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NewsForge.com regrets to report that our freelance contributor Michael M. Murphree, 41, died Monday, October 17, as a result of a heart attack. Michael worked as a system administrator and held Level 2 certification from the Linux Professional Institute. A devoted family man, he also enjoyed writing children's fiction, woodworking, and building computer systems for the less fortunate.

Last month I spent an intense five days learning the ins and outs of the PostgreSQL database management system at the Big Nerd Ranch, a teaching and consulting company based in Atlanta which specializes in Mac OS X and Unix. The "Big Nerd Ranch Way" removes you from your normal environment to Historic Banning Mills, a beautiful resort southwest of Atlanta, where your only concern is learning. Founder and alpha nerd Aaron Hillegass and his staff offer a series of innovative courses taught by world-class professionals.

In the usual course of business, Inveneo provides information and communication technology for remote villages in places such as Uganda. But after Hurricane Katrina hit the US south coast at the end of August, the company went to Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, to set up a communication system for relief workers, who needed to be able to talk to each other and coordinate relief supplies for local residents.

There are many kinds of Linux-related books. Some instruct readers on design philosophies and programming principles, others are "beginner" books written in layman's terms, and then there are administration and security guides. Linux in a Nutshell, 5th Edition is a desk reference -- not something you'd read cover-to-cover, and you wouldn't want it to be your only source of Linux-related information, but it's handy to have around if you use the GNU/Linux operating system on a regular basis.

Earlier today we posted an article about the dispute between the Debian Project and the former Debian Common Core Alliance, now known as the DCC Alliance. Before press time we had not received a response from DCCA leader Ian Murdock, the founder of Progeny. Now we have.

A recent bus trip and tour of Oregon State University's Open Source Lab (OSL), and its cavernous collection of "the most important racks in open source," had political and technological progressives sitting side by side.

Lacking permission from the Debian project to call itself Debian anything, the Debian Common Core Alliance has agreed to change its name to the recursive DCC Alliance, but, according to Debian, has so far refused to remove Debian's logo from its own logo or issue any formal press release about the change or why it took place.

Poor communication and tension between information technology (IT) staff and its internal customers is a common problem for many organizations. In some instances, strained relationships keep IT from moving the organization forward. One possible approach to smoothing things out is to employ a neutral third party -- an IT ombudsman.

Squid is a free caching proxy server that runs on Linux and many other operating systems. Many Linux users who have used Squid have taken advantage of its simple setup, and ignore or overlook its advanced features. Here's an introduction to some of those features and how to use them.

The Tor project, which designs tools for anonymous Internet communications, is running a public user interface design contest in two phases. Phase one will select designs for the new GUI Tor, while phase two will choose among the best implementations. A panel of top-caliber judges from the network security and human-computer interaction worlds will select the winners, and qualifying entrants will receive a free Tor T-shirt from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

Attendees of the first ever Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) in Portland, Ore., last week heard about how the thinking and approach of government agencies must change to gain the cost-savings and other advantages of open source software. The event, which drew more than 200 open source business people, government officials, and consultants, also featured debate on whether open source software communities and businesses, too, must change their thinking and approach to gain the benefits of government business.

The Free Standards Group (FSG) announced the Linux Standard Base (LSB) Desktop Project today. The goal of the project is to spur widespread adoption of Linux on the desktop by providing a standard application runtime for vendors to target when writing applications for the Linux desktop. Participating in the project are Adobe, Intel, IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Linspire, Trolltech, and several other companies and organizations.

As cross-platform development grows, programmers are turning toward open source tools that are not tied to a single platform. Even Windows development is drifting toward open source, as more .Net developers look to tools such as Mono and PHP to develop software for the Microsoft platform.

With a customer list that includes Opera, Skype, German Brockhaus Encylopaedia, Google Earth, Adobe Photoshop Album, and the KDE Project, Trolltech is obviously a successful company. It has grown each year since it was founded by selling products that compete with free-of-charge alternatives such as Java and .Net. It now sponsors several free software developers who share all of their work with the community under the GPL. Let's take a closer look at a company that makes money from free software.

We've all heard the hype about how Sun and Google may someday, somehow, produce a version of StarOffice or OpenOffice.org that you'll access online through your browser instead of installing an office suite on your hard drive. Even though I think "The Network is the Computer" makes a fine marketing slogan, I am still going to keep most of my software where it belongs: on my own computer. Here are three reasons why.

Check Point Software Technologies and Sourcefire have a history of working together, but last week's announcement that Check Point plans to acquire Sourcefire has some open source users a bit nervous.

Blizzard Entertainment, maker of the popular Warcraft and Diablo videogame titles, handed opponents of reverse engineering perhaps their most potent weapon to date last month when the US 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in its case against open source software developers who had created BnetD, an application that emulated Blizzard's Battle.Net and let gamers connect with each other outside of the company's servers.

Welcome to this year's 42nd issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The timely release of Ubuntu Linux 5.10 and its sister distributions last Thursday was the event of the week - this issue naturally starts with a closer look at "Breezy Badger". We'll also investigate wireless network configuration on SUSE Linux 10.0, feature the unusual, Slackware-inspired Kate OS distribution, and ask why the otherwise Linux-friendly Google has expended so little effort to make Google Earth available on our preferred operating system. Happy reading! Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch

We're all about security this week. Not the security you get from being all wrapped up in a baby-blanket, coddling, gratuitous GUI, but the kind that comes from knowing who is connected to your machine, and why. Trojan Scan is a simple but effective tool that monitors connections and alerts you to unauthorized activity of the sort that a rootkit, trojan, or other bad-to-the-bone-ware might engage in. Jump down out of that hi-tech hammock you're in and let's take a look.

Reacting to fears that the avian flu outbreak recently reported in Turkey could spread to Linux, anti-virus vendor Horton AV has released what it calls an effective vaccine.