When they hear the word PAM, most people think of a certain blonde Canadian Playmate, but readers of this Web site surely will recognize the basic element of Linux security: the Pluggable Authentication Modules. So let's talk about how this PAM works, and look at some examples of how it is used.

Video and audio support will soon be built directly into Firefox, by way of the free Vorbis and Theora codecs, and Mozilla is using the opportunity to advance multimedia accessibility for hearing-impaired and seeing-impaired users. Although HTML 5 does not officially include Ogg Vorbis and Theora as baseline codecs for the new VIDEO and AUDIO tags, Mozilla has adopted them for its own implementation. Researcher Silvia Pfeiffer is leading a Mozilla Foundation-funded effort to integrate support for closed captioning and other multimedia accessibility features into the Ogg formats and their implementation in Firefox.

OpenOffice.org 3.0, which is being released today, is not the great leap forward in look and feel that version 2.0 represented, but it justifies its label as a major release with dozens of changes, some major, some minor, but in all more than can be easily summarized.

The Sun Report Builder extension adds powerful reporting capabilities to OpenOffice.org Base, and using it to create reports is easy, as we can see with a simple example. Suppose you're a freelance writer, and you want to keep track of your submissions using a simple OpenOffice.org Base database that stores article titles, publications, submission dates, current status, and payment rates. This is a useful solution, but adding reporting capabilities turns the database into a handy analytical tool. With Sun Report Builder you can generate a list of articles grouped by publication, shows the sum of article payments, and displays a chart of payments for each publication.

This week in the ongoing town-hall debate that is the Linux.com forums, the participants were asked about troubleshooting file permissions, testing Web pages on multiple browsers, and deciding what counts as a low-resource machine. All that, plus your chance at a one-on-one session with unanswered questions.

Reader Christian Nielsen wrote from Sweden to tell us he and his girlfriend have named their baby Linux, after the operating system, and attached this darling photo.

Google's Picasa is all about photos -- it helps you instantly find, edit, and share all the pictures on your computer. Although it isn't released as open source it is free to download and use from Google's Web site. The new version 3, which is currently in beta, is available for Windows as well as Linux.

Virtualization software can help you run programs that your native Linux distro wouldn't. While Linux users have many virtualization options, none comes close to the all-encompassing VMware Workstation 6.5. Introduced last month, VMware Workstation 6.5 continues the tradition of outshining and outpacing the competition with a host of useful new features, and boldly goes where no virtualization software has gone before -- into the realm of virtual machines with accelerated 3-D graphics. Despite the advances, some of the new features are still in beta, so Workstation 6.5 might not be the best virtualization option for everyone.

Yesterday, I looked at the major applications in the first beta for KOffice 2.0. Now it's the turn of the rest of the beta: The KPlato project manager, KChart, the vector graphics editor Karbon, and the raster graphics editor Krita.

Foresight Linux is best known by many as the distribution that features the Conary package management system. Perhaps soon it may become known as your child's favorite distro. The recent release of Foresight Kid's Edition 1.0 introduces a new generation to the benefits of Linux and open source software. Not that kids care about that -- they'll just appreciate the unlimited hours of fun at their fingertips.

Whether you believe that punctuality is "the politeness of kings" or "the art of guessing how late the other fellow is going to be," you can count on your Linux box for information about local times across the globe, so that you can plan a punctual VoIP call, stock transaction, or meeting. Here are some world clocks that work well on the desktop.

KOffice has been trailing the office application leaders for a long time. Despite years of development, it has yet to match OpenOffice.org feature for feature, although its features are complete enough that they have attracted a loyal community. Judging from the first beta, KOffice 2.0 will still not rival OpenOffice.org or other free software rivals, but it should be a major step in that direction.

As important as security is, remaining current with every development is hard, and evaluating possible vulnerabilities across a network can be quite a chore. You need a way to both automate tests and make sure you're running the most appropriate and up-to-date tests. Open Vulnerability Assessment System (OpenVAS) is a network security scanner that includes a central server and a graphical front end. The server allows you to run several different network vulnerability tests (NVT) written in Nessus Attack Scripting Language (NASL), which OpenVAS updates frequently.

Few free and open source software projects have attracted such a range of reactions as Mono. On one hand, as an implementation of Microsoft's .Net that's sponsored by Novell, it has been vilified both for the company it keeps and as a possible source of patent claims, should Microsoft choose to get nasty. On the other hand, Mono has been the platform of choice for such major projects as Second Life, which uses it to increase the efficiency of its servers. This week, as the Mono project reached version 2.0, Miguel de Icaza, the project's founder and maintainer, talked with Linux.com about the history of the project, its application and the criticism leveled at it, and where the project goes from here.

If I had had SpeedCrunch or Qalculate! during high school, finishing homework really would've been child's play. From breaking down complex algebraic equations, to solving your calculus problems, to performing geometric computations and providing statistical answers, SpeedCrunch and Qalculate! are tools that offer quick solutions to difficult questions.

A reliable network monitoring and management solution must accurately detect network devices such as routers, servers, and client workstations. It must be able to display a map of the whole network, monitor the health and performance of each device, and have a way to notify someone of a problem by email, text message, or other form of communication. It should be able to fix a problem by restarting services or running specific programs. It should generate detailed reports that you can analyze easily to help prevent future incidents. Finally, a decent monitoring system must be easy to use, deploy, and customize according to your monitoring needs. Let's use these standards to see if GroundWork Monitor Community Edition is up to the task.

Sidux, a relatively new desktop Linux distribution, is based on Sid, the unstable developmental branch of Debian. The developers strive for an easy-to-install and easy-to-use modern Debian derivative, and pride themselves on remaining true to the principles and values of the Debian project. Despite a few inconveniences, I like Sidux a bit more each time I use it.

Many audio, video, and graphics professionals would like to make the switch to Linux, but don't want to deal with the hassle of figuring out multimedia on Linux or are scared off by the purported lack of such tools. I created Vector Linux Multimedia Bonus Disc (MMBD) to address this problem and perception. It's a complete multimedia creation and production system that contains hundreds of the best multimedia applications available on Linux.

The first essays of the school year are coming due, and with the essays comes the need to outline and plan. GNU/Linux users are fortunate to have a number of outlining applications from which to choose. True, some outliners have become obsolete, and you will be lucky to get programs like GNOME-Think or the once-popular KnowIt to run on a modern distribution. But you can still choose among OpenOffice.org, TuxCards, NoteCase, Emacs, and VimOutliner for doing your planning.

The wave of cheap netbooks, mini laptops, or ultra-mobile PCs has crested with the cheapest yet, the NPX-9000 from Carapelli. Though it was announced in July with great fanfare at a price of £65 (or $110), it has yet to appear on the vendor's Web site. But we got our hands on one of the first units to escape from the factory and put it through its paces. We found that you get what you pay for -- if that.