Simon Brooke asks: "I have today received from Microsoft a flyer about an event entitled 'Microsoft and Open Source 20/20 Seminar: An open and honest technology discussion'. Microsoft are touting one of their speakers as an 'independent analyst'. All the other speakers are either Microsoft employees or represent businesses related to Microsoft. The 'independent' speaker is Philip Dawson of Meta Group, and his job title is given as 'Senior Program Director, International Infrastructure Strategies'. He's described as 'a leading authority on Linux, high end UNIX, Windows server platforms and storage'. Among the 'seminar benefits' is listed 'question the platform and Linux technical experts' so clearly their pitch will be to present this guy is a 'Linux technical expert'. Anyone prepared to help me out here? Have Microsoft held similar events in your part of the world, and if so how did you respond? Do you have any scoop on Mr Dawson?" Sounds like more par for the course from Microsoft. Nevertheless, it doesn't hurt to go into these things armed with more information...that is if you are in to events like these.

JoshuaDFranklin writes "When confronted with the reality of Open Source, academics often ask what processes allow it to happen. In his new book The Success of Open Source, Berkeley professor Steven Weber answers that question. He presents a clear, logical picture of how Open Source development works in a variety of projects, and comes to the intriguing conclusion that the process may be generalizable to other areas of production. The results, he argues, would 'make the consequences of the first-generation Internet seem quaint.'" Read on for the rest of Franklin's review.

Tarantolato writes "A new preliminary public release of the Inferno distributed operating system is now available for downloading from Vita Nuova's website. Inferno is meant to be a better Plan 9, which was meant to be a better Unix. It can run as a standalone OS, as an application on top of an existing one, or even as a browser plugin. Also, all of its major components are named after things related to hell."

ubiquitin writes "Existence of the Secure Architectures with OpenBSD text was first made public on the OpenBSD Journal in early April 2004. The OpenBSD Journal, also known as deadly.org and now undeadly.org, recently changed hands from James Phillips to Daniel Hartmeier amid several more or less obscure references to Pogues lyrics. The peaceful transfer of the site is a good thing, as it means that the several-hundred articles posted to the journal will remain in publicly-accessible archives for the foreseeable future and the occasion gave Hartmeier, known for his development of packet filtering (pf) and network DVD playing (kissd) software, a reason to try his hand at building a content management system. Jose Nazario is both an author of the book under review here and a contributor to the OpenBSD Journal web site, which seems to be a watering hole for unix hackers, having something of the flavor that Slashdot had in the late nineties." (Jose is also an occasional Slashdot book reviewer, and a good cook.) Read on for the rest of ubiquitin's review.

Alaa and his friends at Linux-Egypt put a lot of thought into answering your questions. Alaa wrote, "we felt there was much misinformation or lack of information about egypt while reading the comments so I kinda used each question to inject some extra info," which makes this Q&A worth reading for insight into Egyptian society even if you have no particular interest in Linux. Thanks, Alaa and Linux-Egypt.

dhanks asks: "I'm one of 10 administrators in our group. We're equally responsible for about 300 UNIX servers. We're having problems keeping track of all the root passwords and some of the administrators have taken it upon themselves to implement different security standards. (sudo with silly !SHELLS restrictions) How do other companies and system administrators handle the distribution of root access? I've been charged with coming up with a security policy and I would like to receive some feedback. I'm currently thinking of personal root accounts that would be locked via the /etc/passwd and would only be accessible via 'sudo su - adm_userid' that way each administrator may have full root access only using his regular user password instead of having to keep track of root passwords." While this is similar to an earlier question, this question deals with insuring authorized administrators have the access they need. How would you distribute root over hundreds of Unix machines to the administrators that need it?

mgoulding writes "IBM is expected to announce a software bundle targeted to business users that will challenge the Microsoft Office package. Unlike Office, the email, word-processing, spreadsheet, and database products will be accessible to Linux, Unix, and heldheld users through a web server. NewsFeed posts the story from CNET." It's certainly something that's been tried before - witness sites like MyWebOS (no longer existing).

AArnott writes "Ximian has just released beta 1 of its open-source implementation of Microsoft .NET platform. Mono allows .NET applications to run on Linux, Mac OS X, Unix, Windows. Mono 1.0 is slated for release on June 30, 2004." sjanes71 adds "The first 'beta' always gets heaps of attention, and this is the first of three planned for the Mono project. Some of the new features touted for this release that updates Mono v0.31 include a faster interpreter, a global assembly cache, support for the StrongARM and HPPA platforms, generics support in the VM and C# compiler and an early alpha of System.Windows.Forms. C# and .NET is Microsoft's answer to Sun Microsystem's Java platform and Project Mono aims to create the Open Source, cross-platform version of Microsoft's new development environment."

~*77*~ writes "While taking up considerably less space than a shoebox, this little device seamlessly allows users to add additional storage to any network in less than five minutes. Today we review the Snap Appliance 80GB Snap Server 1100. This compact NAS (network attached storage) device has many great features including: 5 minute installation, a compact web and ftp server, or simply a network share. Most importantly it works in a network mixed with Windows, Netware, UNIX, Linux, and Macintosh machines... "

zxflash writes "SolidZ.com reports the latest update to KNOPPIX; the popular Linux based OS has just been released. Version 3.4 includes the version 2.6.5 Linux Kernel and improved hardware detection. It can be downloaded from one of the mirrors listed on the KNOPPIX homepage..." rduke15 adds "Koffice has been dropped for space reasons, as well as LaTex. From the forum: 'Download using bittorrent tracker at http://torrent.unix-ag.uni-kl.de:6969/. Remember: Leave your bittorrent client running after the download is finished!' And this is the complete list of included packages."

comforteagle writes "According to this article in InfoWorld, Sun Microsystems is considering open sourcing Solaris by changing licenses to the GPL. What kind of impact would this have on those of you considering opting out of Unix for Linux? Red Hat and others have openly targeted Solaris users to switch." By the end of the article, the change seems rather unlikely to happen, but it's still interesting to see what changes this could bring about.

prostoalex writes "Advanced Unix Programming by Marc Rochkind is published by Addison-Wesley this year in its second edition. A book that has been considered a timeless classic, a title that saw its first edition back in 1985 and its second edition almost two decades later, in 2004. Where do you even start to review?" Read on below to see read prostoalex's evaluation.

reddigitaldragon asks: "Some people re-install once a year, but if you're anything like me your machine is formatted at least once a month. After the OS is in, then come the favorite/must have/most used programs to install. My first installations for Windows (I use it; get over it): Trillian, Winrar, Firefox, Winamp, SmartFTP, Azureus, NMap, GKrellM, PowerDVD. What are your First 10 installed programs?" What are the first 10 programs you would install on a Windows machine? How about for a Unix machine?

Simon P. Chappell writes "Linux programming is the C Programming Language. Elaborating a little, Linux programming is C, with the GLIBC library and the POSIX standard API. Even a language as powerful as C needs libraries and to get the Holy Grail of cross-platform portability, it's necessary to have them standardised. The POSIX API is that standardisation and Linux adheres to it very well (opinions from those litigious folks in Utah aside). For those of us who already know C, Linux Programming by Example sets out to teach you the rest in a step by step, helpful, relaxed and incremental manner."

orasio writes " Joe's Own Editor , a unix editor very much like the old Turbo-Pascal 4 editor, or WordStar, used and enjoyed by us console freaks who still miss the old DOS days, and cannot finish understanding vi's modes, has been revamped, adding syntax highlighting and internationalization support after many years without new features. The Sourceforge project is open for contributors since a year ago, but this is the first major feature improvement, that brings new life to JOE as a neat console-based programmer's editor." Joe is one undervalued program -- less arcane than vi, less cumbersome than emacs.

boarder8925 writes "Over at BSDnews, Steve Wingate has written an article on how to easily update FreeBSD. Wingate begins his article by saying, "One of the greatest advantages that *BSD has over other Unix variants is the cvsup/make world process. Unlike most Linux distributions it isn't necessary to wait months for a new version to be released for you to upgrade your system. The cvsup/make world process allows you to update your system at any time. I'm going to show you how to make the process as painless as possible." The article discusses the following: installing CVSup, choosing a cvsup server, configuring make.conf, and, finally, performing the upgrade. The piece is also available as a .pdf file."

bl8n8r writes "IBM subpoenas are flying. Morgan Keegan, EV1, Oracle, Royce, CAI, Center7, Novell, Canopy, S2, are all asked to reveal details on all documents concerning any communications with or any meetings involving Microsoft regarding Unix, Linux, SCO and/or Canopy." Groklaw notes that even more subpoenas are likely on the way.

AMuse writes "After taking a course at SANS from Ed Skoudis (and later hacking with him at the DefCon "Capture the Flag" contest in Las Vegas), I decided it was time to buy a copy of his latest book and see if he writes as well as he teaches. "Malware: Fighting Malicious code" is his most recent computer security book and was definitely a worthy purchase. Though the topic itself is not for novices, Skoudis does a splendid job of reviewing the basics with each chapter so that a less experienced security professional can follow along and learn. Additionally, he is very careful to show both Windows and UNIX/Linux examples of the topics, making the book accessible to a far wider crowd than some platform centric books I've read." Read on for the rest of AMuse's review.

darthcamaro writes "We all assume that the kernel is the kernel that is maintained by kernel.org and that Linux won't fork the way UNIX did..right? There's a great story at internetnews.com about the SuSe CTO taking issue with Red Hat backporting features of the 2.6 Kernel into its own version of the 2.4 kernel. "I think it's a mistake, I think it's a big mistake," he said. "It's a big mistake because of one reason, this work is not going to be supported by the open source community because it's not interesting anymore because everyone else is working on 2.6." My read on this is a thinly veiled attack on Red Hat for 'forking' the kernel. The article also give a bit of background on SuSe's recent decision to GPL their setup tool YAST, which they hope other distros will adopt too."

An anonymous reader writes to point out that Stanford's Information Technology Systems and Services "has written a summary of a series of compromises that have been happening at universities, research institutions, and high performance computing centers, for the last month or more. The attackers are using known vulnerabilities in Linux and Solaris, along with compromised user accounts, to gain access and control of systems, from standalone servers to HPC clusters ... (the attacks are still ongoing)."