Looks like a new neighbor moved in while Pearl was visiting Our Nation’s Capital. And there’s nothing like the fear of becoming obsolete to bond former enemies together. I’m sure that given time, the old timers will learn to get along with Ruby. Of course, I’m also sure that we’ll see the Chicago Cubs win a World Series in my lifetime, so you may want to take that prediction with a grain of salt. While Pearl unpacks her luggage, enjoy this week’s Linux News!

Greetings all. We had our first official presidential primary debate of the 2008 season tonight here in the Granite State, a full seven months before the New Hampshire Primary is currently scheduled (assuming another state doesn’t move theirs up, in which case we could be voting at Halloween the way things are going…). While you can argue who won the debate, there’s no debating that it was another good week here on the OFOW*

Federico Biancuzzi had an informative and somewhat scary interview with Joseph Kong, a BSD rootkit savant. If you weren’t looking at your hard drive with suspicion by the end of the article, you should be…

On a less dangerous note, Andrew Sterling Hanenkamp told us about CAS+, a toolkit for developing Single Sign-On solutions under the Jifty web framework. SSO is a must-have in enterprise applications, so it’s worth a read.

Of course, there were blogs as well. chromatic, always a busy beaver, started the week with another tool salute, this time to Vim. He continued on with another blog, expressing his worry at what he sees as a lack of automated tests in the base Ruby package.

Chris Tyler dropped a line about the demise of the “Core” part of Fedora Core under the new Fedora 7 release.

If you’ve ever wondered why we call hashes hashes, Adriano Ferreira pointed out a recent discussion of the same topic on the Perl mailing list.

Nitesh Dhanjani took a look at the security implications of Google Gears, the new toolkit designed to let browser applications run offline.

You may remember that a few weeks ago, Dave Cross let us know about an upcoming Perl teach-in at the BBC. Well, it happened, and he has a report right here.

Over on the DevCenter blog, chromatic took a look at some Parrot code with Callgrind, and didn’t like what he saw.

Caitlyn Martin reported the addition of GNOME 2.18 support to the Vector Linux 5.8 package.

How do the Microsoft Permissive License and the Apache 2.0 license compare when looking at patents? Well, chromatic took a look…

Looking for a good backup solution? Juliet Kemp likes Bacula, and tells us why.

There are two blogs of note over on the Database side of the force, both by Roland Bouman, and both about offline database support. First he looked at Google Gears, and then he wondered about offline support under MySQL.

Suppose you had to track down the sender of an email? Where would you look? Probably at the logfiles, and Anton Chuvakin takes a look at one way to use them.

It was a quiet week on the Ruby blog (come on folks, let’s make some noise out there). Gregory Brown is looking for innovative Ruby projects to highlight in a new “Ruby Project Spotlight” series he wants to start. Read the details and drop him a line.

* Yes, it STILL stands for the ONLamp Family of Websites

James Turner
Site Editor, ONLamp.com
turner@oreilly.com