Kelly McNeill of OSOpinion writes: “Five years from now the notion that you have to go to a desktop computer — a special machine on a special desk in a special room — every time you need computer power will seem totally ridiculous. Appliances with embedded logic will give you computing wherever you need it. These ubiquitous devices will require a compact, reliable operating system. One for which source code is available so that it can be customized to fit a myriad of environments. One that supports a rich suite of mature applications such as e-mail clients and browsers. Open source software is the obvious candidate for this role.”

– by Tina Gasperson –
Citing a need for someone well-versed in all types of administrative duties,the GNOME Foundation has issued a request for comments in regard to hiring a full-time, salaried “person Friday.”The GNOME Foundation exists as a non-profit organization to direct the GNOME desktop project, its releases and standards, and to direct public relations efforts. GNOME is a graphical desktop for the X Windows system and is included with most Linux distributions.

There’s a “excellent candidate available now” for the job, says Havoc Pennington of Red Hat. Sounds like whoever gets the job is going to be pretty busy, judging from the looks of the list of duties posted to the foundation. He’ll be handling all the bookkeeping, organizing GUADEC (the GNOME user and developer European conference) and all that is entailed with that and other conferences, including booth setup and attendence; plus developing an advocacy campaign, fund-raising, funds spending ideas, and, (pant, pant) communications with other advisory boards.

And not only must this admin person be a jack-of-all-trades, but he’s also going to have to raise his own salary as part of that fund-raising effort mentioned above. “We are hiring on a ‘you raise your own salary’ basis. Our candidate
has an excellent track record in fund raising, and feels he could
pay himself and go on to develop a substantial fund for supporting
GNOME,” writes Pennington in a post to the GNOME foundation list.

Of all these responsibilities, the conference set-up duties seem to stand out as particularly important to others who have commented on the possibility of making a full-time hire. “Just look at the general GNOME preformance when it comes to booths conferences.
If a full-time person takes care of this we [probably] won’t end up doing things
at the last minute as we seem to have done in the past, such as last year’s
Montreal Linux Expo, when I found out we had a booth by walking around the
showfloor and noticing a completely empty booth with a ‘GNOME’ sign on it,” wrote George Lebl of the foundation.

The KDE project, another Open Source desktop that is included with most Linux distributions, does not have a foundation to oversee its affairs, and says it has no plans to create one.

From LinuxSecurity.com: Hidden deep within its code is a format string vulnerability which can be triggered simply by attempting to decrypt a file
with a specially crafted filename. This vulnerability can allow a malicious user to gain unathorized access to the account
which attempted the decryption.

EcommerceTimes.com has a story about some barriers to people adopting Office XP.
From the story, “Another option for Office customers is to switch to another product, but viable options are few
and far between. Linux desktop and productivity suites lack standardization, and the Linux
desktop software market is now in disarray. Linux application software vendor Eazel Inc. has
shuttered its doors, and MandrakeSoft Inc. has undergone a management reorganization.” Linux also gets ripped in a ZDNet story on the same subject.

Interactive Week has a column from a guy who attended a computer security class recently, describing the class cracking Linux and NT boxes.

From LinuxSecurity.com: There is a bug in the Guardian Digital WebTool which shipped with
EnGarde Secure Linux version 1.0.1.

When the WebTool restarts a service, certain environmental variables
are inherited which should not be, such as the token used to
authenticate the administrator to the WebTool daemon. Anybody who can
view the environment variables of a process can thus get this token,
and potentially root access.

From LinuxSecurity.com: Two vulnerabilities have been found in the man package that is installed
by default in all SuSE Linux distributions. The first error is a format
string bug in the error handling routine of the man command that can
allow a local attacker to gain the privileges of the user “man” on SuSE
Linux systems (the man command in /usr/bin is installed setuid man).
After getting write access to the /usr/bin/man binary, an attacker can
place a cuckook’s egg into the executable, waiting for root to view
manpages.
The second problem is a segmentation fault that can be caused by the
options “-S ::: foo” to the man command. On other Linux distributions,
this problem has been found exploitable.

IDG.net has more details about the SuSE 7.2 release scheduled for June 15.
It’ll be based on the 2.4.4 Linux kernel and feature the KDE 2.1.2 and the Gnome 1.4 desktops.

From IDG.net: “Spreading like a virus everyone wants to
catch, hardware and software vendors lined
up Tuesday to announce their support for
Intel’s new Itanium 64-bit chip, parading a
slew of new products while promising
consumers high-performance and variety.

Hardware big names such as Itanium
co-developer Hewlett-Packard and
software makers like Red Hat toasted the
long-awaited arrival of Intel’s new chip by
popping the cork on a range of
Itanium-based products.”

From LinuxPR: DMS Decision Management Systems is both pleased and proud to announce the
release of the seasonal fruits of its developmental loins, version 1.5A of the Kopi Suite.

This new version corrects some important bugs and contains various
enhancements in type handling and internationalisation.