Showing all newswire headlines

It was discovered that certain messages would cause mutt to crash. Mutt 1.4.2 fixes this bug. See CAN-2004-0078.

Sooooo, without further ado, following is a brief collection of some of the headlines posted shortly after Firefox’s release, categorized by the format in which the headline was worded.

The following essay is a response to Russell Jones' "open source vs. closed source" article Thursday in DevX. It is written by one of Jones' own colleagues at DevX, software engineer Ladd Angelius, in the spirit of free and open discussion.

When a machine is booted, one of the tasks performed by the initscripts package is to remove temporary files and stale locks. This script ("/etc/rc.d/init.d/cleanup" in CL9, and "/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit" in CL8), however, incorrectly removed some important files in /var/lock/samba needed by the samba server, causing it to behave incorrectly. The most affected service is winbind, because the idmap file was removed at every boot, causing a loss of the user <-> userid mapping.

The Eclipse Platform, which provides a very powerful Integrated Development Environment (IDE), includes its own help system based on an XML table-of-contents referencing HTML files. What isn't immediately obvious is that you don't have to write Eclipse plug-ins to use it.

I’ve been using the same operating system on my desktop for the past six years. My desktop is productive, stable, secure, manageable and, best of all, free... By the way, in case you were wondering I use the Gentoo Linux (www.gentoo.org) operating system on my desktop and no, I won’t be migrating to Windows this year.

"Microsoft spokesman Tom Pilla said in an interview with The Associated Press that some incomplete portions of the Windows 2000 and Windows NT4 source code had been 'illegally made available on the Internet.'"

A newly-conducted survey of Australian and New Zealand tech users has lent weight to Linux' desktop prospects, with more than three-quarters of respondents saying it will improve its strength in the area.

These Linux server clusters consist of RLX's Control Tower XT and HPC Cluster Manager software, combined with the 1U high RLX RackModule Servers, the HPC ServerBlades or the RLX HPC ServerBlades with InfiniBand. They also include on-site integration and configuration with packages such as LSF, MIP Pro, OpenPBS or BLAST.

Greg MacManus, of iDEFENSE Labs, reports finding several potentially exploitable buffer overflows in XFree86's font code.

Updated XFree86 packages that fix a privilege escalation vulnerability are now available.

Updated PWLib packages that contain fixes for security issues found during protocol testing by the NISCC are now available.

Don't be naive enough to think that because you run Linux you won't be a target for hackers. If you rely on Linux for hosting or transmitting sensitive data, you should check out Security-Enhanced Linux, created by the U.S. NSA and available for free.

Could OSS have saved the '97 Mars Pathfinder mission some headaches?

Novell is making Linux central to its efforts in Europe, and is considering other open-source projects, according to the company's new European president

Novell has effectively ordered SCO to drop charges against IBM based on IBM-owned Sequent's obligations regarding its System V Unix licence.

The United States District Court in Seattle has ruled in favor of Lindows.com Inc in the dispute over the trademark of the generic word, "windows." The company, will be permitted to use the name "Lindows" indefinitely or until the final decision in the case.

In parts 1 and 2 of this series I discussed database front end development tools and RAD environments for the BASIC language on Linux. I'll conclude by looking at tools for smaller programming languages (I won't talk about C++/KDevelop/Anjuta or Java/Eclipse) and little-known or independently developed languages.

SSH keys can provide a relief to system administrators. Are you tired of typing in strong passwords over and over again to connect machines you admin? Using SSH keys and ssh-agent allows you to type in a passphrase only once on your workstation. SSH generates a private and a public key.

New mutt packages are available for Slackware 8.1, 9.0, 9.1, and -current. These have been upgraded to version 1.4.2i to fix a buffer overflow that could lead to a machine compromise. All sites using mutt should upgrade to the new mutt package.