An anonymous reader writes: “Linux users say once they started using the free source operating system they were hooked. Stability, reliability, the absence of software licenses and being able to view and change the source code are some of the reasons. It has been embraced by a range of businesses, from a company that checks term papers for plagiarism, a provider of business and technology solutions to the retail industry and Web developers. Read the full story here at searchenterpriselinux.com.”

– by Tina Gasperson –
IBM put up a KDE tutorial earlier this week, and on April 10 they launched a KDE theme creation contest. If you were watching closely, you may have noticed a few interesting twists to this contest.The interest in IBM’s developerWorks tutorial on creating KDE themes has been running high since the story broke on April 10. But there were a few snags in the contest rules. For one thing, the contest was limited to U.S. residents only — rather impolite considering there are KDE users all over the world. Not only that, but the rules stated that contestants must develop themes for KDE 1.1 or 1.2 only, not the latest versions, 2.0 and 2.1. And last but certainly not least, according to IBM’s director of Linux technology, Dr. Daniel Frye, the rules did not make a provision for submissions being Open Source. Instead, they mandated that all submissions became the property of IBM.

Frye says, “We screwed up in a couple of different ways that we are fixing.” The contest is being extended to include citizens of all countries. The only limitation is that awards to winners in countries other than the United States will be given as donations to the victors’ favorite Open Source project.

IBM is fixing the version restrictions and the wording of the rules as well. “Our heart is in the right place,” says Frye. It’s simply a case of inexperience with the Open Source way of doing things. Frye says that IBM contest designers received several emails pointing out the unintential gaffes. “They (the contest designers) are much more familiar with Open Source today than they were yesterday.”

Frye and Lisa Lanspery, IBM’s Linux media relations representative, said that the site is fully updated. You can take a look at the fresh contest rules at this URL.

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“Linux newcomers are becoming part of the mainstream effort to create software for
non-PC “embedded” computing devices, as indicated by a host of trade show
announcements. Linux, a clone of the Unix operating system that competes with Windows, got its start in
servers. A number of companies, such as TimeSys, Red Hat, Lineo, LynuxWorks and
MontaVista Software have been working to squeeze it into smaller embedded devices such as
network routers, handheld computers and set-top boxes.” Full story at ZDNet.

From SecurityFocus.com: “The head of Microsoft’s security response team argued here Thursday that closed source
software is more secure than open source projects, in part because nobody’s reviewing open source code for
security flaws.”

Patrick Mullen writes: “The Duke of URL has just posted the second part to their wireless LAN overview, which focuses on devices. The review includes benchmarks, some technical overview, installation
experiences and much more. This is a great article for anyone
interested in how the new 802.11b devices run on both Linux and Windows
systems.”

Changes to the latest version of the 2.4.3 Linux kernel include: “Merge Linus 2.4.4pre1; New rwsem implementation; Fix rwsem compile problem; Fix bust_spinlocks build fail if !CONFIG_VT; Merge Linus 2.4.4pre2 except for ipv6; Fix the corner case non zeroing bug in; copy_from_user for x86.” More at LWN.net.

FreeBSDZine has an article on configuring Bochs, an Open Source x86 PC emulator. The program “ncludes emulation of the Intel x86 CPU, common IO devices, and a custom BIOS. Like
VMware, Bochs is a kind of virtual machine that can run Windows95, MS-DOS, Linux, etc.”

From a press release at LinuxPR: “Today, SuSE Linux, the
international technology leader and provider of Open Source solutions,
announced the release of SuSE Linux 7.1 for the Sparc architecture of Sun
Microsystems.”

From Linux Security: “The purpose of this document is to demonstrate the steps necessary to set up GnuPG and use it with Pine, a popular mail and news client. I will not go
into very much detail about the usage and responsability aspects of GnuPG (please refer to the References section for links). I will, however, go into
enough detail to ensure that a reader is familiar with the relevant concepts required for sending and receiving PGP signed/encrypted e-mail.”

“Suppose your cellular telephone could connect to the Internet at speeds faster than many DSL or cable modems or even corporate local area networks? How would that change things? That’s a question we may find out the answer to much sooner than we expected, now that Sprint and Lucent have conducted an on-air test using a third-generation (3G) cellular device to transmit data at speeds of up to 2.4MB per second.” More at ZDNet.