LinuxWorld has the first in a series of columns “describing simple and easy ways to replace a Windows workstation with a Linux workstation, and stay productive in a corporate environment.”

ShellDawg writes, “This paper at IBM.com is a summary of problems encountered by the LAN Distributed Platform (LANDP) for Linux team whilst porting LANDP from OS/2 to Linux. This paper should be useful to other teams that are porting OS/2 applications to Linux.”

Mikael Pawlo writes, “First Monday published an article by Johan Soderberg where Soderberg explores free software from a Marxist perspective. Soderberg is very ambitious in his efforts to apply Marxist theory to free software development. It is not easy to sum the article up in a few sentences, but basically Soderberg sees software as a showcase of the productive force of the general intellect, foreseen by Marx 150 years ago. Hence, production becomes more social, thus the hacker movement can – according to Soderberg – challenge capital’s domination over technological development. This is interesting food for thought, even if you do not share Soderberg political views on computer program development.

A related political message furnished by Gnuheter.

Stallman on why software should be free.”

We are pleased to announce that our next Gnubies meeting — this
Wednesday, March 13th will be a full Question and Answer session led by
Alex Khalil. The meeting will begin with the usual general questions
from 6:30 to 7:00, where individual questions may be asked without
regard to the level of difficulty or generality. From 7:00 on should
be
your chance to clarify things you haven’t understood about GNU/Linux
and
learn more about topics that concern you now. Bring your questions.
(Please note the security procedures required for attending).

6:30 – 7:00 General Q&A

7:00 Alex Khalil – Questions and Answers

at the IBM building, 590 Madison Avenue
(57th Street and Madison Avenue)

The most up-to-date information can be found on our website at:
http://www.gnubies.org
(or if there are problems at http://www.eskimo.com/~lo/linux)

Our meetings are held regularly on the second Wednesday of each month
and are free and open to the public.

Security Procedures

Since September 11th, IBM has implemented new security measures. We are
now required to provide a list of attendees to our meetings in advance.
If you are planning on attending this meeting you will need to mail us
your name ASAP.

You can use the links from the website: http://www.gnubies.org
or email your name to gnubies+March02@eskimo.com.

In addition you will have to present a photo ID when you
come in order to be let in to the meeting. We are sorry that these
procedures are necessary now and hope that they will no longer be
necessary sometime in the future.

Posted on LinuxSecurity.com: “/usr/bin/gzip, a file compression program, does not properly check
supplied filenames against its buffer size. It could lead to
execution of arbitrary code under the privilege with which gzip is
running.

There are ftp daemon programs that invoke gzip on demand (like wu-ftpd).
If your systems run these daemons, depending on the configuration it could
lead to a remote root compromise.”

PCWorld.com catches up on MandrakeSoft asking users for subscriptions. “MandrakeSoft claims that over 2,000 users have joined the club, each paying $5 per month. Costs for corporate memberships start at $2,500. The company did not indicate if any corporate memberships had been sold.”

It’s posted at LWN.net. Today, SuSE
Linux, the international Open Source technology
leader and solutions provider, announced the launch
of the eighth generation of Europe’s most popular
Linux operating system and applications package to be
available from software retailers from mid-April.
Increased security, the newest KDE desktop, KDE 3,
super fast installation and expanded multimedia
capabilities highlight the most advanced Linux
distribution for professional and private desktop
users.

Vnunet.com reports: “Virus watchers have reported the rare sighting of a new strain affecting the Linux platform.

The Jac virus follows the recent trend of infrequent Linux infecting malware, as the first to hit the platform in three months.

Jac infects the Linux binary files in the Linux Executable and Linking Format that exist in the same directory as the virus.
“

It’s posted at LWN.net: “Spring must be on the way because a there has been a lot of activity
and merging in the past week.
As usual, the gory details are at http://kernelnewbies.org/status/.”

InfoWorld has a column by frequent NewsForge contributor Russell Pavlicek taking about the Blizzard Entertainment vs. bnetd Open Source game server controversy. “The problem here is one of precedent. If you thought you were free to use legally obtained software any way you wanted, think again. Under the guise of protecting its intellectual property, Blizzard has also demonstrated that it is possible to force its customers to use its software with its services alone. And don’t think for a minute that the rest of the software industry hasn’t noticed.
“