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Software developers using Borland's soon-to-be dumped integrated development environments (IDEs) are being sized up by the competition. Sun Microsystems and REAL Software are working separately to persuade JBuilder and Delphi developers to switch to their application development tools.

This week, security advisories included updates for several packages including GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG), pdfkit.framework, TUTOS, GPdf, Heimdal, GNU tar, OpenSSH, and more. Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandriva, SUSE, and Ubuntu were among the vendors issuing advisories. Red Hat and FreeBSD did not issue security advisories this week.

Last week, we covered the official ACCESS Linux Platform (ALP)--aka Palm Linux--announcement at the 3GSM World Congress event.

PalmInfocenter now has some screenshots of ALP running on a device. ALP isn't planned to be released to manufacturers until later this year, but I think it is encouraging to see it at least running a couple Linux applications right now on an existing device--the Haier N60 phone being sold in China.

Discover the versatility and power of the X Window System.

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In a previous article, I covered the basics of awk and presented a small application to reformat address book data. Now, I'll show you how to turbocharge awk. You can improve the performance of your awk programs by uncovering bottlenecks in your code with the help of a profiler, hunting for bugs with XREF, and using Awka to increase speed.

The Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa last night formally adopt its constitution and elected a new council to take the organisation forward for the next to years.

Entrepreneur and Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth yesterday hit out at the African telecoms sector saying the existing monopolies in the sector were not able to deliver effective and affordable bandwidth to the continent. He urged national regulators to unbundle their wired networks and develop competitive strategies to improve broadband access to Africans.

Kicking off the Open Source Business Conference, Jonathan Schwartz formally unveiled the roadmap for Sun's OpenSPARC[TM] initiative - the open source project for Sun's innovative T1 processor - and declared it will be licensed under the GPL.

Is Dell is on its way to becoming the first tier-one PC vendor to offer a mainstream business Linux desktop to US customers? It's starting to look that way. [Ed: Yes and they will start using AMD CPUs real soon. Don't hold your breath on either -bstadil]

Congress may have failed to take into account Microsoft's special effects department. Instead of focusing on the movies, this might turn out as reality TV. Have you heard about the case of the disappearing email?

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In the end, I can honestly say that Ubuntu seems to be worthy of much of it's hype. It really is a solid, reliable and easy to use desktop Linux. Once the installer has been simplified and if the Ubuntu team addresses the multi-media issues, it may well be worthy of all of the hype. And I still stand by my original view that it is easily one of the best Gnome implementations I have encountered.

Microsoft is accusing the European Commission (EC) of denying it a fair defense in its long-running anti-trust case, so officials could nip off early for their Christmas holls.

That's just one of the claims Microsoft is laying at the door of the EC - a fact learned today after Redmond took the unprecidented step of publishing confidential documents and correspondence used in the case. Microsoft has also accused EC regulators and prosecutors of tardiness, laziness, acting illegally, and of a brazen desire to encourage cheaper knock-offs of Microsoft products.

Opinion: Dell may be splitting hairs by offering a Linux workstation that looks a lot like a desktop. In the process, it may be giving desktop Linux a boost.

The Service Location Protocol (SLP) is an Internet Standard RFC and software framework that allows networking applications to discover and configure network services. You can use SLP to develop zero-configuration applications and simplify administration of networked devices. This article introduces SLP and its architecture, and then demonstrates the protocol's use with an open source implementation.

MyDNS is a domain name server designed to work with an external SQL database, specifically MySQL or PostgreSQL. The most recent version of MyDNS was released last month, but I've been using it for quite some time for my own domains, and have set it up on other servers for a few other folks as well. It's reliable, stable, and easy to administer.

Radio stations to archive programs as podcasts for the same reason newspapers and magazines should save stories as Web pages. Especially since it's so darn easy. And help is so handy. (Hint, hint.)

Until now, the action on ODF vs. the Microsoft XML Reference Schema has focused on Massachusetts. In the last two days, however, the supporters of ODF have launched an offensive in Europe - making it now a two-front war

Blue Flame Data is a consumer preferences data aggregator and analysis firm based in New York City. The company provides a Web application that presents consumers with a game-like interface that collects information about their likes and dislikes on a variety of products and services. Blue Flame custom configures the interface and the resulting data for its corporate customers. Until recently, all of Blue Flame's database and Web servers were running on Solaris and Sun hardware. Now, with the help of Rackspace, the company is nearing the end of a companywide migration to Linux.

Bristol is one of the largest cities in the United Kingdom. Recently, the city council reviewed its software policies and needs and decided to switch to open document formats by using Sun's StarOffice, based on OpenOffice.org. Jono Bacon recently interviewed Gavin Beckett, architect of the strategy, to discover how and why the migration was successful.

While working on a Java Server Faces (JSF) project recently, I had the pleasure of using Facelets for the first time. What I most liked about Facelets was that it let me create reusable composition components.