.

What Sun should do next – link.

BSD-licensed C compiler added to NetBSD, OpenBSD – link.

Windows and DOS

How to give a tired old PC (running Windows 2000 or newer) a spring clean – link.

20 tools to get the junk off your PC – link.

20 Vista downloads to tweak and improve your system – link.

New PCs come littered with demoware and ads you never asked for. How to get rid of the crud, or avoid it in the first place – link.

Vista resistance: Why XP is still so strong – link.

Windows Vista: five broken promises – link. Microsoft quietly lets Vista users revert to XP – link.

Night of the Living Vista (“I can’t think of a single reason to switch from XP to Vista. I’m not talking a good reason, I really mean any reason.”) – link.

Ballmer threatens Linux and open source with patents again – link.

VMware’s Fusion works well for running Linux (or other x86/AMD64 OSes) on the Mac desktop – link.

QNX source code released – link 1, link 2.

Applications

101 fantastic free downloads and services – link.

The Open CD project forks to OpenDisc, “a collection of high quality open source software” for Windows users. Stated goals are to provide free alternatives to otherwise costly equivalents, and to educate people about Linux – link.

Keep your laptop and PC synchronized using Unison – link.

The KDE Marble project might look like a competitor to other 3D mapping applications, like Google Earth, but it has a very different focus – link.

Two free software choices for the Neo phone – link.

The early stages of the GNU PDF project – link.

Databases

Gambas speeds database development. One cool feature of Gambas 2.0 is its ability to create a chart – link.

PhpPgAdmin is the Web developer’s client tool for Postgres – link.

Internet applications

An interview with a Mozilla evangelist – link.

Opera 9.5 alpha released – link.

A test run of Firefox 3 – link.

15 undocumented Firefox tips – link.

ChromaTabs Firefox extension renders each tab in a different color, a unique color for each site that remains the same on every visit – link.  •  Firefox extensions for tab addicts – link.

Ten Firefox extensions to keep your browsing private and secure – link.

Another day, another Firefox security fix – link.

Session Manager is a Firefox add-on for preserving the state of the window after you close the browser – link.

How to make Firefox look and feel like IE, Safari, or Opera – link.

SamePlace is a nifty IM client that runs inside Firefox, Flock, or Thunderbird, or as a standalone. It offers basic Jabber functionality and a few unique and useful features. Its layer of shared applications turns it into a powerful collaboration platform which is worth a closer look whether you use Jabber or not – link.

The fall of the POP-mail generation – link.

Eudora, used by millions of users before the bundling of Outlook into PCs rendered it roughly obsolete, just will not die – link. Qualcomm sets the record straight on Thunderbird add-on Penelope. It is not the promised open source version of Eudora – link.

Mozilla spins off Thunderbird, similar to what it once did with Firefox – link 1, link 2.

Productivity enhancers for Thunderbird – link.

Read webmail from any email client with FreePOPs, a webmail access daemon – link.

Instant messaging client Empathy has been proposed for inclusion in GNOME 2.22 – link.

Five tag management plugins for WordPress 2.3 – link.

PhpGedView lets you post your genealogy records on your Web site – link.

poMMo is a powerful Web server-based mass mailing program firmly rooted on a LAMP base – link.

Office applications

Top top five suites that took on Microsoft Office – link. Google readies PowerPoint killer – link.

OpenOffice.org 2.3 released – link.  •  OOo 2.3 impresses – link.

OOo Writer vs. Microsoft Word, round 3 – link. Round 1. Round 2.

OOo Calc vs. Microsoft Excel – link.

OOo Impress vs. MS PowerPoint, round 2, indicates that former still has a ways to go before it matches its MS Office counterpart – link.

Export OOo Writer documents into any wiki format – link.

Adding a basket (for notes, ideas, relevant links, text snippets, etc.) tool to OOo – link.

Back up and print your blog with OOo Base – link.

Using Zotero to manage OOo bibliographies – link.

Create an OOo extension the easy way with BasicAddonBuilder – link.

IBM dives into OpenOffice.org development – link 1, link 2. IBM offers its flavor of OO for free, branded as IBM Lotus Symphony – link, review.

Michael Meeks on Sun’s management of OOo – link. Novell is not forking OpenOffice – link.

Converting text files into ODF with odtwriter – link.

Kile automates the process of working with LaTeX while keeping the markup visible. This arrangement makes Kile an ideal way for beginners to learn LaTeX, as well as a convenient and efficient way for more advanced users to work with LaTeX – link.

LaTeX Beamer adds extensions to the classic LaTeX typesetting program to produce PDF presentations – link.

Create impressive charts with Open Flash Chart – link.

Chandler Desktop Project, an open source, standards-based PIM built around small group collaboration and a core set of information management workflows modeled on inbox usage patterns, version 0.7.0.1 released – link.

Knowledge Tree is an open source document management system (DMS) that helps enterprise users categorize, store, index, and share documents – link.

Version 2.9.3.0 of Buddi, a simple budgeting program targeted for users with little or no financial background, has been released – link.

Writer’s Café developers state that it is most suited for writing fiction, novels, and short stories, but you can easily use it for all kinds of writing activities – link.

Desktop-oriented applications

Is the world ready for a Web-Based desktop? Michael Robertson, founder of MP3.com and Linspire, a Linux distributor, thinks so – link.

Lessons learned from open source Xara's failure – link.

Brainstorming ideas for the GIMP’s next interface – link.

Image compression: seeing what’s not there – link.

Free and open source software (FOSS) tools to create cartoons and illustrations – link.

Open source software for architects – link.

Gogh is an extremely lightweight drawing program designed for pressure-sensitive devices. Despite its simplicity, it packs in a lot of features and a lot of fun – link.

ExifTool is a cross-platform Perl-based application that can be used to inspect and modify Exchangeable image file format (Exif) metadata from digital images – link.

No Starch Press has published The Essential Blender by members of the Blender community – link.

CellWriter is a small, straightforward handwriting recognition tool that integrates easily with modern Linux desktops – link.

A quick guide to DVD authoring – link.

LWN.net Grumpy Editor’s video journey, part 1 – link.

Kino is a video editor that allows you to produce your own video masterpieces using only free and open source software – link.

Digitizing records and tapes with Audacity – link.

Ardour is a digital audio workstation that strives to meet the needs of professional users – link.

Loop-based music composition with Linux – part 1, part 2.

Commercial sound and music software for Linux – link.

Specifying audio and video codecs for the web – link.

Download and Watch Videos with cross-platform Miro 1.0 – link.

Programming

Learn OOP while creating 3-D animations with Alice – link.

What every programmer should know about memory – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

AJAX pioneer emphasizes user experience – link.

Gobby provides group editing capability, so two or more people can edit the same document at the same time, in a collaborative fashion, with every participant getting to see all edits at the same time – link.

GCC unplugged – link.

Graphical user interface, Web

Build secure Web applications with OWASP – link.

Ver. 2.2 of P4A (PHP For Applications) released. P4A is a RAD and OO PHP framework for building event-driven stateful web applications. Features tableless HTML, accesskey, auto data type recognition, transparent AJAX, UTF-8, i18n/l10n, PEAR integration – link.

Ver. 3.0.1 of ZK announced. ZK is Ajax framework requiring little programming. Development is as simple as programming desktops and authoring HTML/XUL pages – link.

Freeing web services with Forkolator – link.

Microformats are a way to embed specific semantic data into HTML – link.

KompoZer revives Mozilla WYSIWYG Web editing software. Version 0.7.10 marks the culmination of more than a year’s work, and introduces several new features – link.

C/C++/Java family

Piecing together free java – link.

A look at the Mono Project – link.

What has happened in the year since Sun Microsystems released the source code for Java? – link.

Scripting and high-level languages

Perl creator Larry Wall discusses the history of a number of programming languages – link.

An introduction to Erlang – link.

Introduction to Lua programming – link.

Cross-platform development with Free Pascal 2.2.0 – link.

Zend Technologies is turning to application server vendors in the next phase of its work fine-tuning PHP for enterprise development – link.

Python for system administrators – link.

Python overhauls the language core, removing inconsistencies and other “warts”, without maintaining compatibility with the 2.x version. Except for unicode string handling, most of the changes are not terribly compelling – link.

Ruby on Rails releases 2.0 – link.

Security & Privacy

Eavesdropping on Tor traffic – link 1, link 2. Tor server provider arrested, released – link.

Protect your Linux box with Snort, the free intrusion detection system – link.

DDoS attacks are growing more frequent and more potent – link.

The Novell-sponsored Bandit project is a relatively new entry into the somewhat crowded digital identity space – link.

iptables as a replacement for commercial enterprise firewalls – link. Blocking specific network applications with iptables – link.

IPCop is a specialized Linux distribution whose sole purpose is to safeguard the computers and networks it is installed on – link.

Onetime Google nemesis cranks up click-fraud crusade – link.

Five of the dirtiest malware tricks – link.

Miscellaneous

Taoism of open source – link.

Meet four men who dared to fight MS and won – link.

A look at challenges to open access and open data – link.

Tech charities to consider this giving season – link.

Steve Wozniak hates open source (or at least the movement) – link.

GPLv2 and GPLv3 for beginners – link. Why GPLv3 will supplant GPLv2 – link.

Business

The flip side of Apple’s success is that Apple has started to seem scary – link. iTV is a flat-out iFlop – link.

GNU Herds: The job site with a free software focus – link.

Snowed by SCO – link. SCO, Linux and Rob Enderle – link.

FSF Europe president Georg Greve discusses the fallout from the recent EC antitrust ruling against Microsoft – link.

Red Hat faces stiff challenges to move beyond its core technology – link. Red Hat latest financial results covered – link.

Open source entrepreneur turns his hobby into an Inc. 500 enterprise, iFAX – link.

IT services consultant uses open source to offer more choices to small company clients – link.

Largo, Florida still loves Linux – link.

Amazon’s customer service number revealed – link.

The Internet

New P2P network, Tribler, uses bandwidth as currency – link.

The 10 funniest sites on the internet – link.

Facebook is a sort of corporate version of Paris Hilton, a company that is famous for being famous. Soon it will probably also be rich, though right now nobody quite knows why – link.

Teenagers are abandoning their Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts. Do the rest of us have to? – link.

Who will be the winners and losers when desktops get a 50-megabit feed? Not the ones you would expect – link.

Telecommunications

Yes, Google is trying to take over the world. Their truest and most formidable foes? Today we call them Verizon and AT&T, but their real name is the Bell system – link.