ZDNet’s Smart Partner reports that American fast food giant McDonald’s is hungry for Unix. According to sources, the company will order 4,000 OpenUnix licenses from Caldera International. The compan will use OpenUnix and IBM’s MQSeries to track data and crunch financial information across its restaurants. Other fast food restaurants with OpenUnix on the menu include TriCor’s KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell chains.

Slashdot contributor chromatic reviewsRed Hat Linux System Administration Handbook, written by Mark F. Komarinsky & Cary Collett and published by Prentice Hall: “On the whole, the Handbook packs in a lot of data. Administrators already familiar with Windows
will get the most from the book. It will require some sense of exploration and adventure, but that’s
one of the most compelling parts of free software.”

Doc Searls has posted a blow-by-blow account of today’s Open Source debate between Microsoft’s Craig Mundie and Red Hat’s Michael Tiemann. The debate took place this morning in San Diego at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention.

Gasp, shock, and horror: Instable Linux systems? Yes, boys and girls they do happen, and IBM’s developerWorks series is here to help. Daniel Robbins, CEO of Gentoo Technologies, uses his experience installing an NVIDIA TNT graphics card and its accelerated drivers to demonstrate how to diagnose and fix IRQ and PCI latency timer issues.

Wired News, one of the many online news sites covering O’Reilly’s Open Source convention taking place this week in San Diego, weighs in with its own enthusiastic report on the proceedings. Seems that some folks attending this confab think that Microsoft’s decision to participate in the program is a sign that the Redmond giant may yet be won over to the side of Open Source programming. Isn’t that sweet?

IMP, a Web-based e-mail system that uses the Horde framework, is subject to several vulnerabilities that could allow remote attackers to execute unknown scripts from foreign servers, execute malicious JavaScript code, and/or execute certain PHP code. Read the full Conectiva advisory posted at Linux Weekly News.

From LinuxDevices.com, stories include an interview with Lineo COO Matt Harris, an animated BusyBox tutorial, and a CD-ROM sized Linux distribution called The briQ.

From the advisory, posted at Linux Weekly News: “By providing a value for the the array element $_PHPLIB[libdir], an
intruder can force a script to load and execute scripts from another
server.
This is because the value of $_PHPLIB[libdir] gets initalized *only*
if not already set.”

IBM developerWorks features a comprehensive evaluation of Pippy, a port of Python for the PalmOS and designed for building handheld applications on that platform. The article looks at every aspect of using Pippy, starting with installing this development tool. Says the author: “Pippy is still living at the bleeding edge. The stability is great, but Pippy lacks some pretty basic features.
All things will come with time.”

The latest edition of Kernel Cousin KDE has been posted at kt.zork.net. In this edition, learn about XIM Asian character support for KOffice, check in on a discussion about what’s in store for KDE after version 2.2, and of course, a few words on Kontour, the KDE graphic design program formerly known as KIllustrator.