The first fruit of the recently announced Novell/Microsoft interoperability agreement arrived on Dec. 4, with Novell's announcement that its version of the OpenOffice productivity suite will now support the Microsoft Office Open XML format. The release candidate of Novell's modified version of OpenOffice.org 2.02 is now available for Windows for free download by registered Novell users.

Microsoft has announced an integrated suite of tools for designers, as well as a new preview of the company's 'Flash killer' technology, putting Microsoft squarely into competition with Adobe. Microsoft on Dec. 4 announced its Expression Studio suite of tools for designers, consisting of four tools - three of which had been introduced heretofore and a new tool stemming from an acquisition the company made last summer. In addition, Microsoft announced a new CTP of its WPF/E technology, and there's also an app to show it off, while with some workarounds WPF can be used in Vista's Sidebar.

"Security is an important issue in computing. Unfortunately, many computers allow a cracker to gain access to them and retrieve sensitive information, or just make life hard. This article will review the basics in general security and explain how to apply it to two Linux distributions - Ubuntu and Kubuntu."

The root of the PHP and Lamp security problem lies in the way most Apache servers are configured. In this article, you will improve the Linux security of a LAMP by using the capabilities of Apache's Proxy's directive mod_proxy module to isolate potential Linux security risks while maintaining the flexibility that tools like PHP provide.

"Having been raised on DOS and the early generations of Windows, I rediscovered that sense of excitement in a pure computing experience when I first tried other Linux versions over the years. However, they required a steep learning curve and caused too much frustration with setup and obscure command-line options. Not so with Ubuntu Linux."

A cheeky programmer has produced an unofficial patch to allow the previously Iyonix-only Firefox 2 port to run on A9home computers. The hack intercepts low level ARMv5 instructions that the Iyonix's IOP321 XScale can execute, and converts them into instructions suitable for the ARMv4 Samsung ARM920T processor in the A9home. On a related note, RPCEmu has been updated to work with RISC OS 6.

There are two drawbacks to being a company that has a virtual monopoly in its biggest markets. For starters: where do you find growth? And there is always the nagging worry that someone out there is working on a rival product that just might blow you out of the water. As Andrew Grove, one of the founders of computer chip giant Intel, once put it: "Only the paranoid survive!" Software giant Microsoft is working hard to address both problems.

After my previous short first impressions 'review' of Windows Vista Build 6000, the final build, I promised you a full review which would look a bit deeper into the system, focussing on less obvious matters than appearance alone. Since there are so many new features in Windows Vista, it is very easy to lose track of them. Hence, this review will follow (where possible) a much linked-to page on Wikipedia: Features new to Windows Vista.

Yesterday morning on the openSUSE-announce list, Andreas Jaeger declared openSUSE beta5 the gold master for openSUSE 10.2. In his words "CD production is starting now and I hope to see some shiny green openSUSE 10.2 boxes on the shelves before Christmas."

Speaking to an analyst this month, executives for Apple Computer maintained that the company has no plans to incorporate virtualization technology into the final version of its Boot Camp software that will ship as part of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard next spring. "Apple indicated that it is very pleased with Parallels software and didn't feel the need to compete with its own version of embedded virtualization," Bear Stearns analyst Andy Neff wrote in a research note to clients this week.

"It's quite a challenge really: how does the Number 1 search engine on the web rewrite its search algorithm and test its effectiveness without hurting its current results and user-experience during the testing process? Sergey Brin and Larry Page seem to have figured it out: create a new search engine, and do your testing there! SearchMash.com is the evolution of Google, and should things go right, what Google will (soon enough) become. It tests a range of new features and methods of bringing information to the users' fingertips in more ways than immediately obvious to the eyes."

"There are many different methods to encrypt data using various encryption algorithms (ciphers). In this document I describe in short how to encrypt a device with one of the most contemporary methods, using dm-crypt and LUKS. Actually, devices cannot be encrypted. It's the block devices which are volumes that can be. This means that you can encrypt a hard disk partition, a ZIP disk, a usb flash stick, or even a volume within a file."

The Iyonix-only version 2 of the RISC OS Firefox port was released this weekend. Developer Peter Naulls made the open source web browser available for free download after generous punters donated a grand in cash to the project in little over a fortnight. A second release could be posted online in time for Christmas day if Peter secures more funding. Version 2 has no RISC OS-style menus, the iconbar icon has been removed, and the while browser does support secure 'https' websites, users will have to manually verify the identity of certain sites. Peter also hopes to use the NetSurf Unicode engine in a future release to display non-Latin characters.

"A federal judge on Thursday gutted SCO Group's USD 5 billion, Linux-related lawsuit against IBM - renewing debate about the Utah company's future. Concluding a six-week review, US District Judge Dale Kimball upheld federal Magistrate Brooke Wells' June decision to strike down two-thirds of SCO's allegations. The Lindon-based software company contends IBM violated its contract and copyrights when it allegedly leaked SCO-owned Unix code into the freely-distributed Linux operating system.