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CentOS 4 is now one year old. Wow, it seems like it has been much longer. The CentOS Project has had some major changes and meet many milestones since that release. Some of those include:

I have to confess that whilst I like all sorts of music, a bit of techno can be just what the doctor ordered. It blows the cobwebs away and gets the blood running. Making one's own can be even more fun. There are three applications that allow for this sort of music creation that I know of for Linux. Freebirth, Reborn and LMMS.

Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD, Mandriva, Red Hat, and Ubuntu released security advisories this week. Affected packages include BMV, GPdf, Xpdf, pdftohtml, tar, Heimdal, PostgreSQL, and irssi-text. Fedora distributed a kernel update addressing several security vulnerabilities in the kernel. No security advisories were issued by Gentoo.

In 1999, Ethan Galstad was thinking about starting a business with a friend. Among other things on their to-do list was digging up software to monitor their network and flag any problems. They couldn't afford any of the programs on the market, however, so Galstad wrote his own. Almost on a whim, he posted it on an open-source Web site where geeks around the world browse code and download programs for free.

Galstad's original business idea never took off. But his software quickly became a hit. Some 50,000 companies downloaded the open-source project, called Nagios, and rely on it to monitor their networks. Galstad, now 31, works with other coders around the world to keep the software up to date and earns money by consulting. "It has really grown on its own, beyond anything I could have imagined," he says.

South Africans are becoming more mobile, as evidenced by a 36.9% growth in the notebook market in 2005. This comes at a time when the desktop market's growth rate is slowing – due to the shift towards portables and a slowing corporate refresh activity.

Microsoft's budget for political lobbying exceeded that of Enron, the judge residing over the antitrust case has heard.

The software giant's budget for its Political Action Committee (PAC) increased from about $16,000 in 1995 to $1.6 million in 2000, according to Edward Roeder, a self-styled expert on efforts to influence the U.S. government, and founder of Sunshine Press Services, a news agency devoted to investigating money in politics.

[Ed:She's getting ready to hear much, much more from LXer. Soon -tadelste.]

Microsoft Office is facing an organized challenge from an alliance of government bodies and IT vendors that are promoting OpenDocument Format (ODF).

The OSA (Open Source Academy) has launched a website offering information on procurement and a free 'ask an expert' service.

The OSA, which is funded under the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's e-Innovations programme, was established to encourage local authorities to make more use of OSS (open-source software) systems, such as Linux, StarOffice and OpenOffice, as well as locally developed applications.

ISPConfig released version 2.2.0 yesterday, featuring a new installer, support for 64-bit processors and the option of running it on Slackware and Trustix Linux the same day that Tectonic ran its review on version 2.1.2.

On Digg.com

Brian Cantrill authored the Dtrace facility in OpenSolaris. Recently, the folks at FreeBSD announced they were porting it to their distribution. The Dtrace facility has enjoyed remarkable success.

Recently, at the South California Linux Expo, one of Brian's colleagues, Alan Leventhal demonstrated how to use Dtrace on Linux applications to improve performance. Fortunately, this OpenSolaris has use for more than just one operating system. Brian has shown a propensity to support open-source outside of the principal OS community. You should find this report useful in understanding Dtrace, its history and use.

You may also recall that the Linux kernel team has similar tools providing much of the same functionality. Judge for yourself if you believe the kernel developers have

Debian has released updated packages to address multiple vulnerabilities identified in Gpdf. These flaws are due to unspecified errors that could be exploited by attackers to execute arbitrary commands via a specially crafted Portable Document Format (PDF) file. No further details have been disclosed.

The Globus Consortium Journal (http://www.globusconsortium.org/journal) this month features Grid security perspectives from a range of experts from both the open source and vendor community.

The registration process is now open for a new version of the Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) specification. CGL v3.2 incorporates new requirements based on user feedback, according to the OSDL (Open Source Development Labs), the member-funded industry group that maintains CGL requirements.

On March 8th and 9th 2006, Richard Matthew Stallman is to hold a couple of lectures in Zagreb, Croatia as part of the series of lectures named "Society of Knowledge and Free Sharing of Information" ("Društvo znanja i slobodna razmjena informacija") as announced by the Multimedia Institute in Croatia and the Croatian Academic and Research Network (CARnet).

Year-over-year results show continued improvement led by product revenue growth

New Performance Dashboard and Snapshot Support Provide Powerful Cluster Control and Instant Data Protection

Linspire Inc. and one of its biggest desktop Linux rivals, Ubuntu, are talking about collaborating to offer Linspire's CNR (Click-N-Run) application download service to Ubuntu users. CNR is a subscription service ($20 annually) through Linspire can install thousands of software programs with "literally" one click, Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony said.

A U.S. Army supercomputing center with a legacy that dates back to the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) launched in 1946 is moving to Linux-based clusters that will more than double its computing capability.

The success of Linux and other open source projects has depended heavily on the support and investment of major IT companies, Oracle Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison said on Thursday.

"Open source becomes successful when major industrial corporations invest heavily in that open source project," Ellison said at a Tokyo news conference. "Every open source product that has become tremendously successful became successful because of huge dollar investments from commercial IT operations like IBM and Intel and Oracle and others," he said.

Redmond (WA) - Acknowledging that the European Commission did grant Microsoft access to documents pertaining to the EC's communications with the monitoring trustee it appointed to evaluate Microsoft's compliance with its 2004 antitrust ruling, Microsoft accused the EC, in a Supplemental Response this morning, of secretly collaborating with four companies, apparently to sway the opinion of the trustee.