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Monthly Archive:: December 2006

Get Vista and Samba to Work

Early adopters of Vista may notice that it will not connect to Samba share folders out of the box. This will be a bit of a pain for many enterprise customers. The technical reason is because Microsoft Vista’s default security policy is to only use NTLMv2 authentication. To get Vista to work with Samba follow this simple tutorial.

Rule-Based Access Control

"Although Web servers can perform user authentication and coarse-grained authorization checking for applications, developers of Web services and SOAs often must write custom code to restrict access to certain features of their system, or customize the behavior or appearance, based on the identity of a user. Embedding authorization checking within an application is inflexible, prone to error, and increases its complexity. What if it were data-driven instead of implemented by program logic?"

RPM: Plans, Goals

"There has been a lot of discussion in the past few months about RPM - its present state, its future plans, and its leadership team. In particular, the Fedora Project has received numerous requests asking us, "what are you guys doing about RPM?" Here is our answer: The Fedora Project is leading the creation of a new community around RPM. One in which the leaders can come from Fedora, from Red Hat, from Novell, from Mandriva, or from anywhere. Job #1 is to take the current RPM codebase and clean it up, and in doing so work with all the other people and groups who rely on RPM to build a first-rate upstream project."

Follow Up: Why I Stay with RISC OS

"Gosh! I didn't realize how much discussion my original article would create. A lot of people seemed to accuse me of living in cloud cuckoo land, whereas a lot more agreed with me. I think those who disagreed have either never used RISC OS or just liked a good rant! In either case, I feel compelled to write a short follow up article clarifying some of the points I made in the original article - all of which were perfectly valid." Read the follow up article.

Symphony OS 2006-12 Released

The Symphony OS Project is pleased to announce the release of Symphony OS 2006-12. This release, the first since May, brings more stability and enhanced features to the young desktop environment and Linux Distro. Based on Debian Testing, Symphony OS 2006-12 also now includes the gnome-system-tools within it's System target menu providing GUI system management functions that were missing from previous releases. The system also features Firefox 2, many other updated packages, and performance improvements.

First Release of ExAmour

"ExAmour is an exokernel, a kernel bound to ensure a fair access to hardware resources for applications. The management of those resources is up to the applications (called environment under ExAmour). Kernel specifications: it presently works on x86-32; each application can define its own memory management policy, its own scheduling policy an use its own drivers (hardware or logical); it is multi segmented, no pagination, no overlap between segments in order to avoid exploitation of buffers overflows, heap overflow or off by one; there is no drivers in kernel mode. (increases the security, reliability of the system)."

Master Java Classpath for UNIX, Mac OS X, Windows

The classpath is one of the most complex and infuriating parts of the Java platform, but mastering it is essential to becoming a professional Java programmer. Delve into the intricacies of the classpath and sourcepath and learn how to control them on UNIX and the Mac OS X. In this second article you can tame the classpath in Windows with a few simple rules and save yourself from time-killing problems.

Google Open Sources Web Toolkit

Google is open sourcing the same software that helped to produce popular sites like Google Maps and Gmail. The company has released the Google Web Toolkit under the Apache 2.0 open source license. Independent developers can now use the toolkit to make and debug their own Java applications.

MySQL Quietly Drops Support for Most Linux Distributions

MySQL quietly deprecated support for most Linux distributions on October 16, when its 'MySQL Network' support plan was replaced by 'MySQL Enterprise.' MySQL now supports only two Linux distributions - Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. We learned of this when MySQL declined to sell us support for some new Debian-based servers. Our sales rep 'found out from engineering that the current Enterprise offering is no longer supported on Debian OS.' We were told that 'Generic Linux' in MySQL's list of supported platforms means 'generic versions of the implementations listed above'; not support for Linux in general.

Signals as a Linux Debugging Tool

By focusing on the analysis of data captured using signal handlers, you can speed up the most time-consuming part of debugging: finding the bug. This article gives a background on Linux signals with examples specifically tested on PPC Linux, then goes on to show how to design your handlers to output information that lets you quickly home in on failed portions of code.