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Open source software company Red Hat warned of a network intrusion that compromised some of the company's servers. Though Red Hat considered the advisory critical and issued updated versions of affected packages, it said that a worst-case scenario -- a hacker accessing servers used to sign Fedora or Red Hat applications distributed through their auto-update process -- did not come to pass.

Computerworld Australia is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely used programming languages. Previously we have spoken to Alfred v. Aho of [AWK fame, S. Tucker Taft on the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions, Microsoft about its server-side script engine ASP, Chet Ramey about his experiences maintaining Bash, Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame and Charles H. Moore about the design and development of Forth. We've also had a chat with the irreverent Don Woods about the development and uses of INTERCAL, as well as Stephen C. Johnson on YACC, Luca Cardelli on Modula-3, Walter Bright on D, and most recently, Brendan Eich on JavaScript.

When it comes to open source unified communications and VoIP, Digium grabs headlines. But don't overlook four other key players in the market, reports The VAR Guy.

My exhaustive (and exhausting) eight-part series on what OS to run on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt, 233 MHz Pentium II MMX, 144 MB RAM, 3 GB hard drive) spent a good deal of time on how Puppy Linux represented the best combination of quickness and out-of-the-box features of any operating system for this old, underpowered hardware. I based all of that on running Puppy 2.13. I managed to boot Puppy 4, but the relative slowness of Abiword to start had me pausing about an upgrade from 2.13. However, I discovered something about the Geany text editor that could prompt me to use word processing apps even less than I already do.

Dynamically linked shared libraries are an important aspect of GNU/Linux. They allow executables to dynamically access external functionality at run time and thereby reduce their overall memory footprint. This article investigates the process of creating and using dynamic libraries, provides details on the various tools for exploring them, and explores how these libraries work under the hood.

GlassFish is an app server project for the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) platform, and is based on source code donated by Sun and Oracle. Its servlet container employs a derivative of Apache Tomcat. We checked in with Ken Drachnik, marketing manager for open source software infrastructure products at Sun, about GlassFish and open source issues.

Flock Web browser is a new kid in the block of browsers built on the codebase of Mozilla Codebase, Needless to say, this project is powered by Mozilla. Flock web browser is built in Web2.0 and social networking as the core theme of the browser supporting Social networking, Photosharing, Bloggin, syndications.

My "first" Linux box, which spawned dozens of distro reviews and many hundreds of blog posts, was a Maxspeed Maxterm thin client that worked so well as a stand-alone PC because it was basically a mini-ITX motherboard and small power supply crammed into a thin box. I daisy-chained a few IDE data and power cables through a hole in the back of the thin client so I could hook up a CD-ROM and hard drive outside the small box. Adding a keyboard, mouse, monitor and 256MB stick of PC-133 RAM, I was ready to go.

The Kindle, Amazon’s Linux-powered electronic paper book will have at least one new version out for the 2008 holiday season. The new Kindle, however, may be marketed more for college students returning to school in January rather than for finding a place under the Christmas tree. According to a report by Andreas James, Amazon will be marketing the revised “e-book reader to college students.”

If you've read through Part I and Part II of this tutorial series, you ought to have plenty of templates and clip art for OpenOffice.org (OOo), be typing grammatically-correct papers, and know a few more tips and tricks to ease your transition from Microsoft (MS) Office. Now this part will help you perform a few tasks in OOo that were available in MS Office, just harder to figure out due to the different interface. You'll find out you can still insert WordArt (actually called Fontwork), diagrams, and page numbering in OOo documents.

This year's Google Summer of Code is drawing inexorably to its close: the first indication that season of mists and mellow fruitfulness is indeed upon us. The KOffice students are busy tying up the last threads, adding the last flourish of polish that makes all the difference before they will slake the satisfied sigh that goes with work well-done. So - what did we achieve this year? In our very best tradition, read on for an overview!

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.