Showing all newswire headlines

As a reminder to our readers, we are repeating the same advice we published in 2000, the last time Microsoft's source code was compromised. Don't look at it or you could contaminate yourself legally.

Linux distributions which target the desktop user are growing in number and if some bigger names have left the field there are plenty of smaller, worthy successors to take their place.

How? It seems it is possible for Linux users to run both Microsoft's Office suite and IBM's Lotus Notes, using so-called emulation - as provided by a company like Codeweavers, with whom LinuxWorld Magazine's editors spoke at LinuxWorld last month.

Open-source software is picking up steam in European businesses, and Novell is joining in on the trend--perhaps to the extent of releasing some of its own products under open-source licenses, according to the company's top European executive.

The use of open source software in India is all set to advance further and increased participation from Government and industry could see a balanced distribution of proprietary and open source software, Technetra president Robert Adkins said on Friday.

Two buffer overflow vulnerabilities were found by iDEFENSE in XFree86's parsing of the font.alias file. The X server, which runs as root, fails to check the length of user-provided input; as a result a malicious user could craft a malformed font.alias file causing a buffer overflow upon parsing, which could eventually lead to the execution of arbitrary code.

This leak is as much a disaster to open source as it is to Microsoft and its users.

New Linux-based OS to support handheld computing on the Sharp Zaurus and Compaq iPAQ platforms.

As part of its initiative to put Linux on the desktop, IBM wants to migrate Microsoft's Office suite to Linux. Microsoft said it's not involved and suggests that IBM might do it by emulation.

It was discovered that certain messages would cause mutt to crash. Mutt 1.4.2 fixes this bug. See CAN-2004-0078.

Sooooo, without further ado, following is a brief collection of some of the headlines posted shortly after Firefox’s release, categorized by the format in which the headline was worded.

The following essay is a response to Russell Jones' "open source vs. closed source" article Thursday in DevX. It is written by one of Jones' own colleagues at DevX, software engineer Ladd Angelius, in the spirit of free and open discussion.

When a machine is booted, one of the tasks performed by the initscripts package is to remove temporary files and stale locks. This script ("/etc/rc.d/init.d/cleanup" in CL9, and "/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit" in CL8), however, incorrectly removed some important files in /var/lock/samba needed by the samba server, causing it to behave incorrectly. The most affected service is winbind, because the idmap file was removed at every boot, causing a loss of the user <-> userid mapping.

The Eclipse Platform, which provides a very powerful Integrated Development Environment (IDE), includes its own help system based on an XML table-of-contents referencing HTML files. What isn't immediately obvious is that you don't have to write Eclipse plug-ins to use it.

I’ve been using the same operating system on my desktop for the past six years. My desktop is productive, stable, secure, manageable and, best of all, free... By the way, in case you were wondering I use the Gentoo Linux (www.gentoo.org) operating system on my desktop and no, I won’t be migrating to Windows this year.

"Microsoft spokesman Tom Pilla said in an interview with The Associated Press that some incomplete portions of the Windows 2000 and Windows NT4 source code had been 'illegally made available on the Internet.'"

A newly-conducted survey of Australian and New Zealand tech users has lent weight to Linux' desktop prospects, with more than three-quarters of respondents saying it will improve its strength in the area.

These Linux server clusters consist of RLX's Control Tower XT and HPC Cluster Manager software, combined with the 1U high RLX RackModule Servers, the HPC ServerBlades or the RLX HPC ServerBlades with InfiniBand. They also include on-site integration and configuration with packages such as LSF, MIP Pro, OpenPBS or BLAST.

Greg MacManus, of iDEFENSE Labs, reports finding several potentially exploitable buffer overflows in XFree86's font code.

Updated XFree86 packages that fix a privilege escalation vulnerability are now available.