June 26, 2006

An article over at Linux Dev Center explains how to create podcasts with nothing but open source tools like Audacity and Ardour. You can then use sites like ourmedia.org to distribute your podcasts.

November 2, 2005

IBM DeveloperWorks has published a two-part article explaining how to build high performance Linux clusters. The discussion includes information about fail-over clusters, load-balancing clusters, and high-performance clusters. Among the technologies used are OSCAR, MPI, and PVM.

November 1, 2005

Open source operating system OpenBSD 3.8 was released today. New features include improved hardware support, new tools for RAID and IPSec management, enhanced wireless capabilities, support for the UDF file system, enhanced ospfd and bgpd routing features, OpenSSH 4.2, and dozens of other security enhancements.

October 1, 2005

The Mozilla Foundation has released version 1.0.7 of the Mozilla Thunderbird mail client software. The new version includes a number of security fixes and is a recommended update for all users of Thunderbird.

August 6, 2005

ONLamp.com has published an article about object oriented programming in PHP, and talks about the advantages, disadvantages, and pitfalls of using classes in PHP. For those building ever larger PHP applications, the use of classes is something that enhances productivity and creates cleaner, more manageable code.

August 6, 2005

Several news sites have published coverage of the OSCON 2005 conference. The O'Reilly Open Source Convention featured talks and presentations by many of the most important people in the Open Source community, including Larry Wall, Jonathan Schwartz, Guido van Rossum, Jeremy Zawodny, and many more.

June 16, 2005

The LAMP open source development stack is steadily winning marketshare against Microsoft's .NET and Sun's Java programming suites. LAMP includes the Linux operating system, the Apache web server, the MySQL database and the scripting languages PHP, Perl or Python. In recent months, the LAMP suite has been making big inroads into large companies, due to a growing number of third-party software and service providers that are helping to accelerate the push of LAMP into corporate IT. A number of open source and commercial web applications like SugarCRM and Journyx are also being built atop the LAMP stack instead of atop .NET or Java. Microsoft is now also viewing LAMP as serious threat and is focusing on reducing the cost and complexity of using the .NET framework. As a response, Microsoft is working on a series of low cost products to compete directly with LAMP.

June 14, 2005

Sun Microsystems today released the Solaris operating system as open-source software. The company has published source code to the kernel on the OpenSolaris web site, and will be publishing other code over the next few months. The move is seen as critical in competing with Linux and Windows for the hearts and minds of developers and users. OpenSolaris is being released under the Community Development and Distribution License (CDDL), which means that programmers are able to use code from the operating system in other open source and commercial software projects.

June 13, 2005

Red Hat today released Fedora Core 4, the latest version of their free Linux distribution. Among the major improvements in Fedora Core 4 are GNOME 2.10 and KDE 3.4, the Evince multi-format document viewer, OpenOffice.org 2.0, Eclipse 3.1, PowerPC CPU support, improved SELinux security functionality, Global File System (GFS) storage clustering technology, Xen virtualization, GCC 4.0, and much more.

June 9, 2005

NewsForge has published an article that takes a look at the most powerful extensions to Mozilla's Thunderbird open source e-mail software. Among these are: Quicktext, for grouping text elements and pre-filling e-mail forms; Signature Switch, for toggling your signature with one button; Dictionary Search, an enhanced spell checker and dictionary; QuickReply and QuickQuote, for improved reply handling; Contacts Sidebar, for keeping all your contacts visible; Sender Verification, to allow authentication of e-mails; QuoteCollapse, for managing multi-level quoted text; Buttons, for adding enhanced features to Thunderbird's toolbars; infoRSS, for enhanced RSS feed management; QuickNote, for managing sticky reminder notes within Thunderbird; and many more.

June 6, 2005

Informit.com has published a very interesting article explaining how to use the free open source OpenVPN package to help secure your wireless network. This is done by implementing a VPN connection between the wireless user and the host network using not just OpenVPN, but also OpenSSL and XCA for certificate management, thus providing high level authentication and strong encryption.

June 4, 2005

NewsForge has published coverage from the Red Hat Summit in New Orleans. Topics covered include the Red Hat Directory Server, the freeing of the Fedora Project, the global impact of open source, and more.

June 2, 2005

According to the Mozilla Foundation, version 1.1 of the Thunderbird open source e-mail client will support podcasts. Using existing RSS functionality, the client adds additional support for Podcast-type content and multimedia attachments. Some other new features of Thunderbird 1.1 are enhanced security, anti-phishing support, an improved spell-check engine, and better integration with third-party antivirus software.

June 1, 2005

NewsForge has published a review of FreeBSD 5.4, the latest release of the open source multi-platform Unix operating system. Among the new features and changes are fixes to numerous security flaws, a new ULE process scheduler, new network card driver support, the addition of the CARP protocol, new ipfw firewall features, updates to various components like BIND and Sendmail, and more.

May 19, 2005

The OpenBSD project has released version 3.7 of OpenBSD, a free and highly secure open source operating system. New features in this release include support for Zaurus and SGI platforms, enhanced 64-bit CPU support, driver support for new hardware (especially networking and wireless cards), a new OSPFD service, improved TCP performance, kernel based PPPoE, enhanced NTPD and BGPD functionality, improved pf firewall functionality and performance, enhanced IPSEC functionality, support for OpenSSH 4.1 and X.Org 6.8.2, hundreds of bug fixes, and even stronger security. BSD DevCenter has published an interview with some of the OpenBSD 3.7 developers, who explain all the new features and improvements. NewsForge has also published a review of OpenBSD 3.7.

May 12, 2005

According to a recent survey by Computer Economics, business users migrate towards open source primarily to reduce dependence on software vendors, and not because of cost savings. As strange as it sounds, the hatred of commercial software vendors by businesses is so intense that many would be willing to pay more for open source just to free themselves from the vendors. What this means is that commercial software vendors really have a much bigger problem on their hands; open source didn't create this problem, but instead brings it to light.

May 12, 2005

The Mozilla Organization has released version 1.0.4 of the the free open source Firefox web browser. The new version includes three critical security fixes, as well as enhancements to DHTML rendering. All users of Firefox are urged to upgrade in order to maintain a high level of browser security.

May 9, 2005

The FreeBSD Project has released FreeBSD 5.4, the latest version of its free open source operating system. This release includes many improvements in functionality, stability, security, performance, and device driver support. The operating system is available for the i386, amd64, ia64, pc98, sparc64, and alpha architectures. For a complete list of updates, please check the release notes.

May 6, 2005

SearchSecurity.com has published a technical guide to using the open source Snort intrusion detection system (IDS) software. Topics include an introduction to the software, how to identify ports, how to deal with switches and segments, where to place IDS sensors, how to modify and write custom Snort rules, how to define Snort configuration variables, how to automatically update Snort rules, and more.

May 2, 2005

The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) has announced that it will deploy Linux on servers across its network of 20,000 branches. After completion of the project, many of ICBC's 390,000 employees will access applications hosted on these Linux servers. Other banks like Bank of China have also deployed Linux in regional projects, and several other major banks in China are also expected to move to Linux shortly.