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Is it possible that one day soon, when you boot up your PC, the Linux penguin will walk across the screen instead of the familiar red, green, blue and yellow boxes of Windows? Well, it's definitely in the works, but you shouldn't expect it overnight if you live in the U.S. or Europe.

We've all seen Microsoft's latest barrage of studies that say their products are more cost-effective than the competition. Naturally, many accuse Microsoft -- and other companies that publish outside studies that support their corporate goals -- of bias, if not outright deception. To get a little more insight into the value of TCO studies, we turned (via email) to David A. Wheeler, who has done more than a few software cost-comparisons himself, for advice about how much we should (and shouldn't) trust "sponsored" research.

Innoopract Informationssysteme will ship a version of its W4T (Worldwide Web Windowing Toolkit) Eclipse Plug-In development tool which adds Linux as a development platform. Previously, the product only supported development on Windows but interfaces developed with it could be deployed on Linux.

556-Processor Cluster Will Support Grid Technology Research

This past February David Skok's new VC firm - Matrix Partners - orchestrated, with Accel, a $10 million investment in JBoss, Inc. This first round of funding in an open source company was a bold play, but then David Skok, famous in the Java arena as the founder of SilverStream Software - acquired by Novell in 2002 - is no stranger to bold moves.

A fascinating and ambitious open source project, Wine attempts to solve the complex problem of running Windows executables on Linux. Although Wine is not a new project, the growing expectations for the Linux desktop and growing demand for Linux applications make it relevant today. This article introduces Wine and suggests ways to get hands-on experience with its internals.

The Met Office is using a Linux software management package to improve communication with university research departments and manage and deploy software and antivirus updates. The government weather agency plans to complete installation of Novell's Ximian Red Carpet Enterprise product in the next three months.

Red Hat is turning off its Red Hat Linux 9 support April 30, but on May 1, Progeny will be turning on its support for the distribution.

tcpdump, a tool for network monitoring and data acquisition, was found to contain two vulnerabilities whereby tcpdump could be caused to crash through attempts to read from invalid memory locations. This bug is triggered by certain invalid ISAKMP packets.

GNU/Linux vendors Debian, Mandrake, Red Hat, and SUSE have joined together to give a common statement about the Forrester report entitled "Is Linux more Secure than Windows?".

Welcome to this year's 14th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Manoj Srivastava sent out the final call for votes on the project leader election and revealed that 351 of the 908 developers have already voted. Andreas Schuldei is still looking for ideas for talks for the upcoming Debian Conference.

Despite having pockets of communities spread across the country, open source software (OSS) has no future in the country's budding software development business, according to a software development expert. "The software development industry in the Philippines will always choose commercial applications over open source applications, unless the open source community comes around and becomes serious in turning open source software into a serious business," said Joey Gurango, CEO of software development firm Webworks OS.

There are multiple vulnerabilities in tcpdump and libpcap related to parsing of ISAKMP packets.

Roll out a desktop Linux pilot project quickly without disturbing the legacy desktop OS.

I've taken some pretty tough tests in my life, and passed every one of them on the first try. And since I'm teaching Linux system administration at my local community college, I thought I would be hot stuff when I signed up to take the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) exam. I don't think that way anymore.

By selling software through the traditional commercial model, Microsoft has been seen in some circles as the odd man out when it comes to the popular open source movement. But the company argues that it has a place in the open source model and that open source does not necessarily mean less expensive than Windows. At the recent Open Source Business Conference, InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill met with Jason Matusow, manager of Microsoft’s Shared Source Initiative program, to discuss Shared Source, Linux, and Windows.

Nigel McFarlane writes in with news about his latest article on using XUL rather than DHTML to create Web page menus: "I've written another article highlighting the features of Mozilla. To the best of my knowledge this is the first 'dirty XUL trick' that might appeal to web developers. It's nice to see that the Mozilla styling and layout systems are robust enough to support this kind of fiddling. It would be wonderful to see a full Web toolkit of XBL objects spring up to replace the junk we do in Dynamic HTML."

Just over a year ago, the Linux on IPod site went live, and judging by the half-a million page views and over two thousand downloads, interest is still strong. According to the site's question and answer page, right now the project is focused on porting the uClinux kernel to the iPod.

Shaun Colley discovered a problem in xine-ui, the xine video player user interface. A script contained in the package to possibly remedy a problem or report a bug does not create temporary files in a secure fashion. This could allow a local attacker to overwrite files with the privileges of the user invoking xine.

KDE-PIM may be vulnerable to a remote buffer overflow attack that may allow unauthorized access to an affected system.