Utah’s Lineo is the latest to weigh in on Thursday’s Microsoft/Munide Open Source bashing festival. Excerpt: “Lineo finds
it laughable that Microsoft, the very company that has stifled innovation
through its closed, proprietary software, would say that the open source
model would stifle innovation. Microsoft apparently has no answer to the
troublesome threat that open source software poses to them, beyond this
transparent public relations maneuver.” Read the full text of Lineo’s response at Linux Weekly News.

One of a series of blurbs on Info World’s news page states that NEC will ship its new super-thin notebook computers on Monday. The new notebooks are “encased in lightweight silver magnesium.” My, it does sound like a handsome hunk of hardware; hope the design is as functional as it is decorative.

Daemon News and Bill Moran walk users through the process of setting up a RADIUS server using FreeBSD.

O’Reilly Network reviews ROCK Linux, an “admin friendly” Linux distribution that aims to please the folks deploying Linux solutions in a corporate and/or enterprise environment.

Market research firm IDC discovers that Linux isn’t just for desktops these days. Thanks to handheld units like Agenda’s VR3, the company will be tracking Linux-based handheld devices for the first time next month. “”We’re going to try to accurately estimate the penetration of Linux on the PDA world,
but it’s going to be difficult because the market is just so fragmented and new,” IDC
analyst Kevin Burden said.” Indeed, it will be nice to have some solid sales numbers on those units. Full story at CNET News.com.

LinuxGram “We’re altogether pleased with ourselves because we managed to sneak this story out past all those watchful sentries at RLX Technologies who kept saying no in their sweet Texas drawls. Actually the start-up is mere days away from the magic moment of self-revelation so the information can be had if you know where to look for it… Anyway, on Tuesday, May 8, RLX is going to give birth in public, like the Queen of France used to, to a new paradigm, the
dense server. They’re supposed to say they’ve started shipping.

The box is going to be called the RLX System 324 Web Server.”

“Red Hat, Inc. (Nasdaq:RHAT), the market leader among those developing,
deploying and managing solutions incorporating open source technologies, today announced Red Hat TechWorld, a technical conference aimed at bringing
Red Hat customers and open source developers and advocates together for a variety of educational and technical tracks. The first of these global events will
be held at the Brussels Expo, in Brussels, Belgium on September 17 and 18, 2001.
Red Hat TechWorld Brussels will feature educational tracks on a variety of open source topics including application development, high availability,
clustering, real-time operating systems, journaling file systems and enterprise Linux deployments.” Read the full press release at Business Wire.

Help Net Security: “The sgmltool programs (“sgml2html” and others) are used to convert
SGML-files into various other formats.

During operation, the underlying SGML perlmodule creates temporary files
in an insecure way. This allows attackers to destroy arbitrary files owned
by the user who invoked the sgmltool program”

From Linux Weekly News: ” format string vulnerability exists in the locale subsystem. The
locale subsystem consists of databases that contain language and
country specific information. Whenever a program needs to display a
message to a user, it accesses a database within the subsystem and
retrieves the proper language-specific string using the original
message as the search key. The string(s) retrieved by the program are
displayed using printf(). It is possible for an attacker to control
the output by building and installing a custom database.”

From LinuxSecurity.com: “This week, advisories were released for NEdit, gftp, rpmdrake, kdelibs, gnupg, FreeBSD kernel, mount, and
openssl. The vendors include EnGarde, Immunix, FreeBSD, Mandrake, Progeny, and Red Hat.”