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Random acts of senseless violence against Linux and Unix servers have dramatically decreased recently, with the average low-value Linux box expected to last a few months before being compromised, a report out this week says.

It's one of the perennial questions facing the open source movement: Is Linux ready for the corporate desktop? Ready or not, Linux is coming.

Last week's two-page advertisement in the The New York Times paid for by fans of Mozilla's Firefox browser is bringing in more downloads.

This article explores a few thoughts and observations that I see as relevant for the creation and marketing of open source in the real world. It is based on part of the keynote "How to Eat an Elephant" which I presented at the AUUG Annual Conference in Melbourne, September 20041.

Unless Microsoft licenses its communication protocols differently, open-source projects can't make much use of them.

The recent Newsforge article about dmidecode got me thinking: what other practical applications are there for dmidecode? As that article points out, there isn't a lot of software out there that makes real use of the dmidecode data. Let's see if we can change that.

In political campaigns, flexibility, speed, and cost really are killer apps. Candidates are more interested in results than process. Strangely enough, open source solutions really fit well into this kind of environment.

Users who want Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS3 without actually paying money for it have a number of options, including downloading and compiling or outright stealing (not recommended). Or you can find a free distribution that has put all the packages together for you. Such is CentOS.

Computers have been emulating other computers for a long time, often to access a legacy application or to use applications written for a popular OS on a system with a more stable, responsive OS. As Linux grows in popularity, developers need to examine their options when planning binaries that will run on non-Linux systems.

Aaron Siego, one of the KDE developers, recently posted a very public rant against porting OSS applications to proprietary platforms like win32. I a self professed zealot for all things FOSS, strongly disagree with Mr. Siego. The proceeding is my rebuttal to his statements.

The open-source arena now has its own world-class content-management system: Plone. If you're a solution provider considering a CMS for a client, or perhaps a collaborative portal for your own company, take a look at Plone. You won't be sorry.

Lightning is the working project name for an extension to tightly integrate calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks, etc.) into Thunderbird.

note: In Part 1 of this two-part series, Carla Schroder, author of Linux Cookbook, shared three recipes, with tips on installing a program for easy uninstall, killing user processes, and better logins without passwords. This week, in the final part, she offers two more tasty treats, including tips on running different window managers simultaneously with Xnest and hosting multiple domains with Apache. Enjoy!

Word processors are too often made to do much more than they were originally designed for. If a word processing program is all you've ever had or used for your projects, you may have a tendency to use it for every writing job that you have, even if it is more difficult or inconvenient to do so. For specialized jobs there are specialized tools, so what is it that you are intending to create, and what software should you use? In this article we'll discuss some specialized content authoring tools available for GNU/Linux that you should know about.

Around 20 years ago a programmer at MIT quit his job to develop a complete and free Unix-style operating system--the GNU system. That programmer was Richard Stallman, also known as rms, the founder of the Free Software Foundation.

Since Microsoft released XP three years ago, virus writers have been extremely successful in exploiting embarrassing security holes in Windows. Since then, the company's 57,000 employees have been unable to lock it down and the software giant's home page is now permanently plastered with step by step advice on how to secure your Windows system and guard against the latest security flaws.

Ubuntu Linux has posted a series of international screenshots of their 4.10 LiveCD (thanks to OSDir.com).

This includes Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and French screenshots. Additional languages are soon to be added.

Internet Explorer is insecure junk, and it's time for Windows users to move to Firefox if they want to protect their systems.

OpenOffice.org's Calc isn't only about rows and columns. If you look long enough at the empty spreadsheet, you will soon realise that it looks like a map grid, and, indeed, with a bit of imagination you can use Calc to create a simple yet handy mapping application. This how-to guides you through building a Calc-n-map -- an application for marking points of interest on a city map.

It's been slated as one of the most significant Linux projects in years, but can Mono really succeed in providing an open source equivalent to Microsoft's much-hyped .NET? David Braue separates fact from fiction.