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The OpenOffice.org development team has released the second beta of the forthcoming OpenOffice.org 3.0 office suite. The latest beta includes a number of new features that will make the wait for 3.0 worth it. The final version of OpenOffice.org 3.0 is expected to be released in September.

There is a sizeable amount of free video software available on the Linux platform which is both fully featured and mature. Become a digital video editing master, turn your Linux machine into a Home Theatre box are two avenues that are explored in this article.

Want to get an idea of what speed advantage adding an expensive hardware RAID card to your new server is likely to give you? You can benchmark the performance difference between running a RAID using the Linux kernel software RAID and a hardware RAID card. My own tests of the two alternatives yielded some interesting results. In testing both software and hardware RAID performance I employed six 750GB Samsung SATA drives in three RAID configurations -- 5, 6, and 10. I measured performance using both Bonnie++ and IOzone benchmarks. I ran the benchmarks using various chunk sizes to see if that had an effect on either hardware or software configurations.

Your YouTube viewing history is safe from the prying eyes of Viacom and the other companies suing Google, at least for now. Despite a recent court order backing a Viacom demand for YouTube to hand over complete user viewing history records, Viacom and its confederates have partially backed off.

Red Hat VP and Assistant General Counsel Rob Tiller has publicly posted the terms of the patent agreement he helped to negotiate last month with Firestar Software, Inc. and DataTern Inc. The general idea behind Tiller's post is to be transparent about the deal - the only problem in my simplistic view is that it's missing some very key information about money.

This document describes how to install a Proftpd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota with this setup.

Thank you so much for releasing Flash Player 10 beta 2 for Linux. Thanks even more for (finally) building in support for video4linux2 Webcam technology. You have no idea how much we appreciate that. The only problem is that many (if not most) of us can't use it. You see, it crashes our browsers within seconds.

Over the weekend we had posted our synopsis of Solaris Express Community Edition Build 93, which brings a great deal of needed changes to the Solaris Nevada code-base in order to bring its packages up-to-date. While OpenSolaris 2008.05 is only two months old, work at Sun is already underway in preparing for the second OpenSolaris release, which will be known as OpenSolaris 2008.11 and has been codenamed Jericho. OpenSolaris development packages for this next release, which are currently based upon Solaris Nevada Build 93, are now available through an IPS update along with early ISO spins.

Many LinuxInsider readers are probably familiar with OpenMoko's FreeRunner -- the new Linux-based cell phone. This smartphone uses the Linux kernel along with various other free and open source software packages, including X.org Server with Matchbox window manager. This phone is so open source that you can get scans of the hardware off the Web site, but OpenMoko is just the tip of the iceberg.

Two days ago I reviewed Xfe, a pretty good file manager built using the FOX toolkit, so today I'll continue in the same fashion by reviewing with PCMan FM, a GTK file manager with a simplistic interface and basic features.

QNAP's TS-409U is an excellent centralized storage solution that not only requires minimal setup and maintenance, but runs embedded Linux and software RAID 0, 1, 5, and 6. BIOSLEVEL.com looks at the unit's performance and value.

It's been a slow distro week, but not completely dead. We've had a few releases, several developmental releases, and a bit of news. We also have a guest writer with us this morning, Maurice Lawles. You might know Maurice from his TechieMoe website and hard-hitting distro reviews. Today he shares some of his thoughts on the KDE 4 situation. All this and more in this week's DistroWatch Weekly - happy reading!

Simple C program to convert binary numbers to decimal. Written to appeal to a mass audience I may not have ;) Anyone can learn to code!

How do you put a value on the products created through open source?

Malware includes not just virii, but worms, trojans and root-kits. These known and widely available tools are not the only options available to intruders either... GNU/Linux users should not have any false sense of security just based on the fact that viruses designed for exclusively for windows won't run on GNU/Linux.

Awk is a very nice language with a very strange name. In this first article of a three-part series, Daniel Robbins will quickly get your awk programming skills up to speed. As the series progresses, more advanced topics will be covered, culminating with an advanced real-world awk application demo.

On the evening of July 12, Yahoo! Inc. released a statement relating to recent discussions involving Yahoo!, Microsoft Corp., and Carl Icahn. Microsoft believes the statement contains inaccuracies that need to be corrected. Among other things, the enhanced proposal for an alternate search transaction that we submitted late Friday was submitted at the request of Yahoo! Chairman Roy Bostock as a result of apparent attempts by Mr. Icahn to have Microsoft and Yahoo! engage on a search transaction on terms Mr. Icahn believed Microsoft would be willing to accept and which Microsoft understands Mr. Icahn had discussed with Yahoo!

The study Package Management Security, to be published in a forthcoming issue of the University of Arizona Tech Report, analyzed 10 package managers and found that all were vulnerable to exploits, allowing attackers to install unsafe software on target systems. Package managers are designed to automatically keep software up-to-date and thus safe from known vulnerabilities. The packages analyzed in the study were APT, APT-RPM, Pacman, Portage, Ports, Slaktool, Stork, Urpmi, Yast and YUM.

A new Ubuntu-based Linux distribution has arrived, aimed at both Linux newbies and content creators. Boasting "out of the box" multimedia codecs, the freely downloadable PC/OS incorporates the lightweight XFCE desktop, and is said to offer a similar layout to the groundbreaking, but ultimately doomed BeOS. According to a blog by chief facilitator, Roberto Dohnert, "PC/OS is designed to play videos, music, and create content on a very simplified interface and platform. That's why my two-word mission statement is 'simplified computing.'"

Google's strict code of secrecy may work fine for protecting its internal operations. But the company isn't ingratiating itself to software developers by keeping major updates to its Android mobile software platform locked away in a Mountain View dungeon. Now, even those developers once very committed to pushing Google's technology forward are thinking about abandoning Android – the most closed open platform to not yet exist.