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Learn how to build a self-contained, deployable embedded Apache Derby database application. In this article, the last one in this series, you map database tables into Java classes, write Data Access Objects (DAOs), and combine them with your business logic classes into a complete database application.

There are very few who will disagree that the best way to learn something is to do it. The concept behind the Street Smarts series is simply that if you perform a task related to a certification exam objective, you will be far more capable and knowledgeable than if you simply read about it.

Finding an addictive computer game on a Friday evening can be dangerous. Instead of doing things you have been promising your wife, you spend the weekend in front of your computer playing the game and trying to explain that "this is for work." This is exactly what happened to me when I discovered Battle Tanks. Battle Tanks is an arcade-style game, where you drive a tank, pick up weapons, and blast enemies. While this doesn't sound like a particularly original concept, it's the implementation that makes the game so much fun to play.

It was time for a new computer for my Grandparents. Their ancient Windows 98 PC had become so slow that it was unusable. The replacement, an inexpensive Acer PC, came with Windows Vista preinstalled. It was up to me to set up the new computer and support it. So I decided to wipe out Vista with a Debian 4 base install and set up an easy to use environment for my Grandparents. In this multi-part series I will tell you about how I did it, starting with my reasons for choosing Linux over Vista.

Foreword: Today's nascent robotics market has engendered about 10 general purpose software development frameworks, including nine that support Linux. This article surveys seven of them, before wrapping up with an analysis of market trends likely to shape the robotics software landscape of tomorrow.

The KDE centric distribution Ark Linux has announced the 2007.1 release, which includes KDE 3.5.7, the newly released Amarok 1.4.7, much better support for encrypted wireless connections out of the box, in addition to a large number of updates to software and drivers. This will be the last release with KDE 3, from the announcement: "The Ark Linux team already has plans for KDE 4 and Ark Linux 2007.2, one of our goals is to integrate KDE 4 as deeply into the system as we can; for example by rewriting our hotplug system to integrate with KDE's 'Solid' and using KDE 4 to give the user immediate access to a newly plugged in device."

“Howdy. My husband is Chester Gnull and I’m Laverta Voyd, and I’m the lady to light a way for all you sweethearts out there who do fancy stuff with Linux. Me and my husband’s gonna be bringing you tech tips just about every month now….I don’t know nothing about Linux. Chester, he’s the smart one…”

We interviewed Chris Fernandez, of the Binary Freedom project to find out what they are doing to defend digital freedom.

Admins with the Gentoo Project say they have disconnected major parts of its website a week after discovering it could be vulnerable to a command injection attack that allows bad guys to remotely execute code on the machine. At time of writing, users trying to access Gentoo Archives and at least seven other areas of Gentoo.org got a message saying they were unavailable. Gentoo pulled the server hosting the sections "to prevent further exploitation and to allow for forensic analysis," according to Gentoo's homepage.

Desktop operating systems numbers, even when gathered by top research companies, such as IDG and Gartner, are often a bit fuzzy. When it comes to uncommon desktop operating systems, like Linux, the numbers often amount to little more than an educated guess. Now, a new open-source program, statix, promises to give accurate data on how many Linux desktops are actually in use.

Wind River's stock price rose significantly when the rumour came out that IBM would be interested to acquire Wind River. Earlier IBM was not that interested in Linux based operations as the company had its own operating systems but IBM has now moved toward Linux and according to industry sources the acquisition of Wind River would be suitable for IBM.

Pardus Linux is funded by the Turkish government. With the support from the government, I hope that Linux and open source software would be given more emphasis by the newly elected Turkey government. As Microsoft Windows is the dominant operating system in Turkey, I hope that this relatively new desktop-centric Linux distribution (Pardus) will slowly capture a portion of the desktop operating system market share and thus release the Turkish people from the grip of Microsoft Windows. Actually, I decided to review Pardus Linux 2007.2 when I got to know of its security model that has raised many eyebrows. Another 2 reasons were the very gratifying wifi experience and of course the Pardus Linux's innovations.

Open source innovator and SNORT creator, Sourcefire, Inc., today announced that it has acquired ClamAV, a leading open source gateway anti-virus and anti-malware project. Sourcefire's first acquisition since its Initial Public Offering in March 2007, ClamAV will broaden the company's open source footprint while providing the technology foundation for new products and services that will extend the company's Enterprise Threat Management network security portfolio. Under terms of the transaction, Sourcefire has acquired the ClamAV project and related trademarks, as well as the copyrights held by the five principal members of the ClamAV team including project founder Tomasz Kojm. Sourcefire will also assume control of the open source ClamAV project including the ClamAV.org domain, web site and web site content and the ClamAV Sourceforge project page.

I use RT as a request/bug tracker, but until recently hadn’t set it up with an email address plugged directly into it. This was because I don’t run my own email server - that’s centralised - which makes setup a bit more difficult. And undocumented, hence this post. Convincing users to use a different email address may well be tough, but at least you yourself can start bouncing relevant emails to the RT address, thereby creating a more trackable system. There are 2 basic steps: 1. setting up the mail gateway to RT; 2. mail pickup from the external central server. Note that I’m using exim4 - other mail programs will obviously work differently. These are the details...

IT shops the world over are continuing their inexorable march: They're jettisoning legacy Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Sparc systems running Solaris and moving to commodity Intel or AMD-based x86 systems. And now Transitive Corp. is here to help with its QuickTransit application migration software, the most popular version of which transfers Sparc-based systems onto x86 servers.

Open source moves at a different speed to commercial software. This has become apparent over the last decade as Linux and its Open Source fellow travelers (Apache, Open Office, MySQL, Firefox et al) gradually established their position in the software world. It may have been frustrating for the Open Source activists, more vocal than numerous, who had been hoping for more instant gratification than the software market delivered. Nevertheless Linux and many of its associated Open Source products continued their forward march.

Linux started out on desktops and servers, but has now shipped on about 20 million mobile phones. Ever wonder how it made the jump? In a new whitepaper, embedded industry pioneer Jim Ready offers a concise technical retrospective on Linux's transition into a mobile phone OS. Ready credits semiconductor vendors, embedded Linux providers, and the open source community with helping to make Linux the powerhouse it is today in the mobile phone market. Other factors include Linux's horizontal, vendor-neutral nature and customizability, and "Moore's Law," which over time has resulted in processors powerful enough and memory inexpensive enough to make Linux practical in mobile devices.

As I was getting ready for LinuxWorld, I went around booting Knoppix on everything I could get my hands on, and all the Dells I tried from other people at the office all worked fine. The deal was sealed when the D620 of the last post arrived and worked so well. It was time to try Linux on the Dell C400.

In this tutorial I will describe how to install and configure mod_deflate on a lighttpd 1.4 web server on Debian Etch. mod_deflate is included by default in lighttpd 1.5, but not in 1.4 where mod_compress is used instead. The advantage of mod_deflate over mod_compress is that it can compress static and dynamic files (such as PHP files), whereas mod_compress can compress static files only. The lighttpd version coming with Debian Etch is 1.4.13, so we have to patch it to support mod_deflate. mod_deflate allows lighttpd to compress files and deliver them to clients (e.g. browsers) that can handle compressed content which most modern browsers do. With mod_deflate, you can compress HTML, text or XML files to approx. 20 - 30% of their original sizes, thus saving you server traffic and making your modem users happier.

No other hardware nowadays supports GNU/Linux as weakly as wireless network adapters. Between the constant release of new models and major vendors who are uninterested in supporting the operating system, free drivers for wireless cards are next to impossible to reverse engineer. Nor can you find many retailers willing to customize laptops as readily as they do workstations. In this situation, ndiswrapper and the Broadcom firmware cutter provide a functional, if not always satisfactory, solution.