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Red Hat has announced compatibility certification with Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language (OVAL) definitions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4 security advisories. Red Hat will now produce and support OVAL patch definitions to provide a structured and machine-readable version of advisories, allowing OVAL-compatible tools to accurately test for the presence of vulnerabilities.

The next few years will see many companies opting to mix and match proprietary and open source software where they see fit, according to analyst group Gartner.

New Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian and Novell channel chief Steve Erdman spoke with CRN Editor In Chief Heather Clancy and senior writer Paula Rooney about the company's strategy in the wake of the departure of CEO Jack Messman. Below are excerpts from the interview.

Novell CEO Jack Messman has been ousted from the company he has been involved with since 1982. In a desperate management shake-up, both Messman and CFO Joseph Tibbetts were dismissed by Novell's board of directors, after failing to turn the beleagured company around.

JamboWorks Launches New Open Source Online Service for National Lampoon

Playing on Apple's past "Switch" ad campaign, which was aimed at getting Windows users to migrate to Apple's Mac OS X-based computers, a few longtime Mac and open-source gurus are vocally publicizing their switch away from Apple's platform to more open-source solutions.

According to Distrowatch.com, Damn Small Linux is the most popular microLinux distribution. What began as a toy project to stuff the maximum software inside a 50MB ISO file has matured into a refined community project known for its speed and versatility. DSL includes the ultra-lightweight FluxBox window manager, two Web browsers, Slypheed email client and news reader, xpdf PDF viewer, XMMS with MPEG media file support for playing audio and video, BashBurn CD burner, XPaint image editing, VNCViewer and rdesktop to control Windows and Linux desktops remotely, and more. If they could do all this in 50 megs, imagine what they could do in more space. Last month the DSL developers released DSL-Not, a.k.a. DSL-N 0.1 RC1. It's 83.5MB of DSL coated with GTK sugar. Yummy!

We have been trialling the various beta programmes from the main online mail-behemoths since their respective inceptions.

In fact, we have been unfortunate enough to have to use each one daily and today we’re going to take a quick look at each service, comparing and contrasting each product’s offerings.

Opinion: As others have done, Novell has called in a former IBM exec to serve as CEO. The company has some catch-up to do.

Novell has unveiled a new, comprehensive training course for its SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 completely self-contained on a portable USB drive.

Martin Taylor, best known for his role in leading Microsoft's anti-Linux 'Get the Facts' campaign, has abruptly left the company - just as one of his chief foes began a joint effort with the company.

Though Harald Welte's contributions to the free software community are many, the work he is best known for may well be the gpl-violations.org effort. By pursuing those who ship his code (and that of others he represents) without complying with the source requirements of the GPL, Harald has secured the release of much code into the community, established a precedent upholding the GPL in German court, and greatly increased the respect many companies have for the GPL. Thanks to Harald, the GPL has some teeth.

Looks like it is do or die now for Novell and Suse. Top two execs ousted apparently because they haven't been able to compete with Red Hat.

Motorola has joined the Eclipse open source community which supports the adoption of open-source embedded software and tools including Linux.

Evolis embraces the Linux giveaway policy and the driver can therefore be downloaded free of charge from the Evolis Web site

[Next, they should embrace the open policy of Linux by getting their driver source to the kernel developers. -- grouch]

In my inestimably valuable opinion, we need programmers (and related disciplines like QA, advanced math, and design) more than almost anything else. We’re in the very infancy of the computer age, and already we are intensively computerized, from toasters and refrigerators to inventory tags to vehicles to big ole factories.

So where are all these programmers going to come from? Not the US, with its laughable public education, scorn for science and engineering, and gutted colleges and universities.

To some, the arena of systems management is one exclusively controlled by an old guard of proprietary vendors like IBM, CA and Hewlett-Packard Co. However, a spate of new applications in systems management are proving that open source may have the clout to stake a claim in this market as well.

The CD includes a complete set of Dzongkha-localized applications, namely the Gnome environment, the OpenOffice suite, the Mozilla Web browser, the Evolution mail reader and GAIM as instant messaging application.

Firefox, iTunes, and Skype were the top 3 applications in a list of 15 with the most security vulnerabilities, a Cambridge, Mass.-based security company said this week.

The list from Bit9 calls out applications frequently downloaded by individuals (and thus perhaps not sanctioned by the enterprise) which have at least one critical vulnerability, and that rely on the end user, not the corporate IT department, to manually patch or upgrade to fix bugs.

[FUD alert! Notice how the set of "applications" is artificially limited to those "that rely on the end user [...] to manually patch". This leaves out Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.x. I strongly recommend the author take a look at Secunia's Vulnerability Report for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.x and compare it to Secunia's Vulnerability Report for Mozilla Firefox 1.x. MS IE6.x has 19 unpatched vulnerabilities. Firefox 1.x has 4. Even with all vendor patches applied, MS IE6.x has more unpatched, "moderately critical" vulnerabilities than the total number of unpatched vulnerabilities in Firefox 1.x. None of Firefox's unpatched vulnerabilities reach the level of "moderately critical". Put those numbers in your FUD-pipe and smoke 'em! -- grouch].

The MEPIS team released the second release candidate of SimplyMEPIS 6.0, on June 21. RC2 adds bug fixes, security updates, and screen resolution detection, founder and lead developer Warren Woodford said. The distribution now also includes monitor resolution autodetection.