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A new wave of freely available open source business applications is already being adopted by a significant number of small and mid-sized businesses. Among the open source applications turning up on small business desktops are word processing and spreadsheet applications like OpenOffice and accounting applications like GnuCash and Grisbi.

Every user whose client connects to the Internet should configure his firewall immediately after installation. Some Linux distributions include firewall configuration as a part of installation, often offering a set of defaults configurations to choose from. However, to ensure that your machine presents the minimum "attack surface" (a measure of the number of vulnerable ports, user accounts, and sockets exposed to attack) to the predatory inhabitants of the Internet, you may need to do some manual configuration of your firewall. Here are three tools that can help.

When the Linux desktop gets performance tweaks, people can see a significant difference. Windows XP just cannot keep up. With the addition of a stream of new applications and multiple ways to run Win32 applications, the case for Linux becomes irrefutable.

The existence of open-source software in Europe may be under threat if companies, including Apple and Microsoft, persuade the European Parliament to expand patent protection in Europe.

Fujitsu Siemens Computers was recently presented with the Novell Technology Partner of the Year Award for operational excellence and its innovative FlexFrame for mySAP Business Suite solution, based on the Linux operating system.

MusE is an extensive Open Source MIDI and audio sequencer for Linux, based on Qt. The developers have been interviewed by O'Reilly. For those interested in some background information about MusE, MIDI and audio development on Linux, be sure to check it out. A progress report for the coming 0.7.2 and 1.0 releases has also been posted to the MusE website.

If you're a good administrator, you pride yourself on developing a fundamental understanding of the systems you build. After a while, as you begin to comprehend the complete complexity that goes along with building and maintaining your infrastructure, the commands and procedures to control them become second nature. You have to look at the documentation less and less, until eventually people refer to you as a guru. Having this kind of understanding of your servers is important, but it does no good if you aren't available when something crashes. By creating detailed written policies detailing the ins and outs of your systems in advance, you can provide critical background information to your backup admin who can use it to restore functionality in your absence.

Many corporate users use company-wide LDAP directories to free them from manually synchronizing and updating their contacts -- a convenience that even a two-PC household could benefit from. We will start by installing and configuring OpenLDAP, the free, open-source LDAP server.

Continuing to transform your Linux system into a fast desktop.

the Mozilla Foundation [MoFo] started pushing the separate e-mail and web browsers, instead of the integrated suite, and a whole marketing operation was created around MoFo's now separate components (Firefox and Thunderbird) targeting the end-user audience. Yet, at the same time, the open source nature of MoFo's code made one believe that re-distribution and re-branding was still welcome. That seems not to be the case anymore, if one reads MoFo's Ben Goodger's blog.

Welcome to this year's 21st issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Gentoo Linux continues to maintain its presense on these pages - we have a quick tip describing how to save time and prevent downtime while installing this popular source-based distribution. We'll continue with an update on the release of Debian Sarge and point you to a couple of fantastic Linux learning resources made available recently by Novell. The featured distribution of the week is the PHLAK live CD with its amazing array of security tool and extensive documentation, while Robert Storey reveals a great utility to really erase data from your hard disks. Happy reading!

The Network File System (NFS) is a standard protocol for sharing file services with Linux and Unix computers. It is a distributed file system that enables local access to remote disks and file systems and is based on the clientserver architecture. Although easy to configure, it is typically used only to transfer data over an intranet or LAN because of its transparency and security potholes when exposed to the risks of the Internet. However, it still can be employed -- without compromising security -- to share files over the Internet by configuring it to run on a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection. This article will show you how to set up NFS to run over a CIPE-VPN connection between two Linux systems.

This review takes a fairly brief look at Vector Linux SOHO 5.0. In summary, this distribution rocks. It's fast, easy on the eyes, lightweight, complete, and did I mention that it just screams? The next time I reinstall, I am going to install this for sure. Read on...

Will Stephenson is one of the attendees at the KDE PIM Event. 4 years ago he started with contributing to Kopete, the instant messaging client for KDE. His recent contributions made it possible to let Kopete communicate with Kontact. In this interview, he will tell you about Kopete and his exciting plans for the upcoming meeting.

OpenOffice 1.1.2 and Alt Linux Master 2.3 (russian distro) That is REAL! Microsoft presenation about SSI.

The Kerala capital will play host to a unique two-day international conference that will showcase free software and free content initiatives being undertaken by participants. The conference, beginning May 28, will cover topics like e-governance, bridging the digital divide, education, social justice, legal issues and micro-finance.

Leveraging the power of Linux on IBM hardware as a platform for leading-edge solutions helps build revenue and cut costs in many ways, including high-performance computing, streamlined operations, and distributed enterprise, at a low total cost of ownership.

Do you have a Gmail account? Then, you'll want to read this step by step tutorial for configuring and installing the latest version of Postfix with SASL authentication and TLS encryption necessary for connecting and relaying Gmail to smtp.gmail.com. Plus, I'll walk you through configuring fetchmail (with STARTTLS), which will grab (fetch) Gmail to your local system. But it does not stop there. You'll learn how to forward mail to other computers you have in the house, plus how to automatically backup copies of email.

Noel Davis looks at problems in gzip, Mozilla and Firefox, OpenOffice.org, the FreeBSD kernel, Ethereal, TCPDump, libTIFF, Smail, Apache2's htdigest, and SCO UnixWare's chroot.

Firefox has come up in leaps and bounds of late. The latest tidbit is that Cnet has done a review of all the latest versions of the most popular browsers out there and gave Firefox an 8 out of 10 and the clear lead in the browser war. Unsurprisingly IE6 SP2 tied for last with Opera 8 and Deepnet Explorer with 7 out of 10. Cnet seems to push a pro Microsoft bias most of the time but in this case they have done the opposite...