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Infected binary or source code files aren't anything new. And sometimes they are found on public servers. Mozilla.org is the latest example. Korean distributives for mozilla and thunderbird for linux turned out to be infected - mozilla-installer-bin from mozilla-1.7.6.ko-KR.linux-i686.installer.tar.gz and mozilla-xremote-client from thunderbird-1.0.2.tar.gz were infected with Virus.Linux.RST.b This virus searches for executable ELF files in the current and /bin directories and infects them. When infecting files, it writes itself to the middle of the file, at the end of a section of code, which pushes the other sections lower down. It also contains a backdoor, which downloads scripts from another...

When Jack Messman, CEO of Novell, stands up and tell the attendees at BrainShare that the enterprise desktop is the way his company is going, isn't that a pretty good clue that Linux on the desktop isn't such an anathema as it used to be? Well, apparently not, as pundit after pundit called out to the masses this week all that was Evil (and Good) about the Linux desktop. By Wednesday night, I was reeling from trying to pick and choose articles that were trying to represent a balance of opinions. And that wasn't easy. While some of these articles...

Despite the obvious driver problems experienced on commodity x86 hardware, there is not much else to criticize about Solaris 10/OpenSolaris. There are some obvious gaps which should be addressed over the long term--better updates and patching processes, for example, and an improved administration framework would go a long way to help new users unfamiliar with the Solaris environment. Is it a viable alternative to Linux? Absolutely. In the last six months I've had no problems with Solaris 10 crashing, locking up or exhibiting odd behaviour. By comparison, my Gentoo-based systems have not been so well behaved. A SPARCserver 20 running...

The cost of migrating from Windows XP to Windows Vista will encourage more companies to seriously consider moving to desktop Linux, the chief executive of open-source and networking company Novell said on Monday. Speaking at Brainshare, the company's annual European user conference in Barcelona, Novell CEO Jack Messman claimed that the cost of moving desktops to the next version of Windows will be significantly higher than migrating to desktop Linux. "The cost of migrating to Windows XP to Vista will be higher than the cost of migrating to Linux and that will push migrations to Linux," Messman said. Novell says...

# Automated update to streamline product upgrades. Notification of an update is more prominent, and updates to Firefox may now be half a megabyte or smaller. Updating extensions has also improved. # Faster browser navigation with improvements to back and forward button performance. # Drag and drop reordering for browser tabs. # Improvements to popup blocking. # Clear Private Data feature provides an easy way to quickly remove personal data through a menu item or keyboard shortcut. # Answers.com is added to the search engine list. # Improvements to product usability including descriptive error pages, redesigned options menu, RSS discovery,...

SCO Source income: $32,000. Legal bills: $3 million By Graeme Wearden http://marketwatch-cnet.com.com, marketwatch-cnet.com.com/SCO+Source+income+32%2C000.+Legal+bills+3+million/2100-7344_3-5856675.html Story last modified Fri Sep 09 08:58:00 PDT 2005 <div><img><br><a><img></a></div> SCO has seen a sharp decline in income, as enterprises fail to be tempted by its Linux indemnification program. The litigious Unix vendor announced this week that revenues for its most recent quarter, which ended July 30, were $9.35 million compared to $11.2 million (5.09 million and 6.10 million pounds, respectively) for the same period in 2004. SCO posted a loss of $2.4 million over the three-month period, compared to a profit of $7.5 million for the...

THE NOW very much criticised US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has stopped Mac and Linux victims of hurricane Katrina from applying for relief. The agency, which is already in hot water for its lack-lustre rescue efforts in New Orleans, has created a web-based service that only works for users of Windows and IE6. So far only Mac users that have Opera, which can make an attempt to show that it is an IE6 machine, are able to access the claims service. According to online magazine Ars Technica, relief workers are frustrated at being tied to Windows by FEMA's online...

BRUSSELS, Sept 7 (Reuters) - Microsoft said on Wednesday it sued the European Commission in an EU court to gain quick resolution of a question surrounding sanctions imposed by the Commission on the company. The Commission has required Microsoft to share communications protocols -- or software rules of the road -- with rival makers of computer servers, ruling that it abused its dominance of the Windows operating system. Microsoft does not want to share that information with "open source" publishers who might make public what it says is confidential information. "This filing is the result of the agreement reached...

Signaling needs significantly more time in Mac OS X (Darwin) than on Linux. The processor plays a minor role: the Opteron at 2.4 GHz is a bit faster than the Xeon 3.6 GHz running exactly the same (x86) code. However, it is clear that the operating system plays a much bigger role: a 2.5 GHz G5 running Linux easily beats the identical system with a 2.7 GHz G5 running Mac OS X. Despite the FreeBSD heritage, the TCP signals are very slow (4 times slower!) on Mac OS X.

Linux's total cost of operation (TCO) is typically 40 percent lower than Windows, according to an IBM-sponsored report from the Robert Frances Group (RFG), publicised by IBM this week. The report [pdf] comes after two years of Microsoft-sponsored research heralding the benefits of Windows over Linux, although IBM denied it is a direct response.

There are many faces of Linux, a term which has come to mean many things. Underneath all the things that Linux is, it is an operating system kernel. Under the Linux Faces The term Linux also is applied to the popular GNU operating system (OS) built on top of the Linux kernel, often simply called the Linux OS. Then on top of that are the Linux-based distributions that usually and simply are called Linux distributions, such as Mandriva Linux, Red Hat Linux, or SUSE Linux. Please see Figure 1 in the right sidebar There are lots of Linux-based, operating system,...

Kerala, a tiny coastal state in south India, is a site of significant popularity of free software and GNU/Linux. What lessons can Kerala teach other areas about using free and open source software? Kerala, as a state, is strongly grounded in principles of socialism. Most of the educated middle class is leftist, at least in principle. The state is credited with a near 100% literacy rate and better social statistics than most of the rest of the country. And all this is reflected in a spirit among the people to question any decision imposed on them. They resent lack of...

A major reorganization is in the works for China's open-source software industry, with discussions under way over how local Linux vendors and industry organizations can cooperate more closely -- including the possibility of a merger between several of the country's top Linux companies. If the discussions result in a merger, it would be one that involves some of the biggest names in China's Linux industry, including Turbolinux China Software, Red Flag Software, and Beijing Co-Create Open Source Software, according to executives involved with the discussions. Closer cooperation among Chinese Linux vendors and industry organizations is essential if the country's software...

A group of former high-level execs from Red Hat are planning to launch a startup called rPath that will support customized Linux distributions. RPath’s core Linux offering, based on the Conary open-source project, represents a new way to build and maintain Linux without the overhead associated with RPM specification files and large binaries required for mainstream Linux distributions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, sources said. Conary is a distributed software management system for Linux distributions that enables developers to branch a distribution and intermingle other components from the Internet, rather than use a full distribution from a single vendor....

For a while it seemed as if the free software community was treading water by improving automatic configuration tools and device support, fighting ridiculous legal issues, and arguing over tools instead of concentrating on its original goal of providing free replacements for proprietary programs. But quietly, in the background, a number of important programs have begun to bring "proprietary functionality" to free software. Here are eight free software desktop applications that could change the balance of power between Windows and GNU/Linux by replacing proprietary software with free code. Flash4Linux/SWF Writer For Linux Macromedia's Flash development environment can be used to...

Linux/Unix e-mail flaw leaves system wide open By Matthew Broersma, Techworld Two serious security flaws have turned up in software widely distributed with Linux and Unix. The bugs affect Elm (Electronic Mail for Unix), a venerable e-mail client still used by many Linux and Unix sysadmins, and Mplayer, a cross-platform movie player that is one of the most popular of its kind on Linux. The Elm flaw involves a boundary error when the client reads an e-mail's "Expires" header. A specially crafted e-mail could exploit the bug to cause a buffer overflow and execute malicious code on a system, according...

INTRODUCTION: linuximgDeveloped by Linus Torvalds in 1991, Linux is a free operating system which “belongs to the world” and today, it has millions of happy users worldwide. Its being free doesn’t mean its being meaner than other operating systems. On the contrary, the industry experts are most impressed by its power and richness and more and more users are embracing Linux. Changing operating systems is definitely a big labor but this one-time labor is nothing if compared to all that one does to tackle those terrible blue screens of death, frozen windows, system crashes, viruses, data loss and spy wares....

Avnet Partner Solutions has created a new channel program that offers certification, sales and technical training to solution providers and ISVs selling Linux. The Enablement, Partnership, Incentives and Co-Marketing (EPIC) program is jointly funded with Novell to help solution providers craft Suse Linux-based solutions on IBM’s eServer platform. The initiative also includes marketing development and planning services and margin-based sales incentives for Novell products, according to Avnet executives. “The Linux market is big. We participate with Novell in a big way in an effort to drive more business into the Intel space with the Suse OS,” said Fred Cuen, president...

When Apple Computer announced in June that it planned to move to Intel chips, one of the companies left in the lurch was Terra Soft Solutions. The small Colorado company had carved out a nice niche specializing in selling Linux for Macs and other machines that use IBM's PowerPC chips. In the days following Apple's bombshell, Terra Soft quickly announced plans to seek out alternative hardware on which its Yellow Dog Linux could run. This week, Terra Soft is announcing it has filled some of the void created by Apple's move. Under a new deal, Terra Soft will resell PowerPC-based...

IBM Woos the World's Geeks - Big Blue will let software developers in Brazil, Russia, India, and China use company products for free. IBM announced an initiative Monday to encourage developers in emerging economies to work on the computing giant’s open standards technology, a computing framework for which hardware and software specifications are publicly available. As part of the initiative, the Armonk, New York-based company said that for the first time, developers in Brazil, Russia, India, China—popularly known as BRIC countries—will get instant access to IBM’s hardware and software portfolio from their desktop at no charge.