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Invest Northern Ireland, an agency of the UK government, recently funded a whirlwind trip to Northern Ireland by a half dozen journalists in order to show and tell them about Northern Ireland's high-tech industry. In exchange for footing the bill, they hope to see stories favorable to the area to attract not only new high-tech investment, but offshoring work as well. I took advantage of the opportunity to get a better understanding of the state of Linux and free and open source software in Northern Ireland.

As the release of KDE 3.5 draws near, work is already underway at the Appeal project to integrate 3.5's major changes into the 4.0 series. Subprojects beneath Appeal's umbrella target simplified usability and progressive adjustments to the graphical user interface: The Tenor and Plasma projects will add functionality, while Oxygen and Coolness will enhance visual freshness.

After spending a year enhancing Berkeley DB, Sleepycat Software has released version 4.4.

You know how insecure 802.11x wireless networks are. In this article we'll create an OpenBSD-based secure wireless access point that prevents unauthorized access and encrypts every packet using a VPN tunnel. OpenBSD is one of the most secure operating systems available, is easy to use, and includes almost everything you need for this project in the base installation.

I'm that odd guy who puts Linux on virtually everything, and will take something apart just because I can. My Linksys WRT54G runs Talisman from Sveasoft, my iPaq runs Familiar, and even my TiVos (DirecTiVo and Series 2) have been hacked up a bit. So what does a guy like me use for software tools?

SAN DIEGO -- All good things must come to an end, and the 19th Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA) is no exception. The conference wrapped up last Friday with a full slate of activities. At LISA, no matter how well you plan your schedule, the odds are good that you won't be able to attend all of the sessions that you're interested in.

Hardly a week goes by without Google introducing some new feature related to its search engine or email service. Google "hacks" are popular too, such as gmailfs, a mountable Linux file system that uses your Gmail account for storage, or simpler twists, such as Google cooking, where you "Google" your ingredients and the search engine delivers recipes. One of the latest hacks is G2G Share, a twist on traditional peer-to-peer networks. But the young creator of the service says he's not sure how long Google will allow it to remain active.

If you're new to Linux, the only the thing you may have to lead you along is the recommendations of those who already know about it. While Rickford Grant's book Linux Made Easy will help you set up Xandros 3 and give a spot-on tour of what you need to know, it's written for those who know far less about computers than they may think.

Welcome to this year's 50th issue of DistroWatch Weekly. This issue covers a variety of interesting topics, including a call to protest against introducing a DMCA-style law in France, Linux migration efforts by Berlin, Prague and Cape Town, and an insider's feedback to our last week's feature on backporting newly released applications to existing distributions. In the news section we'll introduce Security Enhanced SUSE, congratulate Patrick Volkerding, and draw your attention to a newly compiled list of FreeBSD projects for volunteer programmers. Finally, we'll take a brief look at the new Ark Linux 2005.2. Happy reading! Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch

If you spend any time working at the shell, you probably use many GNU utilities. One thing that distinguishes the GNU versions from the classic Unix versions is that the GNU programs are rife with additional options. Some of these options are so useful you may want to create an alias so you can use them all the time without needing to do all the extra typing.

In a previous post, I had written how I solved certain problems in Ubuntu like getting support for proprietary file formats. That post may or may not be helpful to many. But for me, it is definitely useful because, in a situation where I want to re-install Ubuntu on my machine, I just have to pull up my blog page and I can come up to date in very little time. The alternative being having to spend valuable time searching on the net or forums all over again.

Having said that, I think credit has to be given where it is due. So here I have put together a collection of sites which are dedicated to Ubuntu Linux and where one can find a wealth of information on general topics or accomplishing a particular task in Ubuntu.

Digg Story

SAN DIEGO -- The second day of the LISA '05 Conference was full of interesting talks and after-hours sessions.

PHP has historically been a simple scripting language used for quickly developing small web sites with dynamic content. But newer features have given the language the structure and libraries for building larger applications. One such library is Smarty, a templating and presentation engine. Smarty helps developers build applications in modules by separating the presentation layer from the application code. This article covers some of the basic features of Smarty for developers.

This week advisories were released for gdk-pixbuf, horde2, helix-player, Inkscape, horde2, Perl, Webmin, eagle-usb, spamassassin, mailman, xpdf, libc-client, and imap. The distributors include Debian, Gentoo, Mandriva, and Red Hat.

Microsoft and Google have engaged in a bit of role reversal when it comes to making it possible to search print books online. This time around, Microsoft and an open technology community are fighting against Google, a rival seen as aggressive, arrogant, and set on doing its own thing for the sake of its cause.

SAN DIEGO -- My first day at the 19th Large Installation System Administration (LISA) Conference in sunny San Diego was kind of like Disneyland for geeks. There are no rides, but there are plenty of attractions, and far too much to do in one visit.

The modern mobile phone is a powerful device that you can use to store contacts, manage calendars, check email, and even browse the Web. But that's not all: install floAt's Mobile Agent (FMA) on your laptop or PC, connect it to your handset, and you can use the combo as a versatile communication tool. This article introduces you to FMA's features and shows you how to get started with the application.

Turbolinux, recovered and prospering in its new incarnation as an Osaka Securities Exchange-listed company, is looking to achieve success in Asian markets beyond Japan and China. The company, now a subsidiary of booming Japanese portal operator Livedoor, has announced plans to double its percentage of income from exports to neighboring countries to 20% within the next couple of years. The latest venture for Turbolinux is into the relatively untapped Vietnamese market, where it has started to conduct market research under a contract with Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

Webmasters looking to provide search capabilities for their site would do well to try out PhpDig, a Web spider and search engine written in PHP with a MySQL backend. There are other open source search engines, all of which have their own advantages. PhpDig just happens to suit the needs of my Information Technology for Greenhouses and Horticulture site. Here's how I got it working.

A little brain power, some readily available open source tools, and two IT services providers out to prove they can solve the "Slashdot effect": Put them together, and you've got Mirrordot, a site that automatically mirrors any Slashdot-linked pages.