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I work as a senior sysadmin for the University of Seville in Spain, where we use a myriad of operating systems. Here are the top 10 utilities I use in my daily basic admin activities.

We've gone from official to announced, captain

[Ed: The interesting part is the comment about this being part of HP's Sun Attack Program. Let's see if I have this right. HP is going to attack Sun by putting Sun's software on their boxes? Perhaps the Bush Administration should try this approach with Al-Qa'ida? Or maybe our law enforcement agencies should fight crack dealers by selling crack! - dcparris]

IP management software firm Palamida is working on a number of fronts to make it easier -- and safer -- to bring Open Source into the IT enterprise. Palamida CEO Mark Tolliver told OET that improving visibility will be a key to improving adoption in 2006. “The real-world situation here is that Open Source is a done deal with Linux, Apache and even more and more with the Firefox browser. Enterprise IT has seen the benefits in huge cost-savings, and without a lot of problems with maintenance, security or other issues,” Palamida CEO Mark Tolliver told OET.

On September 27, Sun released StarOffice 8, their cross-platform office suite, which they believe to be the best alternative to the business standard, Microsoft Office. This new product release along with the release of OpenOffice.org 2.0, on October 20, was a watershed event for open source office suites. With a host of new features and increased functionality, both suites have never before offered such a robust and feasible alternative to the undisputed productivity suite leader, Microsoft Office. Sun Microsystems has been developing the product since their acquisition of Star Division, the previous maker of StarOffice, in August of 1999. For the first time in its history, StarOffice (and OpenOffice.org) has the best chance to convert millions of Microsoft Office users as a result of the latest crop of improvements.

This week, advisories were released for httpd, mod_auth_pgsql, auth_ldap, ethereal, struts, cups, gpdf, apache, and the kernel. The distributor for this week is Red Hat.

A gathering of open source pundits have confirmed that the phrase "open source" is what you make of it. We can all breath a little easier now. The pundits - Tim O'Reilly, Sun Microsystems' Simon Phipps and IBM's Rod Smith - came to this conclusion yesterday at an SD Forum event here. Despite a couple of pleas from the SD Forum crowd, the speakers refused to narrow their definition of open source software or companies. Any vendor that uses Apache, for example, is part of the fabled open source community as they help drive a market for such products, the experts said.

Are configuring custom Linux kernels still something most any Linux user needs to know how to do, or has it moved upwards to where only the power users and system admins need to know how?

Almost every US patent contains at least one mistake, according to new research. The vast majority are trivial errors, most of them the fault of the USPTO; but two per cent of the patents examined were found to contain serious mistakes that weakened the core claims.

A serious vulnerability has been found in the popular KDE open-source software bundle. The flaw, deemed "critical" by the research outfit the French Security Incident Response Team, could allow a remote attacker to gain control over vulnerable systems. KDE is a desktop software package for Linux and Unix systems and includes the Konqueror Web browser and other applications.

An agency created by the US and Canadian governments to validate security software has spent about two years reviewing the OpenSSL project -- and continues to search for a way to validate that the software will always do what it is expected to do.

Is there really a "Linux Community"? Or is it simply a concept to make us feel warm and fuzzy? Are we a united group or just a large number of people taking advantage of free software? There is one good way to find out.

For a document shorter than a lawyer's note to the milkman, the GPL has had profound effects on the industry. Now's your chance to influence the first revision in 15 years - use it or lose it

[GPL:] A simple statement of rights and obligations, the General Public License sets out with astonishing brevity and unmatched clarity one particular concept of community fairness. Among those who agree: take freely what you want, do with it what you wish, give freely to those who ask.

Rivendell and other Salem Radio Labs projects bring GPLed open-source tools to broadcasters everywhere.

The IPCop project is a GNU/GPL project that offers an exceptional feature packed stand alone firewall to the internet community. Its comprehensive web interface, well documented administration guides, and its involved and helpful user/administrative mailing lists make users of any technical capacity feel at home. It goes far beyond a simple ipchains / netfilter implementation available in most Linux distributions and even the firewall feature sets of commercial competitors.
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The BSD Certification Group (BSDCG) is a non-profit organization established to create and maintain a global certification standard for system administration on BSD-based operating systems. After a year of work, the group behind the BSD Certification project plans to complete the process for the first certification (BSD Associate) in the first half of this year, with the first exam to be available by the second quarter. We interviewed Dru Lavigne, BSD advocate and creator of the initiative.

Linux and open source software are jumping the hurdles to wider corporate adoption, and are delivering significant cost savings to companies that use them, according to a report released last month by consulting firm Optaros.
From an August-September survey of 512 US companies, government agencies, and others, Optaros reported that 87 percent were using open source software. Dave Gynn, application infrastructure practice lead at Optaros, said all companies and agencies are likely using open source software in reality. "There's still a gap of many people who don't realize they're using open source," Gynn said.

Thursday, January 19 2006 @ 08:01 AM EST
You know how Microsoft FUD hammers home the idea that total cost of ownership of using GNU/Linux is higher than with Windows, because of needing to train administrators? Well, look at this EU FLOSSpols survey of FLOSS use by 955 European local governments, which found that "FLOSS users administer 35% more PCs per IT administrator than non-users – FLOSS use appears to reduce administrator workload per PC, and IT departments with high workloads are more likely to want a future increase in FLOSS use." The survey was done in March of 2005.

Windows isn’t the only operating system in town: there's growing interest in Linux and open-source applications, both for server and desktop deployment. This guide looks at what small businesses have to gain by going down this route, and where the pitfalls lie.

Introduction

Walk into any small business and, for the most part, you’ll find individually licensed Windows desktops connected via Windows networks to Windows servers running Windows applications. However, it doesn’t have to be that way, and an increasing number of companies are discovering the benefits of switching some, if not all, of their IT to the open source Linux platform.

O'Reilly has announced the release of “Running Linux, Fifth Edition: The Ultimate Getting-Started, Problem-Solving Linux Guide”. The book is authored by Matthias Kalle Dalheimer and Matt Welsh. According to O'Reilly, “All those newcomers need to be welcomed, supported, informed, and educated.”

Matthias Kalle Dalheimer says, "More and more non-technical people are moving to Linux from Windows, and they need to be well received and shown that while Linux is a new world--a world in which those who are willing to do their part of the thinking will thrive best--it is still a friendly world, with a wealth of tools and applications to help."

Google has announced it has opened up its new instant messaging service, Google Talk, to all other IM networks that utilize the XMPP protocol, which originally was developed for Jabber. This enables Google users to communicate directly with users of Linux IM clients GAIM and Psi, Apple's iChat, Jabber, Gizmo Project, Tiscali, Netease, Chikka, MediaRing, and several others.