Recently our LUG mailing list experienced a significant quantity of messages which many participants considered to be off topic. During the several days of exchanges, one person voiced the opinion that to him Linux has always been as much about the free exchange of ideas as it being a developing operating system. There are reasonable arguments both ways.

Stacey Quandt, senior business analyst and Open Source Practice leader at the Robert Frances Group, told LinuxInsider that the situation has little to do with e-mails. It's about proof.
A 2002 e-mail claims a SCO Group Latest News about SCO Group investigation failed to uncover any evidence that Linux Security, strength, a lower TCO: find out about all the advantages of IBM Middleware on Linux. contained copyrighted Unix code.
Groklaw yesterday posted an e-mail dated August 2002 penned by SCO Group engineer Michael Davidson. The message allegedly made its way to one of the company's senior vice presidents and then on to SCO Group CEO Darl McBride.

The announcement at Red Hat Summit that the Netscape Directory Service product purchased by Red Hat last year was destined for GPL glory got a far milder reaction than the significance of this event merits in terms of what it means for Red Hat, Linux users, and open source software.

For the past several weeks, I've been running my home office LAN exclusively on SUSE 9.3 Professional. I found this latest version, released in March, to be an excellent implementation of the Linux operating system. It brings Linux's levels of ease of use and configurability to an all-time high.
I moved to a single platform across the LAN because of my frustration in trying to share a printer on my desktop machine with other machines on the LAN. I had been happily running Debian Woody on my desktop and Ubuntu on the workstation until I began using my workstation more and needing to print from it as often as from the desktop. After several hours of frustration, which had me agreeing with Eric S. Raymond's opinion on configuring CUPS, I decided that a common platform might be the answer. A month before SUSE 9.3 was released, I installed SUSE 9.2 on both systems, and in less time than I had spent unsuccessfully tinkering with CUPS, it "just worked."

History quickly forgets vice presidents, "Best New Artist" Grammy winners, and compression algorithm patent disputes. Five years ago, Unisys ignited an uproar by changing its stance and demanding royalties on two patents it held on the Lempel Ziv Welch (LZW) compression algorithm. Consequently, LZW compression support was rapidly and ruthlessly cut from virtually all free software. As of July 2004, both patents had expired, but so has any resurgence of interest in LZW compression. It continues to remain absent for the majority of Linux users. Fortunately, it's easy to restore.

Nokia Corp. introduced a new Internet-browsing device that represents a new market for the world's largest handset vendor as well as an entirely new software strategy.
Nokia's new personal digital assistant-sized 770 Internet Tablet supports Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and features an 800 by 480 widescreen display and stylus for Internet browsing. It is scheduled to sell in the third quarter for $350 and will be released in Europe and the Americas. Nokia said it will sell the device through broadband carriers, retail outlets and online.

At least one version of Java code, Java 2 Standard Edition, may soon be set free of Sun Microsystems' notoriously complicated licensing. While Sun is apparently OK with it, some of its large, license-paying-through-the-nose customers won't be.
Almost 10 years to the day since Sun first introduced Java, the news comes that it may finally become open source code. Sun will deny it, but the move has been inevitable for some time. On Feb. 1, it was open source Solaris 10. Now it's J2SE, which will take a year or more to become available, if and when it gets past all the political hurdles. Next up: J2 Enterprise Edition? That will take a bit longer, although it does have three major J2EE F/OSS projects -- JBoss, Jonas, and Geronimo -- all committed to compatibility with the JCP's specs and all with good relationships with Sun.

Have you ever wondered how many people are scanning your server looking for weaknesses? One way to find out is to install the Port Scan Attack Detector (psad), is a collection of three lightweight system daemons that alert you to suspicious network activity by analyzing iptables log files.

With psad you can:

* Detect port scans
* View a report of all attacks, along with system resources consumed by PSAD
* Detect application layer attacks using Snort rulesets
* Block IP addresses in real time
* Receive comprehensive email alerts
* Report attacks to Dshield

psad requires only an iptables firewall with logging enabled. To enable logging, add:
iptables -A INPUT -j LOG
iptables -A FORWARD -j LOG
to the end of your firewall script.

Mozilla's Firefox browser includes a built-in capability (Live Bookmarks) for working with news feeds. However, there are numerous news reading extensions available that provide a full range of additional capabilities, from "just the basics" to options for managing and using collections of news feeds.
First, a few words about news feeds, which are a relatively new option on many Web sites. A news feed provides a specially formatted list of current articles, together with summarized article text and other information. The availability of a news feed on a Web site is typically signaled by the presence of a small orange RSS or XML icon. Whether you use it or not, Firefox always signals the presence of a news feed on a Web page by displaying a Live Bookmark icon.
To use a site's news feed effectively, you need a news reader to display the information. The news readers reviewed here fall into three broad categories: The lightweights, which provide only basic news reading features; the heavyweights, for managing larger news feed collections; and specialty news readers designed for a specific type of news feed. All are available via the Firefox extensions option, or directly at the News Reading Extensions Web page.

BPU Banca migrates from Sun Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux to reduce workstation cost by 50% and avoid vendor lock-in
Milan, Italy—7th April 2005—Red Hat, Inc. (Nasdaq:RHAT), the world's leading provider of open source to the enterprise, today announced that BPU Banca, the operational parent bank of the group Banche Popolari Unite, Italy's seventh largest banking group and first co-operative credit banking group, has chosen to implement Red Hat Enterprise Linux across its desktops and servers.
The bank is migrating all of its 8,000 UNIX workstation clients to Red Hat Desktop. In this project BPU Banca will replace Sun hardware with Intel-based PCs to achieve combined hardware and software cost savings of about 50%.
The migration of its systems from UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux also delivers vendor independence for both hardware and software, assuring BPU Banca greater flexibility when implementing infrastructure solutions that comply with new industry trends and best practices. Finally, the migration will enable the use of PCs in dual-boot mode to support Linux and Microsoft Windows without additional cost.
"This project is one of the most important migrations to Linux in the Italian financial sector," says Roberto Semplici, Account Executive Red Hat Italy. "BPU Banca is a clear proof-point of the advantages guaranteed by the Red Hat Enterprise Linux product family, opening the path to future Linux implementations in this market sector."
Using Red Hat Network for the maintenance, asset management and security management of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems will allow BPU Banca to easily manage groups of servers and workstations from virtually anywhere via a Web interface. BPU Banca will conclude its migration from UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux by the end of this year.
Future plans include widening its migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux to encompass the group's entire server infrastructure.