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This week's links include how to make the transition to agile programming, how to build a strong applications security framework and a very funny cartoon on feature creep.

the Dbmail system stores email into a relational database: how and why Harald and his company use Dbmail is really interesting. Here’s the story:

When the "Save as WWF" campaign was launched, WWF Germany created a Facebook page. I guess they never expected that it would cause so much controversy, because initially critics could vent their objections freely and add all the links and pictures they wanted. Being one of the opponents in that controversy myself I was about to experience their social media tactics first hand. This is my story.

Yesterday when I introduced Plasma Active, I secretly thought to myself "oh no, so it's begun." See, I have this underlying fear that KDE is going to go the way of GNOME 3 and Unity and finding the removal of user choice in upcoming KDE software compilations sowed the seeds. Despite my biased first impressions, I booted the live ISO provided by open-six. open-six used openSUSE as the basis for it's live CD. It was a bit slow to boot, but truthfully, I didn't really expect it to finish. Afterall, the list of known working devices is short and I was booting on my regular desktop machine with NVIDIA graphics and two monitors. Well, it did finish booting and it even started the Plasma Active desktop. (The desktop was cloned across the two monitors - which is really best-case scenario without proprietary graphic drivers.) And darn it all, I really hate to admit this... but my first word, my first thought was, "Wow!" This Plasma Active thing might really be cool on a little netbook or tablet.

Habey announced an EPIC-format SBC (single board computer) that features a 1.1GHz Intel Atom Z510P processor, 512MB of onboard memory, plus PC/104, PCI, and Mini PCI expansion. The EMB-4650 also includes CompactFlash and SD slots, dual video outputs, and eight USB 2.0 ports, according to the company....

Following last week's release of the stable Wine 1.2.3, it's now time for a new development snapshot of Wine 1.3. The Wine 1.3.18 is a particularly interesting release since it finally takes advantage of raw mouse events with X Input 2...

This enterprise class Linux distribution is quickly gaining popularity for its elegance and integrity. The latest release by the CentOS project is extremely adaptable, and it is an excellent choice for desktops, notebooks, and servers alike.

Blender isn't the only free software graphics application moving along (they just released their first stable 2.5 build), but work towards GIMP 2.8 is also moving along. Though in GIMP's case, the work has been moving along rather slowly. GIMP 2.8 was supposed to come last December and that deadline was clearly missed. At that point it looked like it was perhaps just a few months away, but only now is GIMP 2.7.2 even being released...

Linux-based distributions like Fedora, Ubuntu, and openSUSE have completely revolutionized the traditional desktop. However, there are some distributions that don't quite match the standards that these Distrowatch-toppers have set. Here's a look at 3 such Linux distributions, that you'll never want to try.

Over the April 1st - 3rd weekend, the first Calligra sprint took place at the KDAB office in Berlin. With a total of 31 people from 14 nations, the room was crowded to the bursting point! It was a very successful sprint, and the first KDE sprint for many of the attendees.

Earlier this week Sapphire launched the Radeon HD 5830 Extreme using the well-supported "Cypress LE" graphics processor at a very competitive price relative to the NVIDIA competition and the Radeon HD 5830 graphics cards from other AMD partners. With it being part of the HD 5000 series and not one of the newer HD 6000 series graphics processors, the Linux support is already spot-on for both the official Catalyst Linux driver and within the open-source stack. In this article are the open-source Gallium3D benchmarks for the Radeon HD 5830 along with other recent ATI/AMD GPUs to show where the latest Mesa/Gallium3D code is at today.

Adding SPICE support to virt-manager is one of the upcoming features in Fedora 15 and as of 2011-03-28 it appears to be 100% done. I decided to use the fedora-virt-preview repository to check it out on my Fedora 14 workstation. Want to see how it works? Screenshots included.

One of the most difficult problems in managing a large network is the complexity of security administration. The deployment of individual security products such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems, network traffic analysis, log file analysis, or antivirus software is never going to provide adequate protection for computers that are connected to the internet.

NagiosQL is a web based administration tool for Nagios 2.x, 3.x and Icinga 1.x. It helps you to easily build a complex configuration with all options, manage and use them. NagiosQL is based on a webserver with PHP, MySQL and local file or remote access to the Nagios configuration files via ssh or ftp .

The product relies on a Mysql DB which keep all the configurations for Nagios, there is also the option “dump to disk” which writes all configuration files of Nagios, you can also import from Nagios configuration text files to the database.

(Reuters) - Technology firms such as LG Electronics are moving toward adopting the Linux-based MeeGo operating system after Nokia abandoned it, one of the project's leaders said.

Angry Birds works on iOS, Maemo, Android, and Windows - yet they refuse to make a general Linux installer.

Some Linux server admins are comfortable with wading through text logfiles, but why wade when you can create beautiful charts and graphs that highlight trouble spots? Try the excellent CairoPlot for beautiful, informative visual server log analysis.

Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux and hero to many Open Source users, might not be the first person one might think would be honored by an organization of lawyers, but that's exactly what's happening. The International Technology Law Association will award Torvalds its ITechLaw Achievement Award at their upcoming 40th anniversary celebration.

Kate Stewart, Ubuntu Release Manager at Canonical, announced in an email to the Ubuntu devel announce mailing list that the Beta 2 of Ubuntu 11.04 was ready and now available for download. This is the last Beta before final release and 11.04 will move from Beta to Final release on April 28th with no planned Release Candidate for this cycle. I've included in total Stewart's email to the mailing list.

While I like grub, it does not do a good of a job of passing boot arguments to the OSX kernel. Beyond this some of the EFI strings Chameleon has happen at boot don't work properly with grub. The solution is to have Grub simply chainload into Chameleon instead of booting directly into the OSX kernel (which it does by default).