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Hewlett Packard Co has completed the certification of Linux on its servers and workstations with evaluation assurance level 3 of the Common Criteria security evaluation and is now looking to the next level.

Dressed in costumes or wearing shirts promoting "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," hard-core computer fans drifted in and out of convention rooms at the Red Lion Inn on Friday night, looking for games, science fiction and computer innovations. Welcome to Linucon 2004: Austin's first festival devoted to Linux, sci-fi and anime.

Internet users starved of a strong Open Source alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser have flocked to Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox. But for those still using earlier Firefox versions, there's a more important reason to upgrade to the new Preview Release. Previous Firefox versions contain several critical vulnerabilities, ranging from moderate to high risk, which could allow a hacker to execute malicious code on user PCs, the US-based Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) has warned.

Linux evangelists will be pleased that a second analyst report which says that the use of open source software can result in savings of about 30 per cent has just been published.

Emerging file systems aim to relieve pain of Linux storage bottlenecks.

Fedora Core 3 test 3 is now available. This is the last planned test release before the final release.

An important consideration in the creation, deployment, and use of Web services is the message itself. Since Web services rely on the transmission and receipt of SOAP messages, the ability to verify the integrity and authenticity of these messages should have a rather high priority associated with it. Further, since Web services are often used to present commercial transaction interfaces to potential customers, message non-repudiation plays a key role in these scenarios. The XML Signature specification, a W3C/IETF effort, addresses these problems by providing a digital signature framework for XML documents based on standard public key cryptography notions, as discussed in an earlier article.

ST Microelectronics said it is joining in with the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology, the French Atomic Energy Commission and Bull to push the Open Platform initiative.

While members of the open-source community are generally supportive of software diversity, flame skirmishes sometimes erupt between devotees of competing projects.

A large part of the software industry has never heard of the science of quality assurance - or if it has, it doesn't believe in it. Thus spake Alan Cox, Wales' most famous Red Hat employee and one of the most influential voices in the IT world. Currently wrapping up his MBA at Swansea University, it's clear that Cox has been spending a lot of time thinking about what the software world can learn from everyone else about quality.

Australia's open source software community appears set to lose one of its most powerful and outspoken champions in the wake of the federal election. Democrat spokesperson for information technology, Senator Brian Greig, today said that it appeared highly unlikely the party would retain its West Australian seat in the Senate.

MontaVista Software has launched an open source project aimed at bringing "hard real-time" performance to standard, native Linux, and has seeded a fledgling "Open Source Real-Time Linux Project" with a reference implementation claimed to improve real-time responsiveness of the 2.6.9rc3 Linux kernel by "orders of magnitude."

Portage hit 100,000 files last week, - a reason to celebrate, finds the new Gentoo Weekly Newsletter. Other news this week include donated desktop computers from Freescale, Inc., Gentoo penguins on the Antarctic Peninsula, and the usual community coverage, bug rankings and a quick introduction on setting up an OpenVPN tunnel to your home LAN. Finally, 'Gentoo in the press' has a remarkable volume of references this week.

Leading chipmaker chosen as partner in Chinese Open Platform Initiative; ST to co-develop hardware/software platform, based on Linux, for use in servers, PCs and mobile terminals

Steve Buer, resident coding hero at Secureworks, sure seems to be having a good time helping his company develop a little Linux-based security device called iSensor. Buer writes the software for the appliance, which sits between the network and the Internet, looks at the traffic, and filters out malicious packets, while at the same time sending alerts back to Secureworks' security operations center. While his boss now calls him "the father of our technology here," Buer didn't even know Linux until after he started working at the company after getting his college degree four years ago.

Do we want, or should we even tolerate a defacto standard GNU/Linux distribution emerging simply because hardware OEM's choose to back one Distribution over others for pre-installation ? Should marketing prowess, mergers, acquisitions, or having loads of cash be the determining factors in what is considered software excellence ?

Mozilla blocks those un-requested and annoying "pop-up" windows. It also has the ability to open new Web pages in a "tabbed" interface, as is common to most Windows-based programs. Rather than opening multiple copies of the browser itself you can instead open multiple Web pages within the single running copy of Mozilla itself.

Joe Pearce's Wyrmkeep Entertainment continues to tirelessly work to revive old adventure games. Wyrmkeep's first re-release, Inherit the Earth, now has a Linux version available for purchase to join the PC and Mac versions released in the past year. Also, a demo of the game is now available for download for Mac and Linux users as well.

Serge Hallyn offered an updated version of his bsdjail patch for LSM, offering "functionality similar to (but more limited than) the vserver patch." Andrew Morton offered a quick review of the code, however sounded unsure the functionality was needed in the core kernel, "I don't recall anyone requesting this feature. Tell me why we should add it to Linux?" He went on to explain, "we need to be able to demonstrate that the new code is sufficiently useful to a sufficiently large number of people as to warrant the cost of maintaining it in the tree for the rest of eternity."

Open source database server company MySQL's next production release of its open source MySQL database server will be sporting a new Windows installer, one partially built with an open source project courtesy of Microsoft.