High-end software caps Red Hat drive, Mar 27, 2002

Red Hat on Tuesday unveiled a powerful new server product aimed squarely at the large enterprises that the company sees as its market sweet spot.

CodeWeavers' new CrossOver Office product delivers on the long-standing goal of the Wine project : making it easy for anyone to successfully install and run Windows software on Linux systems, using a simple point-and-click process. It works so well, and the Windows programs that it currently supports run so smoothly, that it makes me feel slightly guilty -- as though I'm somehow cheating.

Yellow Dog Linux 2.2 offers an array of improvements over v2.1 with the most advanced, stable release of the 2.4 kernel, improved support for the Apple ADC monitors, and accelerated video. The screen brightness and volume control buttons are now supported on NewWorld ROM Apple PowerBooks and iBook computers. And while the latest release of KDE is an appreciated improvement, Gnome has taken a stunning leap forward --giving Mac OS X a run for its money-- exceptional by all standards.

But online security, just like everything else, is subject to the ebb and flow of capitalism -- and the relentless releases of new software products with which one must be compatible. Updated operating systems from Microsoft and Apple require updated versions of PGP, but Network Associates is currently not making the necessary improvements. Koh and tens of thousands of other PGP users have been forced to seek alternatives.

Increasingly, they're finding haven in a small corner of the open-source software world, bringing both opportunity and new users to an oddly named and heretofore little-known programming effort fueled by volunteers: GnuPG.

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