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Last week's 8th Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre (Free Software Regional Sessions) at the University of Belgrano in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was an opportunity for around 1,300 FOSS enthusiasts to share experiences, learn more, and have fun together. Newcomers and advanced users, sysadmins and developers, all learned about and discussed a wide range of issues in more than 140 sessions in three days. There were also a space for the community organizations and companies to show, talk, and advocate about their activities and products.

All of the libraries in the world can't take away from the fact that JavaScript has long been seen as something of a slowpoke. This didn't matter much when JavaScript "applications" were several dozen lines long. But when your word processor, photo editor, or photo-sharing application is written in JavaScript, you really want to be sure that the language is running at top speed.

Although open source software has gained a place in enterprise networks alongside proprietary software, it can't seem to shake doubts about security and intellectual-property issues that have long dogged the movement.

SQL injection attacks can allow hackers to execute arbitrary SQL commands on your database through your Web site. To avoid these attacks, every piece of data supplied by a user on a Web form, through HTTP Post or CGI parameters, or other means, must be validated to not contain information that is not expected. GreenSQL is a firewall for SQL -- it sits between your Web site and MySQL database and decides which SQL statements should and should not be executed. At least that's the idea -- in execution, I found some open doors.

Ok, let's get past the buzz word "optimization". It seems like just a ton of goods and services have been sold over the years, that have promised to "optimize" this or that. Working with "optimization" is like working with "synergy". It's not that the words or concepts are bad or ineffective; it's just that the terms have been overused (Anybody remember your "Inner Child"?). Let's remember that Andrew King's 2003 book Speed Up Your Site "kicked ass" back in the day and that its subtitle is "Web Site Optimization". Does lightning strike twice in the same spot? There's one way to find out. Read on.

BasKet: This notes-taking application just might be a killer application for Linux. Some say a single application won't make a person switch from one OS to another, but I disagree. Take all those threads/comments like 'I only dual-boot because of Photoshop or GTA or you name it'. On forums I also read many threads in which the authors say they switched or tried KDE just because they like Amarok or K3b (being the only KDE application they used). Or vice-versa.

In many users' eyes, a text editor should be lean and mean, fast to start up and shut down, without fancy splash screens or a graphical user interface. The choice of editor has long stirred up strong emotions. For example, the debate about whether vi or emacs (or another) is the best editor started decades before Linux was even conceived.

To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 21 high quality Linux text editors. There's a mix of graphical and console based applications included. Hopefully, there will be something of interest for all types of users.

When I wrote the first article in this series, the intent was to show how a html form could be used to transfer external input to existing web pages on the fly. By definition that is dynamic web content. This was the real goal of this series. Unfortunately, security concerns diverted my attention. To reset the balance, I had begun to rewrite the introduction, however, that corrective measure is still not complete. Despite this, I think it is more important to demonstrate the original intent. Thus, I have written this article describing the easiest method to transfer some dynamic content into active web pages.

I recently ordered a brand new PowerEdge T105 server from Dell because my current home server, a HP ProLiant G3, is much too power hungry for my liking. The new server came with an 80 GB hard disk. I partitioned it with LVM, installed Debian Lenny and moved over the bulk of my things from the old server to the new server. Only one thing remained: my media collection, which is stored on a 500 GB RAID1 array on the old server. That RAID1 array is also partitioned using LVM in a single 500 GB volume group. I wanted to move the OS volumes from the 80 GB volume group to the 500 GB volume group. That way I could take out the 80 GB disk and save some power. Problem: There is no obvious way to move a logical volume from one volume group to another. Cue SytemRescueCD.

Back in June we had looked at the Super Micro C2SBX+ motherboard, which was a workstation motherboard oriented around the Intel X48 Chipset. This was our first time reviewing a Super Micro product at Phoronix, but from the success of the C2SBX+ we decided to look at another one of their motherboards. This time around we have our hands on the Super Micro C2SEA, which is a desktop motherboard that uses the Intel G45 Chipset and provides integrated GMA X4500 HD graphics.

An overview of notebooks available in the US with Linux pre-installed.

It's not often we here at LinuxInsider get to write about celebrities -- other than the Richard Stallman variety, of course -- and indeed, many of the geeks who grace our pages from time to time seem to shun the limelight rather than seek it out. So it was with great glee this week that we found cause to mention none other than Jerry Seinfeld.

The bookmark tagging feature introduced in Firefox 3 is not particularly difficult in use: when bookmarking a Web page, enter the tags you like into the Tags field of the bookmarking dialog window and you are pretty much done. Tagging provides a more flexible way of keeping track of bookmarks than traditional folders. The folder-based system provides an "either/or"-solution to filing bookmarks. For example, you could place a bookmark for an article about installing OpenOffice.org on Puppy Linux in either a Linux or OpenOffice.org folder, but not in both. With tags, you don't have this problem: you can assign as many tags as you like, so the bookmark becomes filed under several categories at the same time.

This article describes how you can set up Apache and Tomcat, linked with mod_jk. It also explains how you set up the SSO (single sign on) solution JA-SIG CAS to protect servlets (provided by tomcat) and static content (provided by Apache). I worked with OpenSuse 10.2 and 11, Apache2, Tomcat 5.5 and 6. It should work on other distributions as well.

The second beta for Mandriva Linux 2009, code named okapi, is now available. There is information about the new release in various places:

Last week was kind of amazing -- I knew a number of things that were going to be happening at IDF but was blindsided by an announcement Intel made that could change the world as we know it. Nikola Tesla turned over in his grave, and we are one step closer to his Tower of Power. Intel also fleshed out its Atom platform, which I think forms the basis of a new class of cloud computing-based client devices.

[Lookout ahead, Rob Enderle Alert. - Scott]

It wasn't that long ago that it was impossible to find good, free open source tools for working with and viewing video. Now that video runs rampant on the web, though, there are a whole lot of applications worth getting, even if you're currently happy with your video and encoding tools. Here are eight good applications to try.

Once upon a time, a Linux distribution would be installed with a /dev directory fully populated with device files. Most of them represented hardware which would never be present on the installed system, but they needed to be there just in case. Toward the end of this era, it was not uncommon to find systems with around 20,000 special files in /dev, and the number continued to grow. This scheme was unwieldy at best, and the growing number of hotpluggable devices (and devices in general) threatened to make the whole structure collapse under its own weight. Something, clearly, needed to be done.

Two years ago, Microsoft Corp. agreed to buy $240 million worth of support vouchers for Novell Inc.'s SUSE Linux operating system as part of a controversial partnership deal between the two vendors. Now Microsoft is reaching into its pocket again, to the tune of another $100 million. The once-bitter rivals -- which are still facing off against each other in an antitrust lawsuit that Novell filed in 2004 -- jointly announced last week that Microsoft has committed to purchase up to $100 million worth of additional support vouchers from Novell, starting Nov. 1.

This week's start-off Linux/Unix bash shell script is a follow up to our previous online dictionary shell script and Thesaurus shell script. I was thinking of doing the online Encyclopedia today, but, for some reason, I got sidetracked on The BabelFish Language Translation Site. This script offers the full functionality of the original website's text translation, except I left out the HTML page translation part. I figure if you're going to translate an entire webpage, it would look a lot nicer using a regular web browser ;)