An anonymous reader writes "MIZI Research appears to be taking on the largest players in the emerging third-generation smartphone software market with an integrated solution based on its MIZI Linux 2.0 distribution. Furthermore, the Korean embedded Linux specialist is rumored to have a development deal with an unidentified major consumer electronics powerhouse that, if true, could result in 3G smartphones based on MIZI Linux 2.0 receiving aggressive worldwide development, distribution, and marketing soon."

securitas writes "The New York Times is carrying a Reuters story about Linux as the software of choice for consumer electronics. At the world's largest consumer electronics show, the IFA trade fair 'the first Linux products are already on show and more will come soon, companies said.' The reason? Linux is freely available, widely embraced and profit margins in the consumer electronics business are one or two percent at best. The math is simple. The industry push comes from the members of the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF), that includes Sony, Philips, Matsushita/Panasonic, Hitachi, Sharp, Samsung, NEC, IBM, LG, Thomson/RCA and Toshiba. The CELF was previously discussed on Slashdot. Mirrors at Silicon.com and CNet News."

Young Grasshoopa asks: "In my 6 years of IT life, I've been a sys admin, perl programmer, and a config. mgmt. engineer. I've recently learned programming in C, and somehow ended up learning a bit of Linux Kernel programming as well. I now have developed a strong motivation to become a Linux kernel developer, but given my background, I am not sure how to approach companies or Open Source Project groups. I ask all those who were in a similar situation - how do you become a full-time kernel developer?"

cadfael writes "SCO is reported in the Age as saying they 'Have no plans to sue Linux companies...' This seems to contradict the earlier statements of Chris Sontag. This story also points out how Canopy owns stakes in several other Linux companies, including Linux Networx wheich supplied the supercomputer for Lawrence Livermore Nat Lab. One begins to wonder if the reality of their situation has become clear to them?" Maybe, just maybe, this is the beginning of the end of this mess.

An anonymous reader writes "This column explains how to write secure applications; it focuses on the Linux operating system, but many of the principles apply to any system. In today's networked world, software developers must know how to write secure programs, yet this information isn't widely known or taught. This first installment of the Secure programmer column introduces the basic ideas of how to write secure applications and discusses how to identify the security requirements for your specific application. Future installments will focus on different common vulnerabilities and how to prevent them."

ThaReetLad writes "In this article at DevX, Executive Editor A. Russell Jones makes the case for a standardised GUI for Linux. He argues that the promotion of choice of GUI as a positive feature of using Linux is detrimental to its chances of attacking Microsoft's home user monopoly. From the article: '...the open source community must recognize that its primary goals: freedom of choice, freedom of source code, and freedom to alter applications, are not the goals of the average user.' In particular he argues that the choice of desktop between KDE, Gnome, IceWM etc, is not one that a former windows user, even a fairly technically competent one, is going to able to make an informed choice on, and that they should not be forced to make that choice in order to get good use out of any applications they might want to use."

InodoroPereyra writes "This article at The Dot indicates that the KOffice developers decided to switch to the Open Office file format (OASIS) for their next major release. Excellent news both for KOffice, which will benefit from OpenOffice's excellent filters, and for the GNU/Linux Desktop users in general, who will benefit from a unified file format standard between these office suites."

jgercken writes "The Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has brought online a 11.8 teraflops supercomputer based on the Linux operating system, comprised of ~2,000 Itanium processors, and assembled by HP. Touted to be the fastest unclassified computer in the US, its main duties will be atmospheric chemistry, systems biology, catalysis and materials science."

asa writes "Today mozilla.org released Mozilla 1.5 Beta, available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. This beta release features lots of bugfixes, the inclusion of a spellchecker for Messenger and Composer, and lots of minor feature improvements to Navigator, Messenger, Composer and Chatzilla. More information is available at the Mozilla Release Notes."

Joe Barr writes "I ran across a curious website recently: OpenLindows.com. The name alone intrigued me. It gave rise to speculation about a weird mix of free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech alternative to the $99/year Click-N-Run software subscription offered by LindowsOS, the most Windows-like/proprietary Linux distribution out there. This is a report on what I found, and perhaps even more importantly, what I didn't."

grahamlee writes "It may be a case of 'do as we say, not as we do' over at the Santa Cruz Operation. The Netcraft statistics meter says that for the last year, SCO's web site has been served by Apache on Linux. Indeed, it's been more than a year since the site was ever served from a SCO Unix machine. So what is the possible reason for this? Your humble author suggests that SCO found themselves requiring a multithreaded web server, and as SCO UNIX is based on an ancient version of The UNIX spec it just couldn't cope ;-)." Read on for one of the strangest-yet turns to the SCO story, and several merely insipid ones.

RabidChipmunk writes "Mandrake 9.2RC1 is out. Go get it with bit-torrent and speed up my download. I like the idea that posting to Slashdot could actually speed up a download. It seems so wrong." If you're on a slow pipe, don't underestimate the throughput of the postal system. Mark Walker writes "Mandrake Linux 9.2 RC1 is appearing on mirrors as I type this. We're currently downloading it from Mandrake, for http://www.budgetlinuxcds.com."

TekPolitik writes "Blizzard's attempt to shut down the multi-platform freeware RTS, FreeCraft appears to have backfired. There are now two replacement projects - Project Inferno and Stratagus. The new sites are making some effort to catalog all the games that use the new engine. Stratagus lists Wargus, Aleona's Tales and RoboVasion. Project Inferno lists ShadowConflict." The Stratagus FAQ page constructively explains: "Stratagus aims at being a generic realtime strategy engine, with no special focus on Warcraft2."

thorgil writes "Guessing about the linux-2.6.0 release date is hard, but here is a new angle (pseudo-scientific): I made a graph (gif) based on errors/warnings from John Cherry's (OSDL) compile statistics for linus' linux bitkeeper tree. My guess is around 12th October, 2003. What is your guess and more important, why?"

What Can You Expect From A University Named "UH?" writes "Eric S. Raymond responds to Darl McBride's charge that he's drinking IBM's Kool-Aid in SCO's fight against Linux. The main thrust: Yes, there is an alliance against SCO, but, like the Open Source movement itself, it arises from lots of folks spontaneously striving for a common goal. 'It's beyond me how [you] can have the gall to talk as though we need funding or marching orders from IBM to mobilize against you. IBM couldn't stop us from mobilizing!' "

tyen asks: "While it's not dead yet (shades of Monty Python), Internet postage on Linux appears to be missing. The biggest player's software is Windows-only, and the other players mimic this requirement. You would be amazed how many businesses will dedicate a computer to printing off postage and shipping labels, why pay an annoying Microsoft tax for such an appliance application? Besides, these Windows-based solutions are heavily GUI-centric, and any integration into Linux-based automated processes would be unacceptably brittle. Has anyone successfully set up their business to print off e-postage from Linux or any other Open Source platform?"

man_of_mr_e asks: "With all the recent brouhaha about Blaster and Sobig, there's been a lot of talk about how poor Windows security is, especially compared to the Linux we all know and love. But is this really true? The website defacement archive at Zone-h shows that Linux accounts for 61% of the defacements in the last 24 hours (note, this figure changes, so it might be different when you view it). An analysis of the last few weeks of their archive shows a similar percentage of exploited Linux systems. Note also that the 'Unknown' category is rather high, and certainly contains at least some Linux systems, further increasing the percentage. Why is this? Are we just deluding ourselves about our own security? Could there be a Linux 'Blaster' just waiting to happen?" While "defacements" don't necessarily mean "root level break-in", sometimes getting your foot in the door is enough. If this happens, wouldn't Linux then be just as exploitable as Windows? Are there other reasons why the likelihood of a "Sobig" or an "ILUVYOU" would be lower for Linux than Windows?

An anonymous reader writes "Marcelo Tosatti has officially released another stable 2.4 Linux kernel. 2.4.22 was released early this morning and includes a lengthy list of fixes. It follows the last stable kernel in this tree, 2.4.21, by a little over two months."

An anonymous reader writes "Welcome to Compiling sources and managing packages, the first of four tutorials designed to prepare you for the Linux Professional Institute's 102 (release 2) exam. In this tutorial, we'll show you how to compile programs from sources, how to manage shared libraries, and how to use the Red Hat and Debian package management systems."

prostoalex writes "UK-based Imagination Technologies announced the first port of Linux to multi-threaded DSP architecture. The port is done for Imagination's META core that it licenses out to those needing a generic DSP architecture. According to the company, 'META can run Linux on one hardware thread while running real-time DSP tasks on the other threads. META can also re-allocate MIPS on the fly so that each thread can be delivered the guaranteed share of processing resource and response time that it needs, while never clocking the processor faster than is required.'"