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The open-source OpenDocument document standard has been submitted to a key international standards organisation, which could make it more attractive as a desktop solution in the public sector.

The Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (Oasis), which is behind OpenDocument, said it has submitted...

CapitolAdvantage.com started out as a paper directory of members of Congress that founder Bob Hansan sold to corporations in the Washington, DC, area in the late '80s. When the Internet boomed in 1996, Hansan moved everything online and conducted a quiet revolution that has permanently changed the way constituents communicate with their congressmen and senators. Today, the entire operation runs on Red Hat Linux.

The team developing the open source desktop environment claims to have made 'very significant improvements' in performance and memory usage, as they target the embedded market with future versions

Ubuntu Linux has won the prestigious "Best Linux/Open Source Distribution" award at this year's UK Linux and Open Source Awards, after the readership of Linux User & Developer voted for their favourite Linux Distribution. In just under a year, Ubuntu has grown to be one of the most respected versions of Linux, being the most popular distribution on Distrowatch for over six months, as well as winning the inaugural Tux Magazine's Favourite Distribution award in September this year.

"Penguin in the Pew" 2.0 is being offered as a Web-Based Training tutorial by GlobalLiteracy (www.globalliteracy.org) for use in its site and at GospelLearning (www.gospellearning.org). "Penguin in the Pew", a book by Christian Libre Software Advocate, Don Parris, helps Christian ministries discover the advantages of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FOSS). The web-based course enables church staffers and others to understand the license terms, technical challenges and financial hurdles churches may face as they consider their next software upgrade. The course will be delivered using the libre software Learning Management System (LMS), Moodle.

Microsoft's opponents said Tuesday that any settlement between the company and RealNetworks Inc. will not affect the EU's coming court clash with the software giant over a landmark antitrust ruling. Seattle-based RealNetworks, maker of a rival to Microsoft's Media Player, is the company's last big commercial opponent in the EU case, after reaching out-of-court deals with four of the five major parties that had intervened against it.

The NSW Office of State Revenue (OSR) is taking a tough stance against Microsoft’s decision to make the enterprise edition of Windows Vista only available to companies that have signed on to its Software Assurance programme. The tax collection agency has declared it would rather switch desktop operating systems than lock itself into Microsoft’s licensing regime.

JBoss Inc is announcing the addition of business rules and BPEL orchestration to its open source product mix, at its European user conference in Barcelona this week

ndian mobile phone and carrier software vendor Jataayu is porting its Instant Messaging and Presence Service (IMPS) stack to Linux, along with several other device software stacks. It expects to ship several browsing and messaging clients for Linux devices in Q4, 2005, with initial support for MontaVista's Mobilinux OS.

Sendmail. Tcpdump. OpenSSH. In addition to being highly useful software products, the Internet sites used to distribute each of these tools were compromised by attackers over the last few years.

With control of the sites, the bad guys replaced the downloadable installation package for each tool with a "Trojanized" version that included a backdoor bundled in the package. By placing their evil versions on the normal, trusted sites enterprises relied on to download their tools, the bad guys had hit upon the ideal mechanism to propagate their malicious code -- duping systems administrators to take the bait and install their wares for them.

The KOffice team today announced the second maintenance release of the 1.4 series. Among various bugfixes and translation improvements, the KOffice 1.4.2 release further improves support for the OASIS OpenDocument file format and interoperability with OpenOffice.org.

DistroWatch reports - Lineox Enterprise Linux 4.053 with Update 2 available. In version 4.053 the installation environment is rebuilt, so it offers better hardware support during the installation. The x86_64 release requires either AMD Opteron or Athlon64 CPU based computer. Some new Intel Xeon and Pentium IV processors with EM64T (Extended Memory 64 Technology) will also be able to run this version.

OSDir has some great screenshots of Lineox Enterprise Linux 4.053.

One of the first things that is asked of any new project in a modern IT department is that a cost benefit analysis be created to determine if the investment of time and resources makes sense. This takes many forms, but at many companies the idea of return on investment, or ROI, is king.

A new initiative from Novell seeks to unlock a better Linux desktop experience by helping developers better understand how the desktop is used.

Multiple vulnerabilities were identified in Linux Kernel, which could be exploited by local attackers to cause a denial of service or bypass certain security restrictions.

The first issue is due to a memory leak error in "/security/keys/request_key_auth.c", which could be exploited by malicious users to cause a denial of service.

The second vulnerability is due to a memory leak error in "/fs/namei.c" when the CONFIG_AUDITSYSCALL option is enabled, which could be exploited by malicious users to cause a denial of service.

The third flaw is due to an error in the file "drivers/char/drm/drm_stub.c" that does not properly validate "debug" sysfs permissions, which could be exploited by local attackers to bypass certain security restrictions and enable drm debugging.

Cross-Platform Race Challenged Microsoft Developers to Port ASP.NET Apps to Linux

Linus Torvalds announced 2.6.14-rc4, "the final -rc before a 2.6.14 release." The 2.6.14 merge cycle began with the release of the 2.6.13 kernel on August 28'th [story], allowing for two weeks of time during which large changes were allowed into the mainline kernel [story]. For the past month, primarily only bug fixes have been accepted as the kernel developers have worked toward a stable release. In his email, Linus summarized the changes in the latest release candidate:

"In the diffstat, most of the changes are one-liners, with the main exceptions being some sparc64 work (fix user-space corruption due to FP save/restore) and the new Megaraid SAS driver. There's some networking fixes, and a couple of driver updates (scsi: aacraid, net: cassini, and watchdog: pcwd_pci). Along with a x86-64 suspend/resume page table corruption and some new defconfig files for ARM, that rounds out the bigger chunks."

Adoption of Zend Core for Oracle Accelerates Enterprise Web Application Development and Deployment

Penguins are some of the most improbable animals on the planet. They have wings and feathers but cannot fly. They are not fish, but they have been recorded as deep as 1,755 feet underwater. And the most improbable is the emperor penguin, which waddles across 70 miles of Antarctic ice to reach its breeding grounds. New research on penguin DNA suggests that the emperor also has the most ancient lineage of living penguins.

A high-performance computing (HPC) Linux service tool for efficient mapping of Message Passing Interface (MPI) tasks to the IBM Blue Gene/L Supercomputer. The algorithms used for mapping are based on the paper Optimizing Task Layout on the Blue Gene/L supercomputer. [pdf] In this paper it talks about the extensive amount of data transmitted between processors for producing maps and the challenge of minimizing the communication time.