mAriuZ writes "Initially funded by a grant from the Pentagon's DARPA, the Sardonix project aspired to replace the Linux security review process with a public website that meticulously tracks which code has been audited for security holes, and by whom. As conceived by Crispin Cowan, Sardonix was to attract volunteer auditors by automatically ranking them according to the amount of code they've examined, and the number of security holes they've found. Auditors would lose points if a subsequent audit by someone else turned up bugs they missed. ... In the end, though, nobody showed up."

Gossi writes "The BBC is carrying an excellent overview of the growing use of Linux, by many different fields. The article says it all, really, and is probably something you should show your Boss."

eco2geek writes "The local "alternative newspaper" is running a cover story titled 'The Rebel Alliance: An unlikely army of hacker hippies, geek visionaries, idealistic teachers and corporate giants is making Portland ground zero of a digital revolution.' I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call Portland 'ground zero' of anything, but the article does give the average reader a good introduction to what Linux is, why it's important, and some of the politics surrounding it. (The article also mentions 'the frenetic Slashdot.org.' :-)"

FyRE666 writes "Infoworld are currently running an interesting comparison of the 2.4 series kernel against the new 2.6 release on Xeon, Opteron and Itanium CPUs with some surprising benchmark results for common server-related tasks. Basically the new scheduler helps the 2.6 kernel to cream the old 2.4: Samba tests showing up to 73% speed increases, MySQL showing up to 29% and Apache serving dynamic content up to 47% faster!"

An anonymous reader inputs: "Mad Penguin has posted a comprehensive review of Sun's JDS 2003 Linux distribution, and it is one of the most honest I have seen: "The developers behind this effort need to focus on what makes a desktop OS great: ease of use, multimedia support, and simple/accessible networking features." Without that, the author says that the distro cannot survive. there was also mention of Project Looking Glass, a 3D java desktop environment for Linux that is still under heavy development." Compare this review with the first one that was posted, back in December.

fmileto writes "Kerneltrap.org is reporting that Nvidia has released drivers for the 2.6 series kernel. The driver and install directions can be found on Nvidia's website."

Oskuro writes "According to this story at news.netcraft.com, Debian was the fastest growing distribution in the last 6 months, closely followed by SuSE and Gentoo. RedHat, while still reigning, has started to lose sites in Netcraft's survey after they announced the end of support for their desktop releases. The survey is based on the stats from webservers which include the distribution name in their webserver's header." Maybe it would grow even faster when Java issues are worked out -- read more below on that.

An anonymous reader writes "Here's an interesting commentary on OSDir.com about one Mac OS X user's guilt over using it instead of Linux on his laptop, and how he's been burned by the dreaded iBook logic board problems so much that it underlines the tyranny of hardware vendor lock-in: it's not that Mac OS X isn't F/OSS, but that it only runs on Apple hardware. It also raises the obvious question: have you ever felt guilty over using Mac OS X instead of Linux?"

MadSaxon writes "gumstix.org has a brief but titillating description of a very small Linux machine based on the PXA255: 20 x 80 mm, '64MB SDRAM, 4MB Flash, MMC/SD/SDIO slot, and power management. It takes 3.6V - 5.0V power, and has been drawing under 200 mA.' It weighs less than 12g sans battery, and 'can fit in a collar undetected.' Is collar-top computing the Next Big Thing?"

mr.big_pig writes "The Seattle PI had a front page article analyzing the Microsoft's Get The Facts website and related ads compairing Windows to Linux. The short and sweet: follow the money and see just how 'independent' is this research. What caught my eye was that this was on the front page and not buried in the business section."

Anonymous Coward writes "Now that the Linux 2.6 kernel has been released and is being worked into distributions, many in the open-source community are turning their attention to the next development and test kernel, known as the 2.7 tree. To get an early glimpse at some of the thinking going into the next kernel, key vendors that aid in shaping the Linux kernel helped eWEEK last week put together a long-range wish list for 2.7."

perbert writes "On January 27th, the KDE Project released KOffice 1.3 for Linux and Unix operating systems. KOffice is a free set of office applications that integrate with the award winning KDE desktop. KOffice is a light-weight yet feature rich office solution and provides a variety of filters to interoperate with other popular office suites such as OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office."

dexterpexter writes "In an interview with Business Week, Linux founder and guardian Linus Torvalds had, in his usual brand of blunt humor, the following to say about SCO: 'They're a cornered rat, and quite frankly, I think they have rabies to boot. I'd rather not get too close to them,' and 'There are literally several levels of SCO being wrong. And even if we were to live in that alternate universe where SCO would be right, they'd still be wrong.'" In the same issue, there's also an interview with Darl McBride where he admits that the company was failing and the Linux-related lawsuits were a last-ditch effort to prevent bankruptcy.

omin0us writes "over at http://cacko.zaurususergroup.com, we are working on a Full X11 based Linux distro for the Sharp Zaurus SL-c7x0/860 series of PDAs. The screen has a usable full VGA resolution of 640x480 and the distro uses Openbox/ROX Desktop as its Native WM. But others such as Fluxbox, Afterstep, and XFCE have been compiled for it and run nicely. You will also find a WIDE variety of compiled apps in the Feed on the Cacko website such as a native GCC Compiler, XMMS, Mplayer, prboom, Gimp, Gkrellm, Abiword and numerous others. Many different screenshots of it in action may be found here. This is truly bringing desktop linux to the PDA. Also, another project that has branched from Cacko Linux is Gentoo for Zaurus. This project, at the moment is based on the Cacko X11 environment, but will eventually become a full Gentoo environment. "It can emerge packages, sync, or create Gentoo packages using the -B switch in emerge." This should be an interesting project to watch."

An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices has published a summary of research findings from Zelos Group that predicts that Linux is going dominate the smartphone market, beating out both Symbian and Microsoft. Zelos says that Linux scored highest on the two criteria that matter most to OEMs and carriers: openness and low cost. Microsoft scored lowest in these criteria. The article says Zelos believes Symbian beats Microsoft due to the flexibility of its licensing terms, and Microsoft prospects will be stymied to an extent by its desire to strictly manage how its brand is used. The conclusion: Linux will be the preferred operating system for connected devices."

Yes, there is a Linux Users Group in Iraq. When it was first mentioned on Slashdot it only had two members. It's grown a little since then, as has The Iraqi Linux Group Portal. Adam Davidson, an American reporter in Baghdad who helped start the group, has agreed to answer your questions about Linux in Iraq. Please post only one question per comment. We'll email Adam 10 of the highest-moderated questions, and post his answers verbatim (except for HTML formatting) when he gets them back to us.

evilmf writes "Well... I was on my daily "relaxing" read of the LKML when I've found an interesting announce about "Cooperative Linux", in this message from Dan Aloni. It allows you to run Linux on an unmodified Win2000/XP system, just launching another app. Dan says that Cooperative Linux is 'is stable enough (on some common hardware configurations) for running a fully functional KNOPPIX/Debian system on Windows,' and provides some screenshots in the project homepage."

JimLynch writes "When you think of Linux, certain names spring to mind: Red Hat, SuSE--even Libranet. But you almost never hear someone say "Hey, did you download the latest version of Ark Linux?" Well, it's too bad, because Ark Linux might someday be a viable contender for the Linux desktop crown and it surely deserves some recognition as such at this point. Despite being labeled an alpha, Ark Linux is one amazing little distro." In other distro news, lmvaz writes "Conectiva, the biggest Linux distribution of Brazil and South America released yesterday the 'Conectiva Linux 10 - Technology Preview 2,' bringing the kernel 2.6.1, KDE 3.2 rc1, Gnome 2.4, Mozilla 1.5, OpenOffice 1.1, etc. The release notes are available here and the torrents for download are here. The final release is expected by the end of the first semester of this year. It's a nice bundle for people wanting to help getting the 2.6 linux kernel in shape."

DCEmumaniac writes "Today news appeared on PS2Vision about work on a homebrew version of Linux for the PlayStation 2 that will not need any hardware modifications to use it. According to the project, which is being hosted on the PS2Dev site: 'The Great Experiment (TGE) is an Open Source PS2/Linux Kit RTE replacement and bootloader. It's being written to provide a binary interface compatible with that of the RTE shipped with the PS2/Linux Kit and other Sony products that use Linux. The end goal is that anyone who owns a PS2 will be able to run Linux (or other programs written to use the RTE, such as NetBSD) on their PS2 without hardware modifications or expensive hardware bundles'."

HAL9OOO writes "I found an article that as well as giving a good overview of "SCO - The Story So Far" also provides an interesting insight into the character of a certain Mr Darl McBride Esq." It's a fairly lengthy article providing a lot of insight. Necessary reading to anyone new the SCO/Linux thing, and recommended to anyone who just wants some interesting details on SCOs position on the whole thing.