Faced with an increasing number of deployed Linux servers and no budget for commercial monitoring tools, our company looked into open-source solutions for gathering performance and security information from our Unix environment.

The law that governs nonprofit foundations requires that during its probationary period, at least 1/3 of its donations must be in the form of smaller donations from individuals, or it risks losing its tax-exempt status. Ironically, because of some very-generous donations, it now must make up for that with $30,400 in smaller donations by 12/31/2004. More info on their predicament an info on making donations are available on their web site.

Sun Microsystem has just released the early access editíon of J2SE 6.0 (Mustang).

There's been a lot of hoopla about Firefox lately, and its security/privacy benefits over IE. However, here this guide can lead you to tools and practices that will make IE safer to use, for those who don't want to stop using IE.

Do you remember this one? It was pretty amazing when it came out. The Mac Portable was heavy, innovative, and mildly successful. The first portable to include a full keyboard, and trackball, the Portable also included a Lead Acid battery, providing 12 hours of battery life. Read the article at MLAgazine

"Because I personally don't think they have anything left worth taking after I've applied the general Unix principles. I really do think Linux is the better system by now, in all the ways that matter." Read more here

A serious bug in the popular PHP development language, which affects php versions prior to 4.3.10 or 5.0.3, can leave databases wide open to intrusion if the proper security steps aren't taken.

OSNews contributor Thom Holwerda posted his end of 2004 best of list, filled with lots of OS-related highs and lows for the year. I particularly like his "Best Computer News Site.

Uber-popular Linux live CD Knoppix will split into a "lite" version, optimized for older computer, and a "maximum" version targetting newer machines, which contains more Debian packages.

In the new article "Developing 64-bit Applications" of the "Tiger Developer Overview Series" published on ADC, Apple states that the Cocoa and Carbon GUI application frameworks will not be ready for 64-bit programming. Even the kernel will be compiled in 32-bit address mode and will be provided in only one version for all the machines. The only 64-bit system framework which will be provided in a "fat" format will be libSystem which command-line applications, servers and computation engines will be linkable to. The 32-bit GUI clients will be capable however to communicate with the 64-bit server processes by using several IPC techniques.

The much awaited new preview of PCLinuxOS has been released: "PCLinuxOS Preview 8 comes with kernel 2.6.7 with udev support. KDE 3.3.2, OpenOffice.org 1.1.3, Firefox 1.0 with plugin support, Thunderbird 1.0, P2P filesharing for Kazza and Gnutella, and many more applications." Read more here. Also, check out the screenshot tour at OSDir.com.

The ubiquity and utility of Ant as a build tool for Java projects is virtually unsurpassed. Even Maven, the new, upstart utility in the build arena, owes much of its power to lessons learned from Ant. This article introduces Groovy's builder utility, which makes it especially easy to combine Groovy with Ant and Maven for more expressive and controllable builds.

Newsforge reviews the effect of recently open sourced databases like IBM's Cloudscape and CA's Ingres and its effect on the classic open source players like MySQL and PostgreSQL as well as the proprietary database leader Oracle

After much development and four previous releases, FreeBSD-5 has finally gone stable with version 5.3. But don't mistake a stable codebase with stable software. While the development team will no longer accept major changes to the base system, FreeBSD 5.3 still has bugs and problems. NewsForge has the review.