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Books that teach programming often start out trying to hide all of the messy details of programming. And they succeed -- at keeping programmers from knowing what is really going on. A new book from Bartlett Publishing changes all that.

A group of former Red Hat employees have formed a start-up called Specifix that aims to lure customers who have customized software needs their former employer couldn't accommodate. Specifix, which is based in San Jose, Calif., and has development sites in Raleigh, N.C., plans to offer versions of Linux that are as compatible as possible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the company said. The company plans to start showing its software, Conary, on Wednesday.

The other day I attended the Chat with the Internet Explorer team. While I found it interesting and the fact that Microsoft is opening itself up more to the public by allowing developers to blog and allowing more public exposure at their conferences I will say I was very disappointed in the chat. Microsoft totally ignored the issues and the questions that really mattered were deflected and basically passed on for something more that Microsoft wanted to talk about.

To promote security, most organizations should maintain separate production and testing environments. Production software begins its life in a testing or research environment. These environments sometimes consist of actual labs on a private network, isolated from the rest of the environment in almost every way (partly as a security measure). Inside the lab are machines that act as representative parts of the production network environment. For example, there may be a machine running Apache, MySQL, DNS, and NTP; another machine on the other side of a router running sendmail and an "internal" DNS server. There will be client machines, of course, and printers, wireless access points, and NIS/NIS+/LDAP servers, which may be acting upon live data.

ReactOS is an open source (GPL) operating system built to be compatible with Windows NT applications and drivers. ReactOS is currently just a development platform; it is not a useful desktop system for the average user in any way, but it has potential.

Australia's Open Source industry body OSIA has said alternative solutions based on open source software can help governments and corporates halt illegal copying of software, according to a media release from the body. A Business Software Alliance (BSA) survey released earlier had said 36 percent of all the software installed on computers worldwide in 2003 was downloaded illegally.

HP's recently launched 441 solution - which effectively offers four PCs in one - is already a hit in centres such as the Limpopo i-Community centre in South Africa and is destined to appear in many other "developing" countries in the coming months. The 441, consisting of four keyboard-mouse-screens running on one computer, ships with Linux and is specifically targetted for the education market.

SourceForge.net, an OSDN (a subsidiary of VA Software Corp.) site, and the world's largest collaborative site for cross-platform and Open Source developers, today announced it has received its largest donation ever in support of its Open Source collaborative development initiatives from Omidyar Network, an organization investing based on its core belief that every individual has the power to make a difference.

The Mozilla Foundation on Tuesday set September as the release date for its free open-source Firefox browser.

Novell made some recent moves to show its new open source colors to the industry. The vendor, which helped pioneer client/server technology with its NetWare brand, acquired two Linux companies last year, SuSE and Ximian. These moves were designed to bring Novell closer to Linux and open source software, as NetWare continued to lose market share to Linux in recent years.

And it says,“Hooray for Linux servers!” It's almost time for the billion-dollar-quarter party.

Welcome to Security Alerts, an overview of recent Unix and open source security advisories. In this column, we look at problems in the Linux kernel, Apache 2, the Linux Virtual Server, Pure-FTPd, FreeBSD's Linux binary compatibility mode, Domino, Shorewall, libpng, and the X Display Manager.

This tutorial begins preparing you to take the Linux Professional Institute's Exam 101 Release 2. In this first in a series of four tutorials on the 101 exam, the author introduces you to bash (the standard Linux shell), shows you how to take full advantage of standard Linux commands such as ls, cp, and mv, explains Linux's permission and ownership model, and much more. By the end of this tutorial, you'll have a solid grounding in Linux fundamentals and will be ready to begin learning some basic Linux system administration tasks.

Welcome to this year's 27th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Jordi Mallach reported that the transition of GNOME 2.6 into testing is nearly sorted out. Steve McIntyre explained that the CD/DVD creation process in debian-cd is very slow because large amounts of data are read and written, and because that data is checked with checksums several times.