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Alan Cox discovered that the isag utility (which graphically displays data collected by the sysstat tools), creates a temporary file without taking proper precautions. This vulnerability could allow a local attacker to overwrite files with the privileges of the user invoking isag.

A vulnerability was discovered in oftpd, an anonymous FTP server, whereby a remote attacker could cause the oftpd process to crash by specifying a large value in a PORT command.

A vulnerability was discovered in squid, an Internet object cache, whereby access control lists based on URLs could be bypassed (CAN-2004-0189). Two other bugs were also fixed with patches squid-2.4.STABLE7-url_escape.patch (a buffer overrun which does not appear to be exploitable) and squid-2.4.STABLE7-url_port.patch (a potential denial of service).

Despite having pockets of communities spread across the country, open source software (OSS) has no future in the country's budding software development business, according to a software development expert.

It looks like I'm going to have to reconsider something I'd been taking for granted -- that Linux on the desktop, and especially the laptop, was a non-starter in the operating systems race. While I wasn't paying sufficient attention, the proverbial tortoise has been playing some serious catch-up.

Any Gentoo user knows how great this distro is. Any Gentoo user also knows the amount of time it takes to install this distro, and to damage your partition is just not an affordable option. I've managed to take the standard 20-30 hour installation and bring it down to about 2-3 hours of time. This guide will try and lead you into the correct direction of the Gentoo installation. It will NOT give you all the apps, Window Managers and so on you are looking for in the distro, but it will get you to the point where it will be very easy to have an operating computer while getting those things.

Much as I like the for-fee Xandros version of Linux, longtime readers know I'm basically a cheapskate. And if you are, too, you'll enjoy our parting shot at Linux, namely, how to get one of the free distributions. Free means free, no kidding. Pretty much everything you get with commercial distributions is included, for example, word processor, spreadsheet, Web browsers, e-mail. About the only thing you don't get is: 1. support; and 2. some of the emulation programs we talked about last week that allow you to run Windows programs.

The Fall distribution release period of 2003 was not the most interesting, nor the least interesting in recent memory. For the most part all of the distributions got better, but not so much that those running distributions now going on a year in age are really missing anything terribly substantial. We did find a few interesting points worth revisiting, however, and those deal with Mandrake Linux 9.2 and Fedora Core 1.

Those who revere Linux can’t imagine why Microsoft doesn’t just give Windows a proper burial. After all, Linux is open, it’s free, it performs beautifully on a wide range of hardware, and there is a massive library of open and commercial Linux software.

Novell received some oomph to both its servers and desktops last week with several announcements that pair its SuSE Linux operating system with machines from HP and IBM.

Sun Microsystems Inc. is pondering the possibility of open-sourcing more of its software—this time with its next-generation 3-D windowing system, called Project Looking Glass, which is under development.

We are very pleased to announce International Month in the Mozilla community. The primary aims are to promote and educate about the localisation (l10n) and internationalisation (i18n) capabilities of Mozilla software, and to show how truly global the software can be and the community is.

In a newsgroup posting, Asa Dotzler has announced that the Mozilla 1.7 branch will become the new long-lived stable branch, replacing 1.4. The stable branch is intended to act as a baseline for developers building Mozilla-based products, with critical bugs fixed on the branch as well as the trunk.

The free software community was reading the tea leaves Friday, too, and there were some distinctly worrisome parts of the deal from that perspective. Most notably, Ballmer and McNealy emphasized, as did their press release, the ``intellectual property'' element of their new arrangement. The chief threat these days to Linux and other open-source software is not a lack of quality. It's lawyers.

Sun Microsystems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. on Friday settled their bitter antitrust battles, uniting the two rivals to take on the increasingly popular Linux operating system.

CoLinux has been ported to linux. This, combined with some much needed stabilization in their 0.6.0 release means it's closing in on being a decent free VMWare clone in terms of platform support... well, if you only want to run Linux VMs.

Contrary to SCO CEO Darl McBride's comments, Linus Torvalds says that he did want to see the Unix source code but couldn't—not from fear of "tainted" code, but rather because of SCO's NDA.

It took seven years, millions upon millions of shareholders' dollars, and way too many snide remarks from both sides, but Sun Microsystems and Microsoft have now stopped their Hatfield vs. McCoys feud and are apparently ready to play nicely together in the marketplace.

I was eager to get my hands on the newest version of SUSE Linux, the first version produced by the company under the Novell corporate umbrella. Like many others, I wondered how it would jell. SUSE has been a leading commercial proponent of the KDE desktop environment. Common wisdom the past few years has held that if you liked KDE, SUSE was your best bet. If Gnome was your choice, Red Hat was the best way to go. Prior to the SUSE purchase, Novell acquired Ximian, with its deep involvement with the Gnome project. Would KDE suddenly find itself a second class environment on the distro that loved it? Many feared that would be the case. What I learned with the beta should go a long way towards allaying those fears.

The fact that Mandrake 10.0 is coded with Linux kernel 2.6 means the number of unique users it can handle has increased from 65,000 to over 4 billion, with 1 billion concurrent processes on a single system. It also means it is more secure. In short, it is better equipped than the previous Mandrake distro to take a lead role in the data center.