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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".

Max Vozeler discovered two format string vulnerabilities in ssmtp, a simple mail transport agent. Untrusted values in the functions die() and log_event() were passed to printf-like functions as format strings. These vulnerabilities could potentially be exploited by a remote mail relay to gain the privileges of the ssmtp process (including potentially root).

A number of vulnerabilities were discovered in tcpdump versions prior to 3.8.1 that, if fed a maliciously crafted packet, could be exploited to crash tcpdump.

On Monday, the new Mozilla 1.7 branch was cut from the trunk, in preparation for the final release of Mozilla 1.7 in mid-May. As well as 1.7, the branch will also provide the foundation for Mozilla Firefox 1.0 and several other Mozilla-based applications. Post-1.7, the new branch will replace 1.4 as the stable development baseline. Checkins to the branch require approval from drivers@mozilla.org — the trunk, meanwhile, is now open for 1.8 Alpha development work. Consult tinderbox for the latest tree status.

A new version of the X11 windowing system, used by Unix-like operating systems including Linux, will become generally available in ten days time. This is significant as it's likely to be the version that will face most users in future distributions. Known as X11R6.7, it's the first release from the XOrg consortium. This was originally founded to steer the specification in May 1999, but only recently decided to do something about it, citing the glacial pace of development by the XFree86 consortium.

The beauty of the open source software community -- and the General Public License that governs Linux and open source -- is that innovation must be shared with the community. This can also cause a bevy of sleepless nights for vendors, IT managers, developers and enterprise bean counters. Reciprocal, or "copyleft", provisions in the GPL give the license a viral aspect...

Approximately 650 MySQL users and supporters are spending April 14 - 16 in the conference center of the Peabody Hotel, with so much of their time occupied by MySQL training sessions that hardly any of them seem to be taking advantage of Orlando-area tourist attractions like Walt Disney World. These people came here to learn -- and possibly to swim with dolphins Thursday evening. The dolphin outing is totally appropriate; there's a dolphin in the MySQL logo. But long discussions about how to make MySQL run better and faster are this group's main course. The dolphin swim is just dessert.

A CANADIAN researcher has warned that Open Source will fall flat on its face unless it gets its act together. In First Monday, Michelle Levesque said that the Open Source concept fails because of its "user-interface design, documentation, feature-centric development, programming for the self and religious blindness". She warned that Open Source will remain an unknown quantity to most computer users until these problems were addressed.