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Red Hat’s monopolistic hold on the Indian market, which has made the brand almost a synonym of sorts to the word ‘Linux’, is all set to change with the entrance of new flavors into the Open Source market. Altosys Software Technologies Limited, Chennai, is all set to release Red Flag in the Indian market by the second week of April.

Primoz Bratanic discovered a bug in libpam-psgl, a PAM module to authenticate using a PostgreSQL database. The library does not escape all user-supplied data that are sent to the database. An attacker could exploit this bug to insert SQL statements.

As noobies, you may not know all the rules about Linux. You may not even know that they exist. Here's the most important one: it's all about fun. At least, that's what Linus Torvalds, the man who invented Linux, credits as being his motivation for developing it. This week our focus is on fun: play, rec, and playing nice. So get out the wrenchs and remove those GUI-training wheels, gals and guys. We're going down to the CLI again.

Jeff Garzik offered a patch to libata that increases the maximum size of the requests sent to Serial ATA hardware. He explains, "With this simple patch, the max request size goes from 128K to 32MB... so you can imagine this will definitely help performance. Throughput goes up. Interrupts go down. Fun for the whole family." This lead into a lengthy and interesting discussion debating whether or not this was the best course of action.

A Yankee Group survey claims that Linux costs more than Windows to run. Companies are well aware that, though Linux is free or almost free to acquire, running costs are high, whether enterprises roll their own support or pay the "hefty premiums for must-have items like technical service and support, product warranties and licensing indemnification", the study said. Analyst and author Laura DiDio, who questioned IT managers and executives globally, said, "Corporate customers report Linux does indeed provide businesses with excellent performance, reliability, ease of use and security.

The company believes that enterprises and government organisations using Unix could save up to 80 per cent in deployment, maintenance and service costs by switching to Linux, while a switch from Windows to Linux could save up to 50 per cent.

It is a low-cost handheld PC on GNU/Linux working through a browser for international markup language IML 2.0, priced at Rs9000 (less than $200).

An updated squid package is avaliable that fixes a security vulnerability in URL decoding and provides a new ACL type for protecting vulnerable clients.

Remote buffer overflow vulnerabilites have been found in Courier-IMAP and Courier MTA. These exploits may allow the execution of abritrary code, allowing unauthorized access to a vulnerable system.

Mulitple overflows and vulnerabilities exist in Ethereal which may allow an attacker to crash the program or run arbitrary code.

The latest set of status reports includes updates from Link Toolbar, Feed Parser, CookieCuller, One Click, Email Vault for Mozilla (EVM) and Mozwho.

The minutes of the mozilla.org staff meeting of Monday 22nd March 2004 are now online. Issues discussed include Mozilla 1.7 final, Mozilla Firefox 0.9, Mozilla Thunderbird 0.6 and trademark policy.

Red Hat India, the Linux and Open Source provider together with Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology, IIT Mumbai announced the Red Hat Scholarships-The Open Source Challenge today. The program is open to students from engineering colleges across India and carries a scholarship amount of upto 10 lakhs.

More on how the 2.6 kernel makes for better embedded devices.

There were 5 security alerts issued last week:

• 2 from Debian
• 1 from Fedora
• 2 from Gentoo

GIMP is a free digital-photograph and digital-image editing program for the Linux, Mac, Unix, and Windows platforms Use GIMP rather than Photoshop and save money

When it comes to browsers, you might assume we've reached the end of history: There was a huge fight in the mid-1990s between Microsoft and Netscape, Microsoft won, and now everybody uses Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Yet that's not quite the whole story. A few small alternatives to IE are thriving, much like the first mammals running between the toes of slow-moving dinosaurs.

The Mozilla Foundation is exploring offering additional end user support options, in addition or instead of the existing telephone support provided by DecisionOne. To this end, the Foundation is soliciting proposals from companies or community members who wish to be awarded contracts to provide these services. Submissions must be well thought out and shown to be viable. Read the full article for complete details from the Foundation's Bart Decrem.

A top official of Sun Microsystems has revealed that Sun will make fundamental changes in open source technology to be announced during a conference in Shanghai on June 2 and 3. Matt Thompson, director for Sun technology outreach who recently spoke at a conference on Java in Manila 2, said that these changes in open source technology are fundamental that would change how people look at Sun Microsystems.

I like Linux because it is stable, secure and cheap. About the only viable objection to running it on your home computer is that it lags behind Windows in available software...My own inclination, at least for initial experiments, is to forget about Windows compatibility and current programs, and use Linux applications as much as possible. You'll find Linux equivalents for most; for example, even though you can't run Kazaa, you'll find Limewire a more than adequate substitute. A useful list you'll find is at Tucows.com. Also note that games, while available, are fairly hopeless and dated.