2005 January

Considering building your own push proxy on a Linux box? Then you might want to read this first. This article from IBM lays it all out for you so that you can get this proxy off of the ground right the first time. Well thought out and pretty easy to follow, I have to give [...]

Open source has won another convert in the local government sector, with soft migrations to Linux imminent across Vienna’s municipal authority.

Sun Microsystems Inc. will use the CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License) for its Open Solaris project, and also will announce Tuesday that it is making the source code to its DTrace technology, found in the upcoming Solaris 10 operating system, immediately available to developers.

Every month when my column posts, I get a bevy of e-mail. And every month, there is a contingent of readers who have one question for me: How do I get started with Linux?

1) problem description, brief discussion
RealPlayer is a combined audio and video player for RealMedia formatted streaming data. These formats are very common throughout the Internet.
eEye Security in October 2004 discovered a flaw in the .rm RealMovie stream handling routines which allows a remote attacker to exploit an integer overflow vulnerability using a special .rm file. [...]

IBM today announced it will offer a new, low-priced IBM POWER5™ processor-based server running the Linux® operating system (OS). The introduction of the IBM eServer™ OpenPower™ 710 marks IBM’s continued commitment to extend POWER5 performance for Linux environments to companies of all sizes.

A major teachers union is looking to open-source technology to move its enterprise systems and its members to a new non-proprietary platform that the union will control completely.

As a consultant to small businesses and non-profit organizations that are too small to have any IT staff of their own, I need to be able to support a diverse array of desktops and servers, platforms and file formats. I’ve been able to do it exclusively with Linux since 1998. Here are my must-have Linux [...]

I’ll admit it up front: I’m not a big distro-testing nut. I have too much work to do to spend time wiping and reinstalling my system every week or so, and I don’t like having to tweak and reconfigure everything once I’ve got my themes, programs, etc. established. On the upside, it ensures I have [...]

Modern Linux distributions all come loaded with several text editors for both the CLI and the various desktops and window managers. While many users typically edit config files with GUI editors like Kate or KWrite, there are times when a GUI may not be available and you’ll be forced to use a command line editor [...]

Check this out: Thunderbird has a new phishing protection measure! When a user clicks on a link within an email message, Thunderbird will warn the user if the actual URL is either a numeric IP address or does not match the URL printed in the email message. This prevents users from erroneously visiting a spoofed [...]

As I mentioned, my TurboTax posts brought in more feedback than most other articles I’ve posted. Beyond casual readers, I also received a response from none other than a TurboTax VP, Bob Meighan. His initial response was as follows:

I am not going to start ripping on IE again, but in all honesty…could its days truly be numbered? According to this article from Computer Weekly, it seems that it is not only likely, but it could even be inevitable! While IE still holds onto some 90% of the market, Firefox is growing every single [...]

Now this is my kind of Linux article! This goes back a point that I made a long time ago that all of the great tutorials like this need to be part of a big, grand database somewhere that all Linux users can then find without having to search and scrounge for hours on end. [...]

Looks as if Centrino is also going to have “Linux inside’ and vice-versa! Builderau is reporting that we are going to start seeing Linux laptops running with Centrino, well officially anyway. See, till recently Intel did not allow for the Centrino logo to be used on Linux laptops. Glad to see Intel waking up to [...]

The idea of having voice recognition on your Linux desktop sounds like great idea to me personally. Now, in this article on NewsForge covering this subject, there are two different applications designed to meet the needs of their perspective users. The apps are called the Sphinx-2 speech recognition engine and the Festival text to [...]

One thing that I really like a about a good Linux walk-through, it is generally done with the newbie in mind. One such example would be this walk-through for Debian Linux being explained at NewsForge. Bruce Byfield has taken a few moments in order to sit down and help you to get things straightened out [...]

I got more than a few responses regarding the TurboTax issue. In fact, I probably got more feedback on it than any other post I’ve written. I guess it should be no surprise that when it comes to taxes, people are going to have an opinion. Heh.

Expanding their long-time partnership into the Linux arena, Oracle and Novell have announced that Oracle’s latest database, clustering, application server, collaboration solutions and enterprise applications are now available for and supported on Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.

Voice control is the next step in human interaction with computers. Voice recognition, and its flip side, speech synthesis, can help you streamline your day-to-day work and organize your Linux desktop in a better way.