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A rift over development procedures has exposed fractures at the highest level of the Linux community and raised questions about the future direction of the open-source operating system.

How one professor designed a class on Linux system administration--and how you can follow the class along on-line.

Security administrators put in considerable time setting up e-mail quarantines and checking on threats that have been cordoned off. But that's too much work, according to senior vice president of Sendmail Inc., John Stormer, and J.F. Sullivan, Sendmail's director of product development. In this FYI interview, Stormer and Sullivan provide an introduction to the aspects of commercial Sendmail that could make the traditionally time-consuming quarantining process much easier for administrators.

School is almost out, and before you know it Duke’s Unix computers will be as well. This summer, the Office of Information Technology’s division of Academic Technology Services will be at work replacing the machines that run with Unix—an operating system commonly used in scientific fields—in labs around campus, including the engineering lab in 106 Teer Library. The current crop of Sun Ultra 10s and Sun Blades will be replaced with new Dell hardware. These new machines will run CentOS 3.3 as supported by Linux@DUKE. CentOS is a distribution of the popular open-source operating system Linux.

Andrew Morton, one of the main developers of the Linux kernel, pointed out some structural problems in the kernel development at Linux.conf.au 2005 in Canberra, Australia. He believes that not enough attention is paid to testing during the development of the kernel. New functions, he claims, are not tested enough because testers do not receive any thanks - much less money - for their time-consuming work. He feels that errors will thus find their way into the kernel.

Taking a page from Microsoft's playbook, MontaVista today announced an embedded Linux platform aimed specifically at mobile phones. "Mobilinux" is based on a 2.6 kernel with real-time and power-management enhancements, and targets "feature-phones" as well as the higher-end devices targeted by Microsoft with its Windows Mobile for Smartphones offering.

SugarCRM is taking steps to push open source business apps to a new level, adding a raft of new upgrades to its open source customer relationship management (CRM) platform. Sugar Suite 3.0, which will be available April 30, will add a wide range of sales-savvy support tools, including campaign management, email marketing, document management, sales forecasting, and even a wireless access option for access from the road. The new features are built on top of SugarCRM's core open source sales force automation (SFA) and CRM platform.

IBM and Israel's Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labour have agreed to a pact to foster development of open-standards technology by Israeli start-ups.

PGI-compiled LS-DYNA delivers 30 percent faster performance on dual-core processor than previously published single-processor results

As system and network administrators, we play many roles. We are the ones who provide stable and secure environments for electronic business in all of its forms, from email to accounting systems to mission-critical Web applications. However, despite our best efforts, disaster will occasionally strike. In this series, I'll present what I feel are the 10 most important steps a systems administrator can take to ensure that when that dreaded 3 a.m. page hits, you're prepared to react quickly, assess the situation, and make everything right again. I call these the Ten Commandments of system administration.

With $1.7 billion in cash and ranking among the top 25 most profitable companies on the NW200, Novell has more than a fighting chance with its Linux-plus-management strategy.

For the first time in my life, I want to thank Larry McVoy. He recently eliminated a major weakness of the free software community, by announcing the end of his campaign to entice free software projects to use and promote his non-free software. Soon, Linux development will no longer use this program, and no longer spread the message that non-free software is a good thing if it's convenient.

Jason Macer owns OSI Hosting.net, a hosting provider incorporated in Texas. Macer's claims in a NewsForge story last October about having "6,000 people signed up for dedicated servers" proved to be false. So did Macer's claims that he was going to open a huge facility and employ thousands of people in the chronically depressed city of Texarkana. But Macer still claims, despite evidence that his company has virtually no significant assets or income, and no employees other than himself, that by mid-May he is going to acquire three companies in Austin, Texas. He says he can't tell us where he's getting the money for these acquisitions because all his deals are covered by non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). We're just supposed to trust him.

roseman sent us links to a couple of online newspaper features about Mozilla Firefox. The first comes from Australia's Herald Sun and is entitled Keep tabs on Firefox. The short article mentions security, tabbed browsing, popup blocking and extensions as Firefox's main attractions. The report does suffer from a few factual errors though, such as its statement that "Firefox is produced by Mozilla, a company that used to be known as Netscape" (as we all know, the relationship is a little more complicated than that).

The ideas in this article came from my project to give my retired father a computer running Debian Sarge and KDE. All the ideas can be transposed to any modern Linux/Unix distribution, and most of these ideas should work with any desktop system.

Earlier this month, we reported that Mozilla Foundation President Mitchell Baker was included in the 2005 Time 100. In a weblog posting, Mitchell describes how she found out that she made the Time list. She talks about her first meeting with Time (for an article that never ran) and how she got nominated for an award she'd never even heard of with no explanation.

Ewald Kicker has written a detailed tutorial about debugging a PHP script inside Quanta Plus using the Gubed debugger. The document is aimed at beginners and describes step-by-step how to set up and use the debugger for your web projects.

HP has changed the name of its Linux operation to the Open Source & Linux Organization (OSLO) to advertise its open source sympathies, it said. It's supposed to signify HP's focus on open source beyond the Linux operating system. Martin Fink will continue to run the unit.

Turbolinux is enjoying its fourth consecutive year of growth in the China Linux market, after a report issued by IDC this week said its share saw significant growth in 2004.

Open source development got a bit faster this week thanks to the release of the GCC 4.0 compiler. GCC is included in every Linux distribution and has been one of the leading compilers in use over the last 15 years.