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Open source stacks such as XAMPP from Apache Friends are simplifying open source development by making it easier to write and distribute applications in a stable and standardized environment. Traditionally, AMPP -- Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl -- have all been installed and configured as separate products. The trend of combining them into integrated middleware stacks promises to make open source development more competitive with J2EE application development, at least for low-end applications.

PHP Development Team would like to announce the immediate release of PHP 4.3.10 and 5.0.3. These are maintenance releases that in addition to non-critical bug fixes address several very serious security issues.

Did he or didn't he? A cracker identifying himself as "ChineseSpyBoy" has been contacting news organizations -- including NewsForge -- the past day or so claiming to have broken into McAfee Inc. corporate servers and providing screen shots as evidence. McAfee says he did not break into their boxes but that he did compromise a partner's machine.

Once the hallmark of a laid-off dot-commer, the job title "consultant" is now legitimately paired with "Linux." Linux consultants, often called in to supplement the in-house staff of large corporations, are also finding fertile ground in the growing number of small businesses seeking powerful and cost-effective IT solutions that let them compete with bigger firms.

Open Sense Solutions LLC has launched a Linux-friendly multi-user PC unit that will support up to three users simultaneously, using any one of three distinct mice, keyboards, or monitors to access the same desktop software.

Phillip Lougher announced the release of SquashFS 2.1, a compressed read only filesystem. Significant speedups were achieved in this new version by indexing directories and sorting them alphabetically. To highlight this improved performance, Phillip offered some benchmark comparisons between SquashFS 2.0, SquashFS 2.1, zisofs, and Cloop. Other improvements include an increase in the maximum directory size from 512 KB to 128 MB, and up to a 25% performance increase in the mksquashfs utility.

Worldwide Market for Packaged Software on Linux Projected to Reach $14 Billion by 2008

During the past week at OSDir.com we kept our hands full, doing screenshot tours of Caos CentOS 3.3, OpenOffice.org 1.1 Draw, BeatrIX Linux November 04, Mandrakelinux 10.1 Official, and UHU-Linux Live 2.2. Be sure to head over and have a look.

A complete listing of our Linux and Open Source screenshot tours is here: shots.osdir.com.

As takeup of Mozilla's open source browser continues to increase, the group is to take out another ad in The New York Times, which it says will contain something unexpected

Connecting road warriors with a full-blown open-source VPN solution. If your company has people on the road, such as sales or technical people, a VPN is a good method for letting them access data on the company network. Many different VPN solutions can be bought, but many are free. Here, I discuss only solutions you can set up without buying a commercial VPN product.

db4objects, Inc., the company that produces the object-oriented database engine called db4o, last week released it under the terms of the General Public License (GPL). CEO Christof Whittig hopes that the release of the database engine as open source will encourage embedded applications developers to give it a try. It's a big move for a company that earlier this year listed the price of its source code at $40,000.

O'Reilly sub-titles this excellent book, "Beating the 0-Day Vulnerability Threat". But, author Bill McCarty gives readers the best summary of the Linux security model you may ever find.

Among open-source users, "Only 7 percent of companies work with multinational open-source software providers such as Novell or Red Hat, while most of the rest train their employees or hire independent professionals," Trends Consulting director Raul Bauer was quoted as saying.

Linux Bangalore/2004, India's biggest tech-fest for free and open source software was held in Bangalore, the country's IT hub, last week. Attendees from many countries got to see more than 80 presentations delivered by 62 speakers in a span of three days.

Linux Client Migration Cookbook A Practical Planning and Implementation Guide for Migrating to Desktop Linux

A new study has found that Linux is more secure than most commercial software -- results that echo what its proponents have long said. A four-year study released today by Coverity, reports Linux has a low bug count, making the code more stable and secure. The 2.6 Linux production kernel, now being shipped with software from Novell and other Linux vendors, contains 985 bugs in 5.7 million lines of code, far below the industry average, said Seth Hallem, Coverity's CEO.

The number of female developers working on Debian is set to rise in the next few months thanks to the work of Debian Women

Novell's newest Linux certification has broken into the Top 10 "Hot Certs" for 2005, an annual ranking of technical certifications by CertCities.com, a leading certification publication.

An extensive review using a source-code analysis tool finds that the Linux 2.6 kernel has 0.17 bugs per 1,000 lines of code, compared with the 10 to 20 bugs per 1,000 lines generally found in commercial software packages.

Zinside (with the appropriate slogan "the Zen side of computing") announces the debut of the Zen Box server, a 100% open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange(c) and Lotus Domino(c). The French company uses an accessible and revolutionary approach to the server industry, which is frequently considered as too technical and is often dreaded by end users.