Anonymous Reader writes, “From Owen Taylor’s release announcement:

‘ The GTK+ team is proud to announce the release of version 2.0 of the GTK+ widget toolkit and associated libraries (GLib, Pango, and ATK). The result of 3 years work with contributions from hundreds of volunteers, GTK+-2.0 represents a major step forward in free software user interface toolkits.’

The full announcement is available at http://www.gtk.org/2.0.0-announce.html.”

Builder.com offers a critique about the GPL. “Attorney David Loundy’s clients never meant for their database to be free software or for its code to be open source. But when a database contractor used snippets of code copyrighted by the GNU General Public License (GPL), the clients were shocked to find they couldn’t sell their own software as a proprietary work.”

Anonymous Reader writes, “In this article at LinuxDevices.com, Rob Wehrli compares eCos (Red Hat’s “un-Linux” OS for devices and
embedded systems) to uClinux (a version of Linux for MMU-less
microprocessors), in terms of functionality, resource utilization,
tools, and support, from a developer perspective.”

USAToday.com has this story: “A top U.S. Air Force official has warned Microsoft to dramatically improve the security of its software or risk losing the Air Force as a customer. In an interview, Air Force chief information officer John Gilligan revealed he has met with senior Microsoft executives to tell them the Air Force is ‘raising the bar on our level of expectation’ for secure software.

Joe Barr writes us about this story: http://www.linuxworld.com/site-stories/2002/0311.e volution.html. “A couple of weeks ago I wrote about moving from Sylpheed (a wonderful e-mail client) to Evolution. I promised then that I would follow up after I had had a chance to put a few more miles on Evo. This week’s column keeps that promise.”

CanadaComputes.com has an article on how the price of Windows may drive more users to Linux, with a Windows XP-loaded system $450 more than a system without it. “The changing circumstances of Linux for personal computers has as much to do with the goings on at 1 Microsoft Way as it has with the continued maturation of Linux. Note that while overall PC hardware costs are falling, Microsoft has been raising its prices, such that a Windows OS has become a significant part of the total cost of a desktop PC.”

– By Grant Gross –

A buffer overflow vulnerability affecting the PPP code in the Linux kernel, Netscape and up to 20 packages in some Linux distributions has been found in the popular compression library zlib. The potential is for crackers to gain remote access to computer systems using zlib, but a fix is available.

Dave Wreski, corporate manager for Open Source security company Guardian Digital and publisher of LinuxSecurity.com, says there’s no known exploit for the vulnerability, but it’s a serious issue because of the sheer number of programs relying on zlib or a variant of it statically linked into their binaries.

“That means that you can’t just rebuild or fix zlib and then reboot the system and have it re-dynamically link against the library,” Wreski says. “You have to actually recompile the binary.”

LinuxSecurity.com has posted an article with links to security advisories and other information and an an advisory to Guardian Digital’s EnGarde Linux, including a fix for the six affected packages in EnGarde. Quoting that advisory: “The zlib shared library may attempt to free() a memory region more than
once, potentially yielding a system exploitable by certain programs that
use it for decompression. Because certain packages include their own
zlib implementation or statically link against the system zlib, several
packages need to be updated to properly fix this bug.”

Packages affected also include X11, rsync and programs that do network compression, Wreski says. Netscape includes network compression in its Navigator package.

“The potential is certainly for root compromise,” Wreski says. “Because it’s network compression, it’s conceivable that it could be a remote root exploit as well.” For example, if you were using Netscape and connected to a Web site with malicious code, you could be vulnerable, he adds.

Linux vendors and the CERT Coordination Center are working together get the word out about the vulnerability.

PCWorld.com reports that despite its advantages, Linux still lags behind Palm and Microsoft when it comes to powering PDAs.

It’s on PRNewswire: Microtronix
(http://www.microtronix.com), a leading integrator of embedded hardware and
software, announced today that they will support the creation of customized
embedded Linux(R) kernels in the Altera(R) SOPC Builder automated system
development tool. Customers will be able to combine the Nios(TM) soft-core
processor development flow with embedded Linux development, providing great
flexibility and speed to the design process.

KDE.org features Stevens, who works on “Kit, Kaboodle, Megami, and a bunch of hard-to-translate Noatun plugins.”