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Ninety two percent of survey respondents indicated that their Linux systems have never been infected with a virus, according to Evans Data's new Summer 2004 Linux Development Survey. Further, 78% of Linux developers say that their Linux systems have never been hacked and less than 7% were hacked three or more times. Of the 22% that have been hacked, 23% of the intrusions were by internal users with valid login ID's. The main ways that Linux machines can be compromised are: Inadequately configured security settings, vulnerability in internet service and Web server flaws.

Yesterday was the last day of Ottawa Linux Symposium, and I can't help comparing it with the Usenix Annual Technical Conference, which was only a few weeks earlier. The difference in the quality and relevance (at least as far as my interests are concerned) of the papers, the energy of the attendees, and the overall atmosphere of the two conferences were distinctly different.

In the first of a two-part interview, William Weinberg, newly appointed architecture specialist at the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), talks to vnunet.com about desktops, datacentres, security and the spectre of legal action by Microsoft and SCO.

In March's "LAMP Post" column, we started to look at MySQL's replication subsystem. We covered how replication works, as well as putting it to use by configuring the master and slave(s). This month, in this inaugural "MySQL" column, let's spend some time looking at the lesser known aspects of MySQL replication, including filtering and log inspection.

In this week's Gentoo Weekly Newsletter you'll find information about the retirement of the net-www Portage category, as well as a call for volunteers for a meeting for UK-based Gentoo developers and users, to be held in September or early October. We also bring an update on the Portage, devrel, infrastructure, releng, and tools projects, as well as a profile of MIPS developer Stephen Becker. Don't miss the security and community coverage either. Enjoy!

Just when the Unix community thought that the fractious BayStar-SCO dispute was history, the investment house proved everyone wrong. The company now says it will sue SCO and continue the pair's troubled financial relationship.

A couple of Linux-related court cases were recently put to rest, and the outcomes could be viewed as mixed for the Penguin-concerned parties involved in each respective litigation.

The package installation problem is one of the primary barriers to desktop Linux adoption. Most if not all solutions so far have addressed the wrong problem (at least for desktop users) -- resolving dependencies at package installation time. A much better approach is to ensure that as few dependencies exist as possible. While this might seem a lofty goal, given the open source development emphasis on reusing as much code as possible, I believe this goal is indeed achievable through a process of desktop component standardization.

NASA has picked Computer maker Silicon Graphics Inc. and chipmaker Intel to develop a major supercomputer based on Linux to simulate space exploration and conduct other research, SGI announced Tuesday

How they got all those displays working for this year's ULB.

Different interpretations of a memo from Office of Management and Budget IT and E-Government administrator Karen Evans make this software purchasing directive look both bad and good for open source.

Linux distributor Xandros has updated its business and consumer Linux desktop to version 2.5, and is preparing for a long-awaited move into the Linux server market.

Seagate,, the world's leading hard drive maker, and Linspire, Inc., today jointly announced an extension of their agreement to offer the LinspireEspanol desktop Linux operating system pre-loaded on Seagate Barracuda hard drives for emerging markets. This package will enable computer manufacturers to offer affordable Spanish language Linux desktop computers to their customers in Latin America.

One of the main reasons that companies choose Open Source software is because of the cost - even commoditised software based on Open Source code is cheaper than proprietary technology since up to 90% of the code will be Open Source, which the vendor gives away for free, with the end user just charged for the enhanced proprietary components. Plus, use of Open Source does largely make companies less dependent on proprietary vendors that periodically provide updates that IT resources must find time to deploy to maintain adequate security measures.

First of all, we should agree on what the definition of "ready for the desktop" stands for. For some of us it refers to a graphical user interface in which applications have icons and can be launched in an intuitive manner without the need of complex commands. Even a Commodore 64 running Geos could be "ready for the desktop" by this definition, but the fact is that when we read "ready for the desktop" we understand "ready to replace Microsoft Windows".

A couple of days before software movers and shakers got together to talk about changing industry with open source at OSCON, geeks and do-gooders and do-gooder geeks gathered to talk about changing the world with open source at the second Penguin Day event held in Portland last weekend.

Although free software operating systems are getting progressively easier to use, a great deal of work is still necessary. Most of us in the alternative OS community are aware of this but a refinement objective that still doesn't get enough attention is the "less is more" analogy. Sometimes it's better to remove (or at least centralize) functionality rather than toss it on top of the heap. The following osOpinion/osViews editorial contributor made this observation after attempting a Knoppix installation.

A tutorial explaining how to use Pygame, a wrapper built on Python and SDL, for game development and improved execution.

Comprised of some 60 Open Source projects plus the company’s own proprietary integration and updating services, Astaro Security Linux is a comprehensive network security product for midsized to large businesses. It combines a firewall, VPN gateway, intrusion protection, virus protection, spam protection and surf protection (URL filtering). The complete software solution bundles a hardened Linux operating system that can run on any x86-compatible hardware, and is also available as a pre-installed appliance.