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Learning good habits in XML can make all the difference between taking advantage of the functionality offered by XML and struggling against the XML standard to get the basics of validation and parsing right. Discover 10 good habits that improve your effectiveness and efficiency as you work with XML documents and data.

Ok, you have to give some kudos to Windows: everyone knows what a window is. In the Linux world, KDE and GNOME aren’t quite as obvious. A gnome stands in your garden or inhabits the World of Warcraft, and KDE doesn’t even spell a word. The truth is they’re the two major window environments for Linux today; if you don’t like one type of UI you have another. Here’s what they do, how they differ and how you can bend them to your will.

Open source is said to be about scratching your particular itches - and I've been working my butt off for the last several months along with a small, select team of developers doing just that. All our hard work have so far resulted in a very experimental linux distribution that's definitely not ready for users yet (or even developers) but does have quite a few interesting ideas and features.

Since the introduction of AMD's new Linux OpenGL driver and their open-source strategy running in parallel, the past few months have been especially exciting for ATI Linux users and the Linux graphics scene in general. To many Linux users, ATI graphics have went from being a name synonymous with problems and poor 3D performance to being an open-source crown jewel that has set a precedence in the industry by releasing their GPU register documentation, but at the same time continuing to develop their high-performance proprietary driver for users interested in the best performance and enabling all of the bells and whistles on their graphics card.

I've been using Linux full-time instead of Windows since July, 2006. After happily using SimplyMepis Linux for 15 months, I switched to using Debian Linux full-time in December, 2007, after I installed Debian Etch (KDE) for the very first time. I carefully documented that entire installation and its subsequent configuration in My Debian Adventure. Since then, I've been very happily using Debian Etch, the "Stable" branch of the Debian family of distros. Once I experienced Etch's rock-solid performance, I was never even tempted to delve into the newer Debian Lenny (Testing branch) or Debian Sid (Unstable branch), even though those other branches had newer Linux kernels and software versions. All of that changed yesterday. Now I'm using Debian Lenny and I probably won't go back to using Etch. This article explains why, and describes my Debian Adventure with Lenny.

First through the Eee PC and now through its PC motherboards, Asus is rapidly carving a global reputation for itself as the company which knows how to take Linux mainstream. The question is will including the minimalist cut-down version of Linux called Splashtop on a million motherboards a month finally bring on the Linux desktop age or has it made the desktop redundant?

In this corner, the challenger, the former executive director of MIT’s Media Lab, software guru, now with Sugar Labs, the champion of Linux, Walter Benderrrrr! And in this corner, the champion, the co-founder of MIT’s Media Lab, best-selling author, founder and chairman of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), the hardware champion, Nickolas Negropont-eeee! All right, let’s get ready to stumbleeeeee!

A new advocacy group, the Public Software Foundation (PSF), is working to make free and open source software available to local libraries so it can be checked out and used just like a book or video. The premise is simple: hand out one CD and maybe you've taught one person; make it available in a library and perhaps you'll reach hundreds or thousands.

The man who once was the president of OLPC, the initiative to provide “one laptop per child” to some of the world’s poorest and digitally divided children, has joined Sugar Labs. Why? To do what Nicholas Negroponte won’t – providing open source opportunities for learning, instead of being just another laptop seller.

I was resolved not to write another Unixfication story until I had more concrete news of Sun and Linus actually working together, and filed it away under “Maybe”. Like many of the speculative peices I write, it was a thought exercise with the objective of “shaking the tree” so to speak.

With Fedora 9, the Fedora project continues its tradition of being the most innovative major distribution, combining new applications from other distributions as well as its own inventions. However, in no other release has Fedora walked the line between leading edge and bleeding edge so precariously. At times, as with its updating of subsystems and its selection of desktop software, Fedora 9 manages to innovate without inconveniencing users. But, in other cases, most notably in the changes to package installation, the project has chosen innovation over usability.

Draw is probably the most under-estimated of the OpenOffice.org applications. Either users seem to expect it to be equivalent to the GIMP or Visio, or they fail to see its desktop publishing possibilities -- but in all cases they are disappointed. Probably, that explains why the OpenOffice.org Extensions page has only a handful of Draw extensions. It may also explain why some of the few that are available are limited in functionality and awkward to use, and almost all seem to still be in heavy development.

Mozilla has pushed out the initial release candidate of Firefox 3 for download. The new Firefox code of the firm’s increasingly popular web browser is available in 45 languages as a public preview for developers, as well as anyone else who fancies tinkering around with Internet Explorer’s closest rival. Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for nearly three years.

Openbravo, maker of open source ERP (enterprise resource planning) and POS (point of sale) platforms, has secured $12 million in new funding. The VAR Guy traded email with Manel Sarasa, CEO of Openbravo, for his thoughts on the funding. Here’s a look at the email exchange.

"This time around, we have 60+% of the changes in drivers, notably drives/video and drivers/media, with some infiniband, networking and usb lovin' to fill things out," began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.26-rc3 kernel. "The rest is (as usual) mostly arch updates," he continued, "this time mostly mips, m68k and uml." Linus noticed that Linux kernel development has been managed with git now as long as it was managed with BitKeeper, a little over three years for both tools. He explained, "the most striking difference has nothing to do with git or BK (the switch-over timing was just the reason I decided to take a look), but with the fact that we're not just continuing to develop, but we're developing faster and with more people,"

LXer Feature: 19-May-2008

This article focuses upon testing the reliability user input at the lowest level. The first line of defense is use of automated searches that might detect malicious inputs. Personally I wish there were a better option. Being realistic, we are confronting coders with superior skills that have added advantage of surprise, stealth and economic incentives. Whereas we are reactive to new or suspected threats as they arise or worse discovered later.

If you have more than one Debian or Ubuntu Linux machines in your home or office, you know that when you upgrade them you have to download the same file twice, resulting in a waste of bandwidth, and more important TIME!. Well that should not be that way, you may use apt-cacher which is a .deb package proxy that will take care of the versions of the downloaded files, and keep the latest in the disk for your upgrades.

msort is a tool for sorting text files. With both a command-line and graphical interface, it allows you to pick out where your sort keys are in a file and lets you select how to order those keys in a number of ways. Compared with the GNU sort program that is installed on most Linux systems, msort offers more flexibility in defining where your sort keys are and how to order them, as well as great internationalization support with full support for UTF-8, the ability to sort a file using different locales for different sort keys, and support for numbers in non-Western number systems.

Free software users rarely, if ever, need to be concerned about the license that governs the applications they use. Unlike developers or distributors, users are unlikely to pay attention to whether a program is released under a BSD, GPL, or some other license—not so with proprietary software. If Blizzard Entertainment has its way, it could get a whole lot worse, with proprietary vendors controlling the behavior of its users and enforcing it by way of the Copyright Act.

Ubuntu, the popular Linux distro that seems to be on the doorsteps of mainstream acceptance, gets better and better with each release. Their latest release 8.04 (Hardy Heron) is certainly no exception and in fact is their most polished release to date. Hardy Heron is the second ever “LTS” (long term support) release from Ubuntu which entails 3 years of support for desktop versions and 5 years of support for server versions. With that in mind, it seems the developers from Ubuntu concentrated squarely on stability for Hardy Heron.