Stephen J. Vaughan-Nichols is not well-known as a Microsoft fan; on the contrary, he tends to be one of their outspoken critics. So, I was pleased when I saw him praise Microsoft in his recent eWeek opinion column:
I haven’t been a big fan of personal database programs for a long time now. The only one out there these days that I care for at all is Microsoft’s Visual FoxPro. Yes, I can say good things about Microsoft products—when they really are good.
The Latest Updates from MySQL AB RSS Feed notes MySQL 5.0 Now Available for Production Use. “MySQL AB today announced the general availability of MySQL 5.0, the most significant product upgrade in the company’s ten-year history. The major new version delivers advanced SQL standard-compliant features such as stored procedures, triggers, views & new pluggable storage engines. Over 30 enterprise platform and tool vendors have also expressed enthusiastic support for the new release of the world’s most popular open source database.”
OSNews notes After 12 Years of Work, WINE is Going Beta. “After roughly 12 years of work, the Wine Project is about to take its widely used Windows translation layer to a place it has not been in all that time: beta. Wine Project leader Alexandre Julliard, who has worked on the software nearly since its beginning in 1993 and maintained it since 1994, said in an interview yesterday that the beta release is “a matter of days away.” He has since updated that forecast and said it would be released on Tuesday, October 25th.”
A remarkable platform, WINE Is Not an Emulator, but rather a thin layer that maps Win32 calls to matching Linux calls, running some applications even faster than on their native OS. Note that Visual FoxPro is a popular item in the Application Database, named to the Top 10 Silver List.
Last OSNews post for the morning, I promise! They report Firefox Sees 100 Millionth Download. “Just shy of Firefox’s first birthday party, the Mozilla Foundation celebrated the 100 millionth download of its Web browser Wednesday. “This is a great milestone. Our massive, worldwide community of grassroots marketers and users – not to mention the developers – have helped to put out a product that’s really kicking butt,” said Asa Dotzler, the Mozilla liaison to the SpreadFirefox community.”
OSNews notes Ubuntu 5.10 Server Released. “The Ubuntu team is proud to announce Ubuntu 5.10 Server, the first release of Ubuntu designed especially for server environments. Like the standard desktop Ubuntu, it occupies a single CD. However, it is distinguished by the following features: Includes server-oriented kernels with out-of-the-box automatic support for multiprocessor systems; Includes a wide variety of popular server applications such as apache, mysql, postgresql, php, zope, openldap, bind, samba, and more.” Visit the OSNews site for links to download the CD image for PowerPC, i386 and AMD64.
Ubuntu has taken the world by storm, recently highlighted as the Desktop OS of choice in Linux Journal poll. I’ve been impressed with the Debian-based distribution. It will be interesting to see what innovations they bring to their server version.
OSNews reports OpenOffice.org 2.0 Released to Servers. “OpenOffice.org 2.0 has been silently released to servers. It can be found here. OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute.”
UPDATED: BitTorrent links here
If you evaluated OpenOffice.org 1.1.x and felt it wasn’t ready just yet, give this new version a try. They improvements are remarkable. This is an office suite suitable for 95% of home and office workers. (I have used OpenOffice exclusively for over a year.)
If you offer custom applications to your clients that integrate or automate MS Office or WordPerfect, take a look at what would be involved in bringing in OpenOffice.org as another alternative. Your clients can obtain OO.o for free, and your application can offer many powerful new features.
The Nashua chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group meets the third Thursday of each month at Martha’s Exchange, Main Street Nashua. Dinner starts at 6 PM (pay for your own), the presentation starts upstairs at 7:30.
This months meeting on the 20th of October will have Ken D’Ambrosio showing OpenVPN, an open source solution to remote secure access to a network. OpenVPN runs on Windows, Linux, *BSD, OS X and Solaris. From their web page:
“OpenVPN implements OSI layer 2 or 3 secure network extension using the industry standard SSL/TLS protocol, supports flexible client authentication methods based on certificates, smart cards, and/or 2-factor authentication, and allows user or group-specific access control policies using firewall rules applied to the VPN virtual interface. OpenVPN is not a web application proxy and does not operate through a web browser.”
Sounds like a meeting not to miss!
Ubuntu Linux 5.10 (that’s a Year-Month versioning scheme) code-named “Breezy Badger” has been released. Join the BitTorrents for a speedy download. Versions for i386, AMD64, PowerPC both live and install are available. Key features include a recent kernel (2.6.12.6), GNOME, Xorg, improved drivers and hardware compatibility and beta 2 of OpenOffice.org 2.0. Also included is a server configuration with support for LTSP (the Linux Terminal Server Project), NFS support and more. Check it out!
Tonight at the MonadLUG meeting, I will present “The Open CD” a CD to share with family and friends. It has Windows-readable and -runnable binaries including FireFox, OpenOffice.org, Thunderbird, 7-Zip, Audacity, Battle for Wesnoth, Gaim, Celestia, GIMP, Notepad2, PDFCreator, Really Slick Screensaveers, NVU, Sokoban and TuxPaint. It also includes the texts “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” and “Open Sources.” If booted, the CD runs a LiveCD version of Ubuntu. It’s a powerful tool to convince family, friends, clients and perfect strangers to try out F/OSS.
Download your copy from http://www.theopencd.org/ or come to the MonadLUG meeting tonight where I will have copies to give away.
The Monadnock Linux User Group (MonadLUG) meets the second Thursday or each month at 7:00pm at the SAU 1 Superintendent’s Office behind South Meadow School in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Details, directions and lots more information are available at the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group web site.
The Python Special Interest Group (“PySIG”) of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group meets the fourth Thursday of each month at the Amoskeag Business Incubator in Manchester at 7 PM.
This month, the meeting will take place on Thursday, 27 October 2005 and will feature a presentation on Jython by KentJohnson.
“Kent is soliciting suggestions for specific topics (on the PySIG mailing list). In the meantime here’s a synopsis about Jython in the large from the project’s home page: http://www.jython.org/docs/whatis.html. Jython should be of interest to anyone who uses or wants to know about either Python or Java. I particularly like the “typically 2-10X shorter” part, having worked on Java projects in a former life…” — Bill Sconce, PySIG coordinator