BM said it has reconfigured its Lotus Foundations software -- which includes Lotus Notes, Sametime and Symphony -- to preload on Linux distributions like Red Hat, Ubuntu and Novell's Suse Linux. The repackaging makes the middleware easier and cheaper to install on Linux PCs, IBM said.

The easy availability of collaboration tools could trigger businesses to switch to Linux, considering Windows Vista adoption has been stagnant, IBM executives said in a press conference at the Linuxworld conference in San Francisco.

The Mobile Internet Devices (MID) market is likely to be the first real example of a greenfield situation in which all mobile operating systems start on the same equal footing, without the baggage of previous histories such as existed in the smartphone market. The Linux OS, in the form of Moblin, LiMo and Maemo, looks ready to take the lion's share of the MID market and is set to capture unit volumes of 50 millions units per annum in 2013.

Well, last week started out with a bang thanks to Monday's announcement of the new, Debian-powered CherryPal PC.

That the low-power machine runs Linux is, of course, good news. The twist is that users won't even see it, because the entire user interface is presented through Firefox.

Slashdot and LXer, among other forums, immediately picked up the news, and most bloggers seemed to be skeptical.

Read the whole story here: http://www.technewsworld.com/story/63940.html

The ruling has come down in the SCO/Novell case regarding Unix copyrights, but the decision is likely to leave observers divided over the results.

The decision from U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball awarded $2.55 million to Novell, a nominal victory, but a far cry from the millions the company had sought.

As a result, the ruling, which could be appealed by Novell, means that SCO could continue to survive as a going concern -- and that its delayed case against IBM is likely to go ahead as well.

The software update mechanisms used by most BSD and Linux operating systems can be tricked into installing buggy or known-to-be-compromised software on users' systems, creating serious security risks, according to new research.

The study Package Management Security, to be published in a forthcoming issue of the University of Arizona Tech Report, analysed 10 package managers and found that all were vulnerable to exploits, allowing attackers to install unsafe software on target systems.

Read the whole article here: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39446765,00.htm

For three health care centers, the challenge was clear: Find a way to improve internal communications by expanding e-mail accounts to all employees, including doctors, nurses, security staffers and dietary workers, without breaking their IT budgets.

To do it, the hospitals needed to look at alternatives to traditional ways of creating and administering e-mail accounts.

Read the whole story here: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&...

They’re tiny, they’re portable, and they’ve rewritten the rules in the traditionally feature-heavy notebook market. Despite years in which Linux has been ignored by mainstream notebook makers, Linux-based mini-notebook PCs drove a spike in sales during 2007 that suggest the operating system could finally be hitting the mainstream.

Or could it?

Read the whole article here: http://apcmag.com/linux_not_essential_to_eee_pc_success_asus.htm

Description:
A vulnerability has been reported in the Linux Kernel, which potentially can be exploited by malicious people to cause a DoS (Denial of Service).

The vulnerability is caused due to a boundary error in the "pppol2tp_recvmsg()" function and can potentially be exploited to corrupt kernel memory via a specially crafted PPP over L2TP packet.

The vulnerability is reported in 2.6.x versions prior to 2.6.26-rc6.

Solution:
Use PPP over L2TP in trusted networks only.

Fixed in version 2.6.26-rc6.

The efforts being pursued by LiMo Foundation, developer of the Linux platform, received a boost with Verizon Wireless, the builder and operator of wireless network in the US, announcing its decision on Wednesday, May 14, 2008 to concentrate its future operating system on the Linux Platform. Verizon Wireless, thus becomes the first carrier in the US to patronize the Linux Platform after its rival, AT&T (T) decided to go with the Android platform being developed by Google.

Sun Microsystems, which purchased MySQL this year for over $1 billion, ephasizes that the database will remain open source despite what critics say.