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An upgrade to CrossOver Office makes the newest version of Xandros Desktop worth a look.

Even as commercial search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search grow more dominant, a new distributed search engine with the unglamorous name Grub is taking a different tack. Grub aims to take participants' unused bandwidth and CPU cycles to crawl more than 10 billion Web documents and maintain an up-to-date index of the Web.

Tech analysis: Novell's open-source release opens door to cross-platform support.

Sure, you can get on-line from a hot-spot Internet cafe or conference center. But when you're in a cold spot and want your mail anyway, try making a connection through your GSM mobile phone—no cables required.

With Sun's decision to release Project Looking Glass under the GPL, the project took the first step toward being more than a fancy trade-show demo.

2.4 stable Linux kernel maintainer Marcelo Tosatti released the official 2.4.27 kernel, unchanged from the earlier 2.4.27-rc6 release candidate. The release announcement highlighted six security issues that are fixed in this latest kernel. Read on for the full changelog.

Deploying Novell Linux desktops in the enterprise is one step closer to reality with the pending launch of the Utah-based company's software due out this Fall, according to Novell executives at LinuxWorld this week. Over the past several months Novell has been releasing updated products, merging software from their Ximian and SuSE acquisitions that help IT easily integrate and manage Linux desktops in the enterprise.

According to the roadmap, Firefox 0.9 was supposed to be feature complete, leaving the time between this and 1.0 to be dedicated to final touches. However, during the last weeks several nice enhancements have been added including a trio of new features

Continuing the series of articles previewing KDE's World Summit, aKademy (running from August 21st to 29th), Tom Chance interviewed Matthias Ettrich, the founder of the KDE project, the creator of the LyX document-processor, and an employee of Trolltech. At aKademy he will be talking about how to design intelligent, Qt-style APIs. I asked him for his thoughts about the status of the KDE project, its achievements, and what he is looking forward to in aKademy. You can read the previous interview with Nils Magnus of LinuxTag here.

Unlike the glittering spectacle of JavaOne and Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, the O’Reilly Open Source Convention hums so quietly in the catacombs of a Portland, Ore., waterfront hotel that even the hotel’s guests aren’t aware of it. Attendees drive long distances, bunk many to a room, and put their lives on hold to get here. It’s remarkable considering that, on paper, many in attendance can’t afford to be here. But they show up anyway.

The CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) is the backbone of the Perl community. It includes hundreds of modules that extend Perl in every imaginable direction: networking, directory services, XML processing, statistics, you name it. Before writing a substantial piece of new code, a seasoned Perl programmer will check CPAN to see whether an existing module can meet the need. The same holds true for users of PHP, Python, Ruby, and other dynamic languages.

Sun Microsystems President and COO Jonathan Schwartz made a dramatic debut in the blogosphere this summer. Anyone who has met Schwartz knows that he speaks passionately and persuasively about Sun technologies, and I’m looking forward to hearing more of his unmediated voice in his Weblog. One of his early posts (“Competing against a social movement”) got me thinking about how I ended up placing my IT bets on Linux (the “social movement” referred to in Schwartz’s blog) these past few years and, more importantly, where my platform commitments should lie in the future.

SAN FRANCISCO--Novell plans to release its new corporate version of Linux for desktop computers this fall, the first product to merge technology from the Waltham, Mass., company and two Linux specialists it acquired.

SAN FRANCISCO -- In 2003, much of the talk at LinuxWorld Expo& Conference was of the increasing worry about IP litigation involving Linux and Unix, especially emanating from Lindon, Utah, via The SCO Group. SCO had filed a $5 billion lawsuit the previous March against IBM, contending that Big Blue had knowingly misused and distributed SCO's Unix System V code within its AIX operating system. A lot of not-very-nice words were used last year to describe the litigation that SCO was initiating. This year, things were different; the name "SCO" was seldom heard.

Lindows, the Linux desktop software company changing its name to Linspire, lowered on Friday the expected value of its initial public offering.

As Google prepares for its initial public offering, the company seems to be more popular on the Net's back streets than on Wall Street.

The LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco this week put the spotlight on a growing opportunity for enterprise customers: the ability to integrate open source software into existing IT architectures from the data center to the desktop.

Debian is one of the fastest growing distributions of GNU/Linux, thanks in part to its Advanced Packaging Tool (APT). However, Debian is difficult to install for many new users. While many commercial projects such as Red Hat and Mandrake offer advanced hardware autoconfiguration, Debian relies on a user's knowledge of the underlying hardware. Enter Kanotix -- a bootable GNU/Linux distribution based on Klaus Knopper's Knoppix that uses mostly fresh Debian sid packages.

Google hacks are for real, regardless of what some uber-hackers may think or say. They can produce passwords, user IDs, credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, bank account numbers and routing codes, and more. They can also be used to troll for vulnerabilities. One quick example: using one of the simplest Google advanced operators in combination with another operator, I quickly found a number of Microsoft IIS 6.0 Authentication Manager pages exposed to the Internet on Army, Navy, state, and federal agency sites. In fact, finding the sites proved to be much easier than alerting them to the vulnerability.