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During the conference Friday, neither CEO mentioned open source or Linux specifically as motivating factors. But their continual emphasis on intellectual property (IP) and patent rights--fighting words to those who back Linux and the open--source movement--signaled the formation of a proprietary software army.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) has upped the ante in the battle to win market share in the increasingly fraught Linux space. Last week the vendor announced that it has made Novell's SuSE Linux its standard for customers that want an open source operating system for business desktops and notebook PCs.

In a company-wide e-mail, Microsoft CEO characterizes Sun deal as 'a dramatic event in the industry.'

There were 27 security alerts issued last week:

• 4 from Conectiva
• 7 from Debian
• 9 from Gentoo
• 2 from Mandrake
• 1 from OpenPKG
• 2 from Red Hat
• 2 from Trustix

Government authorities have reached an agreement with counterparts in China and Japan to promote the development of open-source computer operating systems such as Linux. The agreement is seen as a possible guard against over-reliance on Microsoft's Windows.

A study from Forrester Research has concluded that the Linux operating system is not necessarily more secure than Windows, with Linux distributors taking longer than Microsoft to patch security holes, although Microsoft flaws tended to be more severe.

despite the fact that Linux is becoming more pervasive and has begun to move into the mainstream, particularly with the advent of blade servers to which Linux is well suited, the International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasts that Linux will not come near to replacing the Unix and Windows operating systems in the next three to four years.

The People Behind KDE is staying on base this week. The guy I'm interviewing is multi-talented and full of surprises, not only is he KDE-NL's own webmaster/translator/bug-submitter but also a musician and teacher. His favorite thing is his low-racer. You think a low racer is a kind of jeans style? Guess again... ;-] Get to know the person behind KDE-NL's website, Wilbert Berendsen!

Tuning your Linux server can mean many things to many people. A portion of tuning is about security, insuring the configurations of the ftp, mail, ssh and web servers are properly setup to enable access and interaction with your server while tightening the belt for those who may be browsing through for potential back doors.

Linux kernel version 2.6.5 has been released.

Steve Kemp and Jaguar discovered a number of buffer overflow vulnerabilities in vfte, a version of the fte editor which runs on the Linux console, found in the package fte-console. This program is setuid root in order to perform certain types of low-level operations on the console.

Alan Cox discovered that the isag utility (which graphically displays data collected by the sysstat tools), creates a temporary file without taking proper precautions. This vulnerability could allow a local attacker to overwrite files with the privileges of the user invoking isag.

A vulnerability was discovered in oftpd, an anonymous FTP server, whereby a remote attacker could cause the oftpd process to crash by specifying a large value in a PORT command.

A vulnerability was discovered in squid, an Internet object cache, whereby access control lists based on URLs could be bypassed (CAN-2004-0189). Two other bugs were also fixed with patches squid-2.4.STABLE7-url_escape.patch (a buffer overrun which does not appear to be exploitable) and squid-2.4.STABLE7-url_port.patch (a potential denial of service).

Despite having pockets of communities spread across the country, open source software (OSS) has no future in the country's budding software development business, according to a software development expert.

It looks like I'm going to have to reconsider something I'd been taking for granted -- that Linux on the desktop, and especially the laptop, was a non-starter in the operating systems race. While I wasn't paying sufficient attention, the proverbial tortoise has been playing some serious catch-up.

Any Gentoo user knows how great this distro is. Any Gentoo user also knows the amount of time it takes to install this distro, and to damage your partition is just not an affordable option. I've managed to take the standard 20-30 hour installation and bring it down to about 2-3 hours of time. This guide will try and lead you into the correct direction of the Gentoo installation. It will NOT give you all the apps, Window Managers and so on you are looking for in the distro, but it will get you to the point where it will be very easy to have an operating computer while getting those things.

Much as I like the for-fee Xandros version of Linux, longtime readers know I'm basically a cheapskate. And if you are, too, you'll enjoy our parting shot at Linux, namely, how to get one of the free distributions. Free means free, no kidding. Pretty much everything you get with commercial distributions is included, for example, word processor, spreadsheet, Web browsers, e-mail. About the only thing you don't get is: 1. support; and 2. some of the emulation programs we talked about last week that allow you to run Windows programs.

The Fall distribution release period of 2003 was not the most interesting, nor the least interesting in recent memory. For the most part all of the distributions got better, but not so much that those running distributions now going on a year in age are really missing anything terribly substantial. We did find a few interesting points worth revisiting, however, and those deal with Mandrake Linux 9.2 and Fedora Core 1.

Those who revere Linux can’t imagine why Microsoft doesn’t just give Windows a proper burial. After all, Linux is open, it’s free, it performs beautifully on a wide range of hardware, and there is a massive library of open and commercial Linux software.