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Salt Lake City, Utah-based Linux Networx has named a new CFO, saying today that it has hired Robert Neumeister, Jr. as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer for the firm.

Last week I installed Fedora Core 5 on two aging but serviceable systems: my eMachines desktop (2GHz Celeron, 768MB RAM) and a Toshiba Satellite 1805-S204 notebook (1GHz Celeron, 512MB PC100 RAM). The desktop had previously run Fedora Core 4 while the laptop had been running Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) for a few months and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4 Update 1 prior to that.

Seeking to offset recent gains by Microsoft, a leading open source evangelist has launched a service designed to boost domain parking on open source software. Author and developer Bruce Perens created OpenSourceParking.com in response to a 5 percent market share gain by Microsoft in this month's Netcraft web server survey. The shift was due to domain registrar Go Daddy shifting 4.5 million parked domains from Linux to Windows Server 2003. "It's time for the Free Software/Open Source community to fight back," wrote Perens, urging open source supporters to park their undeveloped domains with the new service, which runs on the Linux operating system and Lighttpd web server.

Membership in the OpenDocument Format Alliance has almost quadrupled over the past month. The Alliance, a coalition of international organizations whose goal is to enable governments to have direct management and greater control over their documents, was launched March 3 with 36 initial members, but that has grown to 138.

Linux was one of the first cross-platform operating systems to use 64-bit processors, and now 64-bit systems are becoming commonplace in servers and desktops. Many developers are now facing the need to port applications from 32-bit to 64-bit environments. With the introduction of Intel Itanium and other 64-bit processors, making software 64-bit-ready has become increasingly important.

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation is offing NTT's open source codes of the 128-bit block Cipher algorithm "Camellia", jointly developed with Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (Mitsubishi) in 2000, using the C and Java languages on the Camellia home page. This is based on the policy of expanding the international infrastructure technology to support a secure advanced information society as the first Japanese encryption algorithm.

Chinese domestic software company Redflag Linux has set up a joint venture company with Japan's Miracle Linux and South Korea's Haansoft to jointly promote the Linux operating system.

Drake Consulting launches Web service that stops viruses and blocks spam.

Opinion: Microsoft is Oracle's most threatening rival in its quest to get its own piece of the Linux pie.

Oracle's decision to pay $US220 million for telco billing software developer, Portal Software fits neatly into its reported ambitions to gain, through acquisition, its own Linux distribution: release of a Linux version of the Portal billing system appears imminent.

Open source software advocate Eric S. Raymond is reporting that his name and copyright information for a bit of MIT-licensed code called the GIFLIB library are included in the end user license agreement of a Microsoft application called Expression 3.3.

The following instructions decribe the process for installing Knoppix Linux on a USB flash drive. This allows the OS to be booted directly from the flash drive. The instructions have been tested to work on Dell Optiplex GX270 and GX280s.

Dawn Foster comments on Dana Blankenhorn's post about the fragmented Open Source market. [Dawn's blog post is important, as it highlights the definition of a fragmented market - something that I view as a rather positive thing because the lack of a clear market leader means it will be more difficult for any one company to dominate the market as other companies have and do. Is a fragmented market a beneficial thing? Or is that a matter of opinion? - dcparris]

Jitterbit released the latest version of its Open Source Business Integration software today. The new release of Jitterbit has a revamped installation that will make it much easier and faster to get the server up and running. This version also includes better XML and web services functionality, added support for databases, and better overall stability.

You can get directly to the downloads at the link below.

Download Jitterbit 0.9.9

Linus Torvalds has had an opportunity to examine the testing and analysis by Hans-Werner Hilse which we reported on yesterday, and has blessed it as being correct. The reason that the virus is not propagating itself in the latest kernel versions is due to a bug in how GCC handles specific registers in a particular system call. He has coded a patch for the kernel to allow the virus to work on even the latest Linux kernel.

In the constellation of Windows network managers, Vlad Mazek's a shiny new star. He's a hyper-active Windows crusader who administers a fleet of enterprise-class servers. So with all that Windows experience, why did Mazek choose Linux for his latest Windows-promoting project? Mazek says, when you get right down to it, it's strictly about cost: Linux is cheaper, even for a Windows MVP. That's bad news for Redmond. And very good news for Linux.

A week before the spring LinuxWorld tradeshow got underway in Boston in March, Novell's chairman and CEO, Jack Messman, was quoted in the trade press as saying that eventually, when all the dust clears, there would only be two commercial suppliers of the Linux operating system: Red Hat and Novell.

Lawrence Lessig and Richard Stallman here give their reasoning behind opposing DRM, and Lessig explains his previous comments