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The IBM Systems Application Advantage for Linux, also known as the Chiphopper offering, provides tools to help developers whose applications run on x86 Linux systems scrub their C/C++ code for portability prior to porting to System p, System i, or System z. Source hardware platforms for 32- and 64-bit applications are x86, EM64T, and AMD systems running Linux Standard Base (LSB) 3.x certified Linux distributions.

Translating equivalent arithmetic operations between bash, Perl and awk. Part of an ongoing series on porting code.

Traditionally, web hosts have had a difficult time offering efficient, highly secure web space for a multitude of customers. Generally, a host will provide cheap accounts on a shared server and offer virtual machines as a more expensive option for the more security-conscious site owners. In this article, Joshua Kramer will explain how to provide highly secure hosting for Python-based web applications in an efficient manner. With the popularity of applications such as Trac, Django, and TurboGears, Python-based web applications will become more prevalent in the future, and the concepts presented in this article will become more valuable.

Late last week I downloaded and installed Slackware 12.1 on my aging (OK, old) Toshiba laptop side by side with Vector Linux Light. I'll post a full review to my O'Reilly Linux Dev Center blog once I've had more opportunity to use the latest version of Slack.

My first impression: Slackware is still Slackware.

Cisco has announced an alternative to the Web-services protocol Soap--and made it open source. Cisco said its Etch messaging protocol will be more efficient than the Soap standard and the company will release the source code. A beta version of Etch will be launched this summer, as part of version 2.5 of the Cisco Unified Application Environment (CUAE). Within that environment, it will replace the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standard, Soap, said Cisco, providing a more lightweight and faster interface, suitable for real-time interaction.

I will never cease to be amazed at how fast things change and how quickly people forget. Today’s example is a Slashdot posting with the title, “Why Buy a PC Preloaded with Linux?” Specifically, the dotter—slasher really doesn’t give the right tone—wants to know “‘Why should I buy a PC preloaded with Linux?’ They are more expensive, and it’s not hard just to reformat the PC with Linux. I hate paying the Microsoft Tax as much as anybody else, but if paying that ‘tax’ allows companies to reduce my price by bundling with my PC products that I will never use, why wouldn’t I just buy a Windows-loaded PC and reformat?”

The idea of open-source hardware is slowly slowly but surely gaining traction. VIA Technologies, Inc., joined in on the fun today by unveiling an open source reference platform for low power notebooks, based on its own processor technology (obviously). The CAD files have been released under a Creative Commons license. The machine is tentatively named OpenBook.

On the eve of its first-ever developer conference, Google Inc. threw open the doors for its Google App Engine to all takers Tuesday and unveiled pricing details for the cloud-based development environment. Google's App Engine, which the company first announced in April, provides hosted dynamic Web serving, persistent storage, automatic scaling, a local development environment, and authentication and load balancing aimed at making it easier for developers to build Web applications.

As the popularity of blogs continues to rise, blogging software platforms continue to evolve. With the recent release of version 4.1, the popular Movable Type application offers improvements that allow bloggers to expand their control over the publishing process. Movable Type is professional open source blogging software developed by Six Apart, written in Perl, and released under the GNU GPL. It requires a Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl (LAMP) server or an equivalent to run, and a mail server such as Sendmail or another SMTP-capable engine. The Apache server must be configured to execute CGI scripts. To start, you can try a functional online demo.

Often, the web browser that comes with an operating system is not set up in a secure default configuration. Not securing your web browser can lead quickly to a variety of computer problems caused by anything from spyware being installed without your knowledge to intruders taking control of your computer. As a result, exploiting vulnerabilities in web browsers has become a popular way for attackers to compromise computer systems. For that reason, it is very important to take control and to decide what kind of  browser and plug-in to use. But here is the good news; Linux is already using Mozilla Firefox as a default browser. This workshop will describe how to use additional plug-ins to browse the Internet more secure but also anonymously on a Mandriva 2008 Spring client.

SystemRescueCD has been around for sometime and their latest version 1.0.3 just came out today. I take a short look at it and briefly describe some of its advantages. Checkout the short flash video at the end of the article to see SystemRescueCD 1.0.3 in action.

It seemed like such a great idea. Linux is moving from edge and departmental servers to the data center, so why not offer Linux data center automation, complete with virtualization Linux lifecycle management? Well, maybe it's still a great business idea, but Levanta wasn't able to make a go of it. Officially, there's still no word that the San Mateo, Calif.-based company is out of business, but former employees say that the company laid them off on April 1. The list of those who were fired ranges from clerical support to Madhur Kohli, the company's former vice president of engineering.

Instructions mentioned bellow in general follow up the ones in my previous post, regarding OpenSolaris 2008/05 DomU at Xen 3.2.1 CentOS 5.1 Dom0 (64-bit). However, Xen 3.2.1 Dom0 had been built on CentOS 5.1 from the source obtained by cloning Mercurial Repository@xensource.com. Install Xen on Ubuntu 8.04 had been performed from Ubuntu Repositories and the patched as usual.

Over the years, I’ve developed a generalized theory about the relative cost of getting things done in Windows versus that of Linux, and as something of a corollary, the reason a lot of people say Linux is too hard, or “not ready for the desktop.” The essence of this theory can be illustrated by a graph that I call The Difficulty Divide. You can see the graph and my theory on Works With U, a site covering Ubuntu Linux.

If your life is like mine, it's probably more complicated than it should be. There's that full time job, social events, and vacations to say nothing of various side businesses and their associated deadlines. The kids have Cub Scouts, soccer, and baseball. Since we homeschool, we have science club, field trips and play dates. And it seems that everyone we know has 2 email addresses and at least 3 phone numbers. Then there is the family budget, workout goals and the infamous Honey-Do List. This is a lot of information to keep track of.

Which Eclipse distribution is right for you? Compare the CodeGear JBuilder 2008 Turbo trial version, nexB EasyEclipse, Europa bundles, and Innoopract's Yoxo On Demand distros. Many of these Eclipse distributions already contain the plug-ins and tools you need to start working right away.

Ars tests the latest beta release of Banshee 1.0, an open-source media player for Linux. This version adds support for video content, including video podcasts.

You wouldn't know it by looking at the market today, but VIA Technologies was really the original mainstream company to be the proponent of the "mini-notebook" market that has become epitomized by the ASUS Eee PC. Last June VIA demonstrated and showed off a device called the VIA NanoBook at Computex in Taipei; essentially a very small form factor laptop with Windows XP on it. Looking at it next to the current generations of the Eee PC and you'd be hard pressed to find significant differences. The single area that VIA failed to address was actually PUSHING their devices into the market - we never really found them in the US and they never took off.

Ubuntu's deep software catalog, focus on usability and active community combine with long-term support to put desktop Linux's best face forward. Canonical has marshaled the best of what the open-source world has to offer in Ubuntu 8.04, a Linux-based operating system that's capable of mounting a serious challenge to Microsoft Windows on mainstream desktops and notebooks.

Anyone interested in writing academic and research papers knows that the process includes researching existing works, planning a research study, collecting and analyzing the results, and writing up the findings. In such papers, reference and citation information is essential. GPL-licensed Wikindx lets you store bibliographic references, quotations, and notes in a database, from which you can easily insert appropriate citations into a paper using its built-in Web-based word processor.