Larry Ellison is a man with many opinions and interests. But if there's one thing he's focused on right now, it's forging "Unbreakable" alliances within the Linux community.

A future where Linux PCs are the rule rather than the exception depends largely on Linux succeeding in the workplace. To do that, Linux has to be usable by John in Sales and Jane in Finance. KDE puts that friendly face on Linux. If you're ready to switch your entire office to open source, KDE can bootstrap your efforts. Here's how.

Even if a system can't provide raster graphics, there's no reason it can't offer the convenience of windowed interfaces. Perhaps you've never heard of it, or perhaps you've just forgotten about it -- in any case, the ncurses library lets you build windowed applications for character-based displays.

The popularity of free news and discussion Web sites like NewsForge (http://newsforge.com), Slashdot (http://www.slashdot.org), and Use Perl (http://use.perl.org) and the explosive growth of weblogs has created a need for good Rich Site Summary (RSS) aggregation software. (RSS is an XML-based file format that allows sites and weblogs to "export" headlines and story information for use elsewhere.) RSS aggregators monitor web sites and weblogs for new content, and create a list of the latest headlines and abstracts (when available).

This month, we finish our three-part series on hardening Linux systems. As we've seen, hardening is the process of reconfiguring an "out of the box" Linux distribution to make it more secure.

Scheduling jobs and allocating resources on a Beowulf cluster quickly becomes a challenge once more than a few users start running codes on the system. Manual coordination of runs is tedious, particularly when different codes have very different resource requirements. A job queuing and scheduling facility solves these problems by automatically executing jobs as resources become available ensuring optimal utilization of the cluster. Moreover, a good job scheduler can be configured to enforce operational policies about when and where jobs belonging to different users may be run.

Last month, we configured Apache with mod_log_sql to log all Web traffic to a MySQL database, using one table for each virtual domain.

Last month's column introduced java.nio, one of the most significant new packages found in Java 2 Standard Edition Version 1.4. java.nio finally adds high-performance I/O features -- memory-mapped files, non-blocking I/O, and managed buffers -- to Java.

The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, known as "the CPAN," is the "one stop shopping center" for all things Perl. This 1.2 GB archive contains over 13,000 modules for your Perl programs, as well as scripts, documentation, many non-Unix Perl binaries, and other interesting things.

If you ride a motorcycle, you know that it's not "if you fall down," but "when you fall down." As a rider, you can't prevent the inevitable, but you can learn what to do in a crash, and learn what to do to minimize your own injuries.

JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA 2.6

Orinoco's Ap-200 WAP

I just finished reading yet another Slashdot thread in which various GNOME and KDE zealots argue with each other. This most recent thread was about the way that Red Hat has packaged the popular desktop environments for their up-coming "Null" release. Evidently, Red Hat is providing themes for GNOME and KDE that make both desktop environments look very, very similar to each other. Both camps are unhappy and irate at Red Hat, and both sides are fuming about dilution and misappropriation.

Are you tired of people yacking about how Linux isn't a serious application server platform? I know I am.