Desktop Dreams for Linux, Feb 01, 2001

Big companies like Dell and Sun, and smaller ones such as Eazel, CodeWeavers and Ximian, are putting their muscle behind this year's edition of the free, open-source operating system's attempt to unseat Microsoft Windows' rule over office and home end-user systems.

Computer giants Dell and Oracle have increased their support for Linux. A move that is likely to boost corporate confidence in the free operating system

The duo is to open a test facility in Austin, Texas to test Oracle databases running on Intel-based systems running Linux. Oracle will also use Dell's servers and storage products for building the Oracle 9i database on Linux.

Linux may be known as the software that came from nowhere to change the server market, but its effect is being felt in other computing sectors as well.

One area in which Linux has made strides is "embedded" software. This means set-top boxes, handheld devices and other computing contraptions may soon be running Linux-based operating systems.

While Microsoft executives publicly vacillate between declaring Linux either the most hyped operating system or the biggest threat to Windows, in reality, the company has learned some powerful lessons from its open-source competitors.

In fact, in an unprecedented move, during the past six months Microsoft has made available to "hundreds" of its larger customers copies of its closely guarded Windows source code, said Doug Miller, group product manager with Microsoft's Windows .Net server marketing group.

Opera Software hasn't yet put the finishing touches on its forthcoming Mac and Linux browser releases. But the software maker plans to announce Thursday that it will make free versions of Opera 5.0 for both of these operating systems available later this year

French Linux seller MandrakeSoft has acquired Coursemetric, an online education company, as part of an effort to expand its services.

Just as IBM did yesterday, Intel will enlist the help of open-source developers in pushing Linux and open source to the limits.

During a Thursday morning keynote speech at LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in New York, William Swope, vice president of Intel's architecture group, will talk up the role of enterprise servers in furthering the growth and potential of open source.

Software emulation firm VMware announced it has teamed up with researchers at the National Security Agency to create a nearly crack-proof computer that can place sensitive data in virtual vaults inside the PC.

The concept, assuming it works, would streamline the methods intelligence agencies use to manage data. At present, the NSA--the military surveillance arm of the United States intelligence community--physically separates networks carrying data of a particular classification. For example, top-secret data might be kept on a different computer than data classified merely as sensitive material. Sometimes, for workers to have access to the information they need, up to six different computers can be on a single desk.

V-Sync Co., Ltd. announced development of a pay-settlement system called "CoCyph" for petty amounts of money used in combination with portable phones.

The company based the CoCyph system on its experiences in music distribution to mini disks through multimedia kiosk terminals. The company has Linux installed into servers at its music-distribution center and Kiosk terminals at shops. Likewise, Linux is adopted as the operating system for servers providing the clearance infrastructure.

We are pleased to announce the release of whizzBee 1.0a, a web server that will work like a busy bee to bring satisfaction to your clients. Download the ready-to-run free binary at http://www.whizztech.com/ WhizzBee is a next-generation web server that leverages the state-of-art clustering technology. It is developed on top of the open-source Apache web server with a number of performance enhancement features. The current version, WhizzBee 1.0a, works for the Linux OS on i386 platforms. Features of WhizzBee 1.0a include support for clustering, cooperative caching, efficient request dispatching, high availability, web or console management, and dynamic load-balancing. Benchmark results show that WhizzBee 1.0a outperforms its competitors both in the commercial and the open-source domains, with improvement reaching as much as 1,522% in an 8-node configuration. A minimal configuration of WhizzBee 1.0a requires two PCs running RedHat Linux v6.2. WhizzBee 1.0a supports up to 128 web server nodes. Whizz Technology Ltd.

DShield.org just published a summary of 'Ramen Signatures' submitted to its database since January 1st. The graph show an increase in port 21/53/111 scans around January 11th and a decrease of these scans over the last week. However, things are not back to normal yet...

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