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Life online is certainly getting complex. As if spam, spim, crackers, and worms weren't enough, you now have to worry about dragons, thieves, spells, and Sith lords. It's almost enough to make you pull the RJ45 plug. But don't. Dragons aren't a new Windows exploit (yet), and you don't need to protect your hard disk from the Sith. And while you might run into such beasties online, have no fear: you'll have a trusty axe, light saber, or passel of pigs to protect you.

You know Linux is easy to run and is as stable as houses. I know that, too. But does your friend Joe Windows know it? Chances are he doesn't.

I remembered someone recently talking about how Perl-Tk can create nice graphical user interfaces. I'd never spent much time learning Perl-Tk, so I considered this the perfect opportunity to tackle the learning problem via a practical problem. I cracked open my recently acquired Mastering Perl/Tk from O'Reilly, and started reading.

Let's look at some powerful things you can do on a command-line. Even if you don't want to do exactly these things, you're likely to get some ideas for related uses. This "related-ness" ability of the shell and its command-line -- letting you combine tools to do just what you need to do -- is the very spirit of "Power Tools."

Half of Australia wrote in to tell us that today's issue of The Sydney Morning Herald features an opinion column in which technology correspondent Graeme Philipson recommends Mozilla Firefox over Microsoft Internet Explorer. The actual article itself is short but it is strikingly splashed in the promotion box under the print newspaper's main masthead (as a PDF of today's Herald front page shows).

Linux on Intel is driving the commoditization of computing. But it's not the only game in town, nor is it the only combination of software and hardware with influence. Linux also runs on PowerPC processors - including IBM's POWER series, Apple's G5, and other embeddable cores - and runs well. Here's a look at the "other" Linux, the one that runs on PPC.

Novell this week announced the availability of Mono 1.0, an open source development platform based on the .NET framework that allows software developers to build Linux and cross-platform applications. A community initiative sponsored by Novell, the Mono project makes it easier to build and develop applications on Linux and other platforms, allowing developers to get software to market faster and more cost effectively.

Ninety two percent of survey respondents indicated that their Linux systems have never been infected with a virus, according to Evans Data's new Summer 2004 Linux Development Survey. Further, 78% of Linux developers say that their Linux systems have never been hacked and less than 7% were hacked three or more times. Of the 22% that have been hacked, 23% of the intrusions were by internal users with valid login ID's. The main ways that Linux machines can be compromised are: Inadequately configured security settings, vulnerability in internet service and Web server flaws.

Yesterday was the last day of Ottawa Linux Symposium, and I can't help comparing it with the Usenix Annual Technical Conference, which was only a few weeks earlier. The difference in the quality and relevance (at least as far as my interests are concerned) of the papers, the energy of the attendees, and the overall atmosphere of the two conferences were distinctly different.

In the first of a two-part interview, William Weinberg, newly appointed architecture specialist at the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), talks to vnunet.com about desktops, datacentres, security and the spectre of legal action by Microsoft and SCO.

In March's "LAMP Post" column, we started to look at MySQL's replication subsystem. We covered how replication works, as well as putting it to use by configuring the master and slave(s). This month, in this inaugural "MySQL" column, let's spend some time looking at the lesser known aspects of MySQL replication, including filtering and log inspection.

In this week's Gentoo Weekly Newsletter you'll find information about the retirement of the net-www Portage category, as well as a call for volunteers for a meeting for UK-based Gentoo developers and users, to be held in September or early October. We also bring an update on the Portage, devrel, infrastructure, releng, and tools projects, as well as a profile of MIPS developer Stephen Becker. Don't miss the security and community coverage either. Enjoy!

Just when the Unix community thought that the fractious BayStar-SCO dispute was history, the investment house proved everyone wrong. The company now says it will sue SCO and continue the pair's troubled financial relationship.

A couple of Linux-related court cases were recently put to rest, and the outcomes could be viewed as mixed for the Penguin-concerned parties involved in each respective litigation.

The package installation problem is one of the primary barriers to desktop Linux adoption. Most if not all solutions so far have addressed the wrong problem (at least for desktop users) -- resolving dependencies at package installation time. A much better approach is to ensure that as few dependencies exist as possible. While this might seem a lofty goal, given the open source development emphasis on reusing as much code as possible, I believe this goal is indeed achievable through a process of desktop component standardization.

NASA has picked Computer maker Silicon Graphics Inc. and chipmaker Intel to develop a major supercomputer based on Linux to simulate space exploration and conduct other research, SGI announced Tuesday

How they got all those displays working for this year's ULB.

Different interpretations of a memo from Office of Management and Budget IT and E-Government administrator Karen Evans make this software purchasing directive look both bad and good for open source.

Linux distributor Xandros has updated its business and consumer Linux desktop to version 2.5, and is preparing for a long-awaited move into the Linux server market.