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Microsoft's opponents said Tuesday that any settlement between the company and RealNetworks Inc. will not affect the EU's coming court clash with the software giant over a landmark antitrust ruling. Seattle-based RealNetworks, maker of a rival to Microsoft's Media Player, is the company's last big commercial opponent in the EU case, after reaching out-of-court deals with four of the five major parties that had intervened against it.

The NSW Office of State Revenue (OSR) is taking a tough stance against Microsoft’s decision to make the enterprise edition of Windows Vista only available to companies that have signed on to its Software Assurance programme. The tax collection agency has declared it would rather switch desktop operating systems than lock itself into Microsoft’s licensing regime.

JBoss Inc is announcing the addition of business rules and BPEL orchestration to its open source product mix, at its European user conference in Barcelona this week

ndian mobile phone and carrier software vendor Jataayu is porting its Instant Messaging and Presence Service (IMPS) stack to Linux, along with several other device software stacks. It expects to ship several browsing and messaging clients for Linux devices in Q4, 2005, with initial support for MontaVista's Mobilinux OS.

Sendmail. Tcpdump. OpenSSH. In addition to being highly useful software products, the Internet sites used to distribute each of these tools were compromised by attackers over the last few years.

With control of the sites, the bad guys replaced the downloadable installation package for each tool with a "Trojanized" version that included a backdoor bundled in the package. By placing their evil versions on the normal, trusted sites enterprises relied on to download their tools, the bad guys had hit upon the ideal mechanism to propagate their malicious code -- duping systems administrators to take the bait and install their wares for them.

The KOffice team today announced the second maintenance release of the 1.4 series. Among various bugfixes and translation improvements, the KOffice 1.4.2 release further improves support for the OASIS OpenDocument file format and interoperability with OpenOffice.org.

DistroWatch reports - Lineox Enterprise Linux 4.053 with Update 2 available. In version 4.053 the installation environment is rebuilt, so it offers better hardware support during the installation. The x86_64 release requires either AMD Opteron or Athlon64 CPU based computer. Some new Intel Xeon and Pentium IV processors with EM64T (Extended Memory 64 Technology) will also be able to run this version.

OSDir has some great screenshots of Lineox Enterprise Linux 4.053.

One of the first things that is asked of any new project in a modern IT department is that a cost benefit analysis be created to determine if the investment of time and resources makes sense. This takes many forms, but at many companies the idea of return on investment, or ROI, is king.

A new initiative from Novell seeks to unlock a better Linux desktop experience by helping developers better understand how the desktop is used.

Multiple vulnerabilities were identified in Linux Kernel, which could be exploited by local attackers to cause a denial of service or bypass certain security restrictions.

The first issue is due to a memory leak error in "/security/keys/request_key_auth.c", which could be exploited by malicious users to cause a denial of service.

The second vulnerability is due to a memory leak error in "/fs/namei.c" when the CONFIG_AUDITSYSCALL option is enabled, which could be exploited by malicious users to cause a denial of service.

The third flaw is due to an error in the file "drivers/char/drm/drm_stub.c" that does not properly validate "debug" sysfs permissions, which could be exploited by local attackers to bypass certain security restrictions and enable drm debugging.

Cross-Platform Race Challenged Microsoft Developers to Port ASP.NET Apps to Linux

Linus Torvalds announced 2.6.14-rc4, "the final -rc before a 2.6.14 release." The 2.6.14 merge cycle began with the release of the 2.6.13 kernel on August 28'th [story], allowing for two weeks of time during which large changes were allowed into the mainline kernel [story]. For the past month, primarily only bug fixes have been accepted as the kernel developers have worked toward a stable release. In his email, Linus summarized the changes in the latest release candidate:

"In the diffstat, most of the changes are one-liners, with the main exceptions being some sparc64 work (fix user-space corruption due to FP save/restore) and the new Megaraid SAS driver. There's some networking fixes, and a couple of driver updates (scsi: aacraid, net: cassini, and watchdog: pcwd_pci). Along with a x86-64 suspend/resume page table corruption and some new defconfig files for ARM, that rounds out the bigger chunks."

Adoption of Zend Core for Oracle Accelerates Enterprise Web Application Development and Deployment

Penguins are some of the most improbable animals on the planet. They have wings and feathers but cannot fly. They are not fish, but they have been recorded as deep as 1,755 feet underwater. And the most improbable is the emperor penguin, which waddles across 70 miles of Antarctic ice to reach its breeding grounds. New research on penguin DNA suggests that the emperor also has the most ancient lineage of living penguins.

A high-performance computing (HPC) Linux service tool for efficient mapping of Message Passing Interface (MPI) tasks to the IBM Blue Gene/L Supercomputer. The algorithms used for mapping are based on the paper Optimizing Task Layout on the Blue Gene/L supercomputer. [pdf] In this paper it talks about the extensive amount of data transmitted between processors for producing maps and the challenge of minimizing the communication time.

This comment refers to "LinuxToday is no friend of Linux" in response to an angry post.

A controversial new partnership between the South African government and the world’s leading software company, Microsoft, is at the centre of a heated debate about the best way to roll out IT access to poor communities.

The memorandum of understanding signed by the Department of Communications parastatal the Universal Services Agency (USA) and Microsoft aims to roll out free Microsoft software and training to telecentres in all 284 municipalities over three years.

However, critics claim that the agreement contradicts the Cabinet-level open-source strategy that was approved in June 2003.

No matter how many strides Linux makes toward desktop acceptance, we're still a long way from the day when we'll see the free OS become a true drop-in replacement for the commercial systems we use now. Case in point: Last week, the folks at Novell were kind enough to send along a copy of their latest OS release, Suse Linux 10.0. I've always thought Suse had an edge over Red Hat in the UI department. Plus, Novell describes this edition of its product as a home-user version targeted at "hobbyists and enthusiasts." So, naturally, I figured I'd install it on my desktop PC at home.

A Stanford-designed robotic car has driven away with the $2M prize in the second DARPA Challenge, a 175-mile race for autonomous vehicles held this weekend in the Mojava desert south of Las Vegas. Four of 23 vehicles completed the course, including several that used Linux.

The Ubuntu 5.10 release, also known as Breezy Badger, is not drastically different from the previous Ubuntu release, 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog, but it is an excellent distribution that is well worth a look for any user interested in a Linux distro for the desktop or server.