Based on the current efforts in Latin America to adopt Linux in schools and government, and the penalties for illegal use of proprietary software, the outlook for its spread is bright. Considering cost alone, by using Linux, Latin American nations will be able to provide their citizens with significantly more computers than would be possible with proprietary products. This will impact open source development efforts, as Latin American developers increasingly turn to Linux.

Working with IBM, SCO and Caldera release a preview of AIL 5L, a 64-bit UNIX OS for Intel Itanium processors that can run Linux applications. For the technology preview release only of AIX 5L, licenses will be free of charge and will not include support. Pricing and support for future releases will be determined at the time of each such release.

IBM Corp will take aim at Sun Microsystems Inc. with the launch of two new midrange servers -- the deskside p620 and rack-mounted p660 -- as part of its overall strategy to catch up to Sun, which leads the U.S. in UNIX server market share. It also will open up things a bit in the UNIX market by introducing its AIX 5L, which is primed for Linux, in an effort to gain an edge over the closed systems of its competitors.

Mike Godwin, formerly staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, weighs in with his opinions on Content Protection for Recordable Media (CPRM).

PyQt v2.4 (the Python bindings for the Qt cross-platform GUI toolkit)has been released and new features include added support for Qt v2.3.0 and Python v2.1, the Qt v2.3.0 QFontDatabase.isFixedPitch() class method, the Qt v2.3.0 QToolBar.styleChange() class method, the Qt v2.3.0 QScrollView.AutoOneFit enum value, the Qt v2.3.0 QInterlaceStyle class and many more.

According to Ted Ts'o, Linux kernel developer and principal engineer at VA Linux Systems, the next version of the Linux kernel, kernel 2.5 is due sometime in mid-to-late 2002, and will offer improved support for enterprise, mobile and Internet use.

If you're still feeling uncertain about what it will cost to make a Linux play, here's some help. There are a logical series of steps you can take to evaluate the real costs involved in adopting Linux in your enterprise. In this article, Anne Zieger outlines these factors.

In Linux, the networking related services could be set up in three different ways:

1) /etc/hosts to /etc/hosts mapping based networking

2) DNS based networking

3) NIS/NIS+ based networking which in turn can take the help of DNS or /etc/hosts file

For network-based services the actual network daemon reads some file for communication.

The first file that it reads is /etc/host.conf. Over here one may generally find two lines as

Order hosts, bind, Nis

Multi on

"Anyway, I must point out that Linux can still do more sophisticated firewalling than any of the appliances such as the SOHOware and Linksys boxes. I still use the firewall capabilities of Linux for the servers that are connected directly to the Internet."

e4Graph is a package for efficient persistent representation and manipulation of graph-like data. Using it you can concentrate on

representing the data you care about and its relationships, rather than on the storage layout or persistence mechanism.