sl0wp0is0n writes "Computerworld has published an interview with Microsoft's chief Linux strategist, Martin Taylor. It's interesting to find out that Microsoft thinks and predicts Novell (SuSE) will be the dominant Linux distribution they'll have to compete against. The interview also has Taylor talking about indemnification, IBM and his realization that customers generally adopt Linux to get a better TCO than Unix, not Windows."

uninet writes "In the third installment of the Stealth Desktop series about Slackware Linux, Eduardo Sánchez builds upon the previous steps of Part I and Part II. Continuing where those parts left off, he introduces the subjects of user, font and printer management in Slackware using KDE."

DNAspark99 writes "It seems Multiple vulnerabilities have been reported in GdkPixbuf, which can be exploited by malicious people to DoS (Denial of Service), and potentially compromise a vulnerable system. Personally, I wasn't concerned about this until I ran 'ldd firefox-bin | grep libgdk_pixbuf'" There's no official patch yet, but the article notes several Linux vendors have issued updates. Worth keeping an eye for those who use libgdk_pixbuf under other Unix-style operating systems as well.

An anonymous reader writes "eWeek is reporting that: "Novell announced the program at its European BrainShare 2004 tradeshow in Barcelona, Spain." "Under the initiative, leading software and hardware vendors, including Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM, Intel Corp., Oracle Corp. and Scali Inc. will work with Novell help their software partners deploy their platforms and solutions on SUSE Linux, according to Novell Inc."

MohammedSameer writes "Mandrakesoft released MandrakeLinux 10.1 Community, As usual it's only available first to the club members The new release features Kernel 2.6.8.1, Xorg-X11 6.7, KDE 3.2.3 with 3.3 as an install option,"

psykelus writes "Ubuntu Linux, a Debian-based distro (formerly flying the flag of 'no-name-yet.com') annouced a preview of their first release (Warty Warthog) earlier today. Ubuntu is the most shiny Debian-based distrobution ever, sporting Gnome 2.8 and an extremely streamlined, mostly automatic installation & configuration process." For a limited time, they're also sending out free disks on request.

damogar writes "The GNOME 2.8 Desktop and Platform release is the latest version of the popular, multi-platform free desktop environment, out today, with an awesome schedule time. Some pretty cool improvements have been made, specially the Nautilus file manager, the new MIME system and others. Release notes are already available, as well as screenshots and a variety of sources. Enjoy!" jimmy_dean adds a plug for the new GNOME Journal, which is meant to be a source of "good written material surrounding GNOME and the opinions of the community."

Fabrice Mous writes "The KDE Dot editors contacted the P2P internet telephony company Skype Technologies to ask them some questions on their client software for Linux. You can read the interview with Jaanus Kase from Skype at dot.kde.org."

A semi-anonymous reader writes "lakerdonald has written a review of Knoppix 3.6, the latest release version of the popular Linux Live CD. Knoppix currently ranks #3 in the distrowatch chart, and is certainly a distro to keep your eyes on!" (Apparently, German readers can also get Knoppix 3.7 on the cover of a Germany computer magazine.) Another anonymous reader writes "The Crux Linux ppc port is growing really fast and well! These guys reviewed the release candidate #3 for the 2.0 version of this light-weight distribution."

rcunnings points out this "interesting story about the assimilation of one prominent Linux hacker into the business of Linux. Sushi anyone?" Linus himself has always seemed a perfect pragmatist, and in this article he implies that corporations are benefiting everyone when they act as -- his term -- "sponsors."

larryg writes "Debian Hardened is a new project that wants be an official Debian sub-project. It aims to provide a complete tree of hardened kernel and software packages for a standard Debian distribution, without changing to another like Adamantix and making easy the hardening of any machine running Debian GNU/Linux. The hardened kernels use the grSecurity patch and some of the Adamantix kernel patches; also, its packages are compiled with the ProPolice/SSP gcc extension and some libraries to prevent and trace buffer overflow attacks. Also, and as a second project, we are working on some enhacements against the Linux Entropy Pool engine, using an external TRNG (True Random Numbers Generator) device which uses thermal noise and also the atomic decay from a Geiger counter, making true unpredictable random numbers."

An anonymous reader writes "SCO has filed for another delay in the case against IBM. The article reports that 'According to filings in the case, SCO is looking to buy time until the court can hear its arguments compelling IBM to release more information. SCO lawyers argue the information -- namely source code they claim was lifted from AIX and Dynix to bolster the open source Linux kernel -- is necessary in getting a successful ruling.'"

An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices has published an article about the 'PC Reviver', a small device that replaces hard drives in aging computers with a solid-state flash memory drive that boots an embedded Linux OS. The 'revived' computer can then be used as a thin-client network appliance for Citrix, Windows, Linux, and/or browser-based server-centric computing networks."

Havoc Pennington writes "Red Hat developers have been working on a generic framework covering all cases of sharing a single operating system install between multiple physical or virtual computers. This covers mounting the root filesystem diskless, keeping a read-only copy of it cached on a local disk, or storing it on a live CD, among other cases. Because OS configuration state is shared rather than local, the project is called 'stateless Linux.' The post to fedora-devel-list is here, and a PDF overview is here."

Anonymous Coward writes "An interesting review of Yoper Linux has just been posted posted at linuxforums.org. Yoper Linux really does look like it could be the first serious competition Gentoo has had in a long time."

prostoalex writes "Linux Standard Base 2.0 has been released by the Free Standards Group. The release will allow application developers to ensure their product works on multiple flavors of Linux. FSG keeps a list of compliant distributions on its Web site."

An anonymous reader writes "Beowulf clustering turns 10 years old, and, in this interview, creator Donald Becker talks about how Beowulf can handle high-end computing on a par with supercomputers."

prostoalex writes "O'Reilly Network posts an update on Project Utopia that produced Hardware Abstraction Layer for Linux simplifying device changes. They also link to the Driver on Demand project on SourceForge, whose goal is to create a central database to enable Linux desktops download the drivers automatically when the user plugs in her new hardware device."

occamboy writes "I'm trying to make a case for switching to Linux desktops, and would like to demonstrate how advantageous Linux is. While the advantages of Linux are more obvious for us techies, I'm finding that many non-technical types are immediately negatively biased by the look of Linux desktops. The problem boils down to screen fonts. It seems that, in the distributions that I've demonstrated, the screen fonts are either all aliased, or are aliased in some places and antialiased in others, which I've been told resembles a ransom note with letters cut from different magazines. I can understand where these critics are coming from; after all, they are staring at fonts on a monitor all day long. Are there any distributions that I can demonstrate which provide smooth and consistent screen fonts without requiring a lot of messing around?"

`Sean writes "Pepper Computer debuted their $800 Pepper Pad 2 at DEMOmobile 2004 this week. Specs include a 624 MHz XScale processor, 8.4" 800x600 TFT touchscreen, 802.11b+g, and 20 GB HDD running MontaVista Linux CEE. Out of the box the Pepper Pad 2 loads the Pepper Keeper as its GUI, but a full-blown Linux distribution with Java 2 JRE and X-Window System is sitting under the covers just waiting be customized. I personally can't wait to get a hold of one of these to turn into an OBD-II and telemetry workstation for the rally car."