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Declarations that 2004 will be the year of the Linux desktop may not be premature, but they can be labeled overzealous. Substantial commercial support for the Linux desktop is creeping upward and vendors like Novell Inc., Red Hat Inc. and others are devoting more resources toward bringing about an inevitable enterprise desktop revolution. But don't expect an overnight overhaul.

THE Primary Care Doctors Organisation Malaysia (PCDOM) is calling on the Government to consider an open source pilot implementation in either the public or private hospitals.

This is the last part of the exploration of Gentoo.

For those of you unfamiliar with this Linux Distro, its claim to fame is speed, pure speed. Part 1 of this review covers the installation process of Gentoo Linux and a first look.

In the last article Getting Started with PEAR, you got the PEAR Package Manager up and running. Now, it's time to put PEAR to good use with PEAR::Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer, a library for generating Excel spreadsheets.

Mozillazine reports that development of Mozilla 1.7 is now complete and the final version should be ready for release in mid-May.

Novell Inc. punctuated its commitment to open-source software at its annual Brainshare conference in late March by releasing its YaST configuration tool and iFolder remote document management software under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and by announcing plans to release a Linux and NetWare bridge product a year ahead of schedule.

FEDERAL welfare agency Centrelink has established an internal Linux laboratory as part of increased research efforts into the potential cost savings or performance improvements the open source platform might deliver. Centrelink IT architecture services national manager Peter Gunning said the agency had continued to expand its Linux investigations despite some uncertainty created by on-going lawsuits between the software firm SCO and IBM over alleged intellectual property infringement within the Linux code.

Linux makes headway in Web servers and databases, but large companies remain wary of the software in mission-critical areas. CATA, CGI and John "maddog" Hall offer advice for IT managers.

Security Enhanced Linux, a "hardened" version of the open-source software that was helped into existence by a U.S. spy agency, is on the verge of gaining broad acceptance, a New Zealand developer says. Kerry Thompson, an Auckland security consultant, says the pending release of the Fedora Core 2 distribution will introduce SELinux to mainstream Linux users.

Conectiva Linux, developed by Brazilian vendor Conectiva S.A., is the most popular distribution in South America, so it’s quite surprising that there aren’t more reviews of their products online. This is really quite surprising – while you may not have heard much about Conectiva Linux itself, you almost certainly know quite a lot about three of their most important contributions to the open source community – the Conectiva Crystal icon set, apt-rpm, and Synaptic.

With Wednesday's release of MySQL AB's MySQL Cluster version of its open-source database, the little Swedish company is beginning to swim in the same pool as the big, enterprise-class database vendors, analysts say.

Marcelo Tosatti released the 2.4.26 Linux kernel today, following the earlier 2.4.25 release by nearly two months. This latest release includes a number of important fixes and updates to various subsystems, including XFS, JFS, SCTP, ACPI, Bluetooth, USB, IDE, SCSI, and networking.

Red Hat has manoeuvred to boost uptake of open source software in the federal government, opening its first Canberra office this week.

Red Hat and Intel have worked together to design an online, searchable catalog to display compatible applications.

HP and Novell announced a joint agreement to certify and support the Novell SUSE LINUX operating system on select HP Compaq client systems.

A Canadian researcher has drafted a paper about five areas where open source software often falls flat on its face - user-interface design, documentation, feature-centric development, programming for the self and religious blindness.

There are two vulnerabilities in CVS; one in the server and one in the client. These vulnerabilities allow the reading and writing of arbitrary files on both client and server.

Several serious problems have been discovered in the Linux kernel. This update takes care of Linux 2.4.18 for the i386 architecture. This advisory replaces the i386 part of DSA 479-1 (except for the i386bf part). An unfortunate build error caused some of the kernel packages in DSA 479-1 to be broken.

Steve Kemp discovered a vulnerability in xonix, a game, where an external program was invoked while retaining setgid privileges. A local attacker could exploit this vulnerability to gain gid "games".