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Deciding to switch to Linux is one of the daunting questions every CIO must continually evaluate. Fortunately, the answer is getting simplier as Linux evolves into the enterprise-ready versions making their way onto the market today.

Last month Michal Zalewski posted to the Bugtraq security mailing list the results of a small experiment he carried out involving feeding randomly generated HTML pages into some of the Web's most widely used browsers. The results were somewhat alarming. All of the open source browsers Michal tested crashed when faced with this kind of input. Only one browser stood up well against this type of stress test. Which one? A round of applause please for, er, Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

The Office of Government Commerce has made recommendations that public procurement of software should consider open source solutions, citing, amongst other case studies, the experience of a Dublin-based hospital that made significant savings in transferring all its software to open source.

Microsoft chief executive officer, Steve Ballmer, has acknowledged Linux as the "only game in town" when it comes to competing with the proprietary software heavyweight's offerings, Australia's peak open source body claims.

Delivers High-Performance, Enterprise-Class Relational Database Management Solution to the Open Source Community

Lulu, founded by open source pioneer Bob Young, has opened a new software marketplace geared at allowing individual developers and projects to publish boxed sets, CD/DVD media kits, and printed docs and e-books themselves, and drive proceeds and donations back to the projects.

MontaVista has agreed to provide Linux "platforms" to NEC for its hardware reference designs for mobile phones, digital consumer devices, and car navigation systems. NEC, meanwhile, will join MontaVista's hardware vendor self-certification program, and will resell and support MontaVista Linux.

Security-software vendor F-Secure Corp. last week introduced two open-source products that let administrators route Windows security reporting through a single Linux-management interface.

After launching two of the world's first Linux smartphones, China's E28 is offering handset makers the opportunity to licence its software and hardware designs. "With our technology, manufacturers can bring their own Linux-based smartphones to market within only a couple of months," said chairman and chief executive officer Roger Kung at the LinuxWorld conference in Frankfurt. "We view Linux as a very powerful contender to the smartphone operating system software developed by Microsoft and Symbian."

How pervasive is the use of open-source software? InformationWeek Research measured adoption of open-source architecture via an online survey completed by 420 business-technology professionals familiar with their companies' desktop, network, server, or mainframe operating systems. Two-thirds of companies interviewed use open-source products; another 16% expect to use open source in 2005.

Airport security is an ever-growing concern these days, as fears about the potential for terrorist attacks loom worldwide. One airport adopting major security upgrades is the Santiago Airport in Chile, which recently opened 60 checkpoint kiosks utilizing biometric security software running on SUSE Enterprise Linux.

IBM has put Linux on the menu after signing a deal to develop Linux-based systems to help food and consumer goods distributors optimise supply chains and customer management.

The MultiMedia Productivity CD lets you transform your Linux system into a productive Music Recording Studio by using your existing hardware (minimum a soundcard is needed) and the provided set of applications.

Microsoft's CEO argues that Windows is cheaper and more secure than its open-source rival. Do the facts support him?

ASM is a fantastic new feature in Oracle Database 10g that provides the services of a filesystem, logical volume manager, and software RAID in a platform-independent manner. ASM can stripe and mirror your disks, allow disks to be added or removed while the database is under load, and automatically balance I/O to remove "hot spots." It also supports direct and asynchronous I/O and implements the Oracle Data Manager API (simplified I/O system call interface) introduced in Oracle9i.

The scrappy, passionate computer programmers of Mozilla.org say they can feel the momentum that comes from having their new Firefox browser downloaded 5 million times in one month.

Plenty of good news this week, ranging from the release of Portage 2.0.51 via the web contest winner and documentation updates to a reminder of the Gentoo presence at the upcoming German LWE. This week's Gentoo Weekly Newsletter also contains a request for help from the Haskell team, an announcement of the first Gentoo user meeting in Cambridge, UK, and the regular services with community and press coverage, tips and tricks centered around the new Portage release, bugzilla statistics, and three new developers to welcome on the Gentoo team.

The next version of Mandrakesoft's Linux distribution comes with Wi-Fi roaming capabilities, Bluetooth support and improved power management for laptop users.

Thirteen months after taking the "first step" of a stategic shift toward Linux, the world's largest embedded software company is set to ship its inaugural Linux product. "Linux Platform for Network Equipment, Linux Edition" targets makers of telecommunications equipment who use Linux on the control plane along with Wind River's proprietary VxWorks real-time operating system (RTOS) on the data plane, and it includes middleware that lets Linux and VxWorks processes intercommunicate. Additionally, the company has updated its Eclipse-based Workbench development suite to work with 2.6-series kernels and has upgraded the tool to Eclipse 3.0, among other advances.

New Linspire Internet Suite Allows Searching for Every Word in Browser and Email