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While GNOME remains the Linux desktop of choice for Linux enterprise distributions, on openSUSE KDE is dominant among the user base. 70 percent of the openSUSE user base uses the KDE desktop. Though OpenSUSE 11.1 includes KDE 4.1, Novell developers actually backported a number of features from the upcoming KDE 4.2 release.

It's that time of the year again. No, not Christmas -- it's the time of the year we get the latest versions of our favorite Linux distributions. Version 11.1 of openSUSE is being released today. Designated as a point release, there are enough new goodies to warrant a new install or upgrade.

Ubuntu's default installation is pretty secure, but the wise computer user knows that security is something that requires continual attention. Fortunately, Matt Hartley shows how easy it is to keep on top of prudent security measures and useful applications: firewall, secure remote networking, anti-malware, and more.

Red Hat Inc. today unveiled a new service aimed at making it more cost-effective for its customers to run and maintain one version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a longer period of time, reducing management and administration costs, the company said. Extended Update Support (EUS), a new maintenance option, allows customers to standardize their IT environments on a version of RHEL for 18 months instead of six months, the current time frame for Red Hat's maintenance contract, said Gerry Riveros, product marketing manager for EUS.

Database relationship is hard to maintain even for a mid-sized PHP/MySQL application, particularly, when multiple levels of relationships are involved because complicated SQL queries are needed. CakePHP offers a simple yet powerful feature called 'object relational mapping' or ORM to handle database relationships with ease.In CakePHP, relations between the database tables are defined through association—a way to represent the database table relationship inside CakePHP. Once the associations are defined in models according to the table relationships, we are ready to use its wonderful functionalities. Using CakePHP's ORM, we can save, retrieve, and delete related data into and from different database tables with simplicity, in a better way—no need to write complex SQL queries with multiple JOINs anymore!

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Tuesday, December 16, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. This is episode 38. Today's stories feature a whole mess of speculation. Does Windows need a package manager a la Linux? Can Apple do small? Will USB 3.0 do Linux first? Wherefore art thou, Palm new-ness? Who stole my Linux netbook? Will you believe the truth if you heard the lie first? It's all speculation.

The first in a two-part "Eclipse's Rich Client Platform" series, this tutorial explores the basic design goals of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) and how it fits within a developer's toolkit. This tutorial also demonstrates how to construct a basic RCP application.

Let's take a look at three projects that are aimed at showing calendar information through a Web interface: WebCalendar, VCalendar, and CaLogic. These projects run on a LAMP server and provide a Web interface to calendar events. For testing when one or more calendars are required I'll use the US Holidays and UK Holidays from the publicly available iCalendar files at icalshare.com. All installation and testing was done on a 64-bit Fedora 9 machine.

John Dragoon, Novell’s Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer today announced that due to the difficult economic times, BrainShare 2009 has been cancelled. The announcement made it clear that the primary reason was that Novell’s customers “are under increasing pressure to reduce travel and other controllable expenses and are hesitant to commit to attending our BrainShare 2009 conference.”

The open source IT channel continues to grow up. The latest example: Compiere, which specializes in open source ERP and CRM, is hosting training events for VARs and solutions providers.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Linux Mint 6 (Felicia) desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. Linux Mint 6 is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu 8.10 that has lots of packages in its repositories (like multimedia codecs, Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, Skype, Google Earth, etc.) that are relatively hard to install on other distributions; it therefore provides a user-friendly desktop experience even for Linux newbies.

Adobe Systems is extending on Thursday its AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) technology to Linux desktops. Previously available for Windows and Macintosh, AIR is Adobe's free technology that enables delivery of Web applications that also can run outside the browser; it lets Flash programs run on the desktop. The Linux version of the software can be accessed here. The company is making available version 1.5 of AIR for users of the OpenSuse 10.3, Fedora Core and Ubuntu 7.10 or higher open-source Linux distributions. AIR 1.5 also has worked on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop, but the company has not tested it on this implementation of Linux.

I have recently been writing some documentation in DocBook XML format that I wanted to convert to PDF. Debian has a really useful package called xmlto that you can use for this, but it did not work for me. Instead I opted to use the DocBook-XSL stylesheets to convert DocBook to fo and use Apache fop to convert it to PDF. DocBook-XSL and Apache fop work wonderfully well but there were a couple of bumps that I had to sort out before everything worked as it should, especially regarding the Java setup and getting images to work correctly. Here is how I set up my DocBook toolchain on Debian Lenny.

On December 17th, 2008, the OpenVAS developer team released OpenVAS 2.0.0 which marks the start of the next generation of the Open Vulnerability Assessment System for network security scanning.

There's a long standing argument over the differences between "open-source" software and "free" software. But, a more common error outside of software ideology circles is that you can use open-source software anyway you please. Nope. Wrong. It's never been that way. Cisco, the networking giant, should know better than this, but they've worn out the FSF's (Free Software Foundation) patience. So, Cisco is now being sued by the SFLC (Software Freedom Law Center) on behalf of the FSF for Linux and other GPL copyright violations.

ZaReason, which makes Ubuntu PCs and notebooks, plans to launch Ubuntu servers as well. That's a small step forward Canonical's Ubuntu Server Edition. But challenges remain, reports WorksWithU, the independent guide to Ubuntu.

Linux has a strong following among those who manage corporate servers, a loyal corps of desktop users and a small but growing base of laptop users. But it's also been a big -- if stealthy -- success as a platform for gadgets. In fact, there ought to be a Linux Gadget Hall of Fame. I'll get it started with the first group of inductees: 10 of the most important gadgets of all time, each one based on Linux.

Some of us will find some kind of alleged spare time on our hands over the next few weeks. Certainly, there’s often some kind of break from “work” over the festive season. Traditionally free software developers have used such times for long coding sessions, get-togethers and “hack-fests”. Of course we’re not all hard-core (or even soft-core) hackers so here’s a few suggestions for the rest of us who might want to try something new over Christmas.

Even as the US economy collapsed this fall, Asterisk downloads rose 30 percent, according to Digium. But that's not all. The company's partner program is generating exponential growth. Here's the scoop, from The VAR Guy.

Initially setting up the XSCF facility on Sun M4000's is just as much fun as you think ;) You may have noticed (sometime in the last year or so ;) that I like to write about Sun computers and Solaris almost as much as I like to write about the many variants of Linux out there, without which I might not even have gotten interested in computing in the first place.