In the second part of the ZDNet interview, Linux kernel hacker Alan Cox explains why the world needs open source software on the desktop and why Linux was perfect for Iceland. Alan Cox is generally referred to in the open-source developer community as a "kernel hacker"--someone whose programming responsibilities cover the Linux kernel, or core, itself. His role of organizing and applying improvements is vital. At an interview with ZDNet U.K. in Swansea he spoke on the latest challenges for Linux at the high- and low-end, the arrival of revolutionary 64-bit hardware and why it's hard to argue with the economics of open-source software.

"AOL Time Warner's Netscape unit is snooping on searches performed by users of its latest Navigator browser at Google and other search sites. According to a network traffic analysis performed by Newsbytes, Netscape is capturing Navigator 6 users' search terms, along with their Internet protocol (IP) address, the date Navigator was installed and a unique identification number." Read the report at NewsBytes. Our Take: Yet another reason to use the original Mozilla and not the Mozilla-Netscap(-ed) package by AOL.

As many people noticed, and quite a few emailed us about, the past couple of days OS News has been displaying a great number of pop-up ads. I'd like to take this opportunity to say that OS News thinks that pop-up ads are generally bad, and that we have stopped using the ad broker that was serving the pop-ups. They made arrangements to not display pop-ups at our request, but didn't follow through on their agreement, so we have yanked them until they do. We're sorry for putting our loyal readers through it, but rest assured that we're trying to balance our need to make a little money and maintaining a good experience for our beloved readers. You may still see the occasional pop-up, but we're determined to keep it to a minimum. By the way, if you'd like to provide support to OSNews, so we don't have to resort to pop-ups and other intrusive advertising, there are two easy ways to do it that won't cost you a cent: First, when you buy something--anything--from Amazon.com, use This Link and OSNews will get a small percentage of your purchase, without costing you more. Also, when you're in the market to buy anything, check OS News' Pricegrabber where we also get a little kick-back.

Especially if you're just starting out in embedded development, the wealth of available bootloaders, scaled-down distributions, filesystems, and GUIs can seem overwhelming. But this wealth of options is actually a boon, allowing you to tailor your development or user environment exactly to your needs. This overview of embedded development on Linux on IBM's developerWorks will help you make sense of it all.

This document at BSDToday covers the basic steps in building a bootable CD containing a live FreeBSD filesystem with a couple of security features enabled and configured. With this CD, it is possible to transform a PC from a mediocre workstation into a VPN Gateway or firewall or both without touching the hard drive.

This paper presents the results of the test conducted on a 58-node Cluster 1300 system, simultaneously running eight instances of e-Business Trade 2 benchmark tests on Red Hat Linux. This solution mounted in only three racks supported 800,000 users, serving an unprecedented 12,547 requests/sec with an average response time of 0.27 sec/request.