Red Hat has acquired Planning Technologies, an Atlanta-based consulting service that focuses on infrastructure. The acquisition strengthens Red Hat's strategy to offer open source solutions for software and a broad choice of services with Red Hat Network as the backbone for deployment and management.

In the wake of one of the most devastating forest fire seasons in history, the U.S. government has purchased an IBM eServer supercomputer that will provide hyper-accurate weather data to help authorities battle the destructive blazes. The new IBM supercomputer can process 478 billion calculations per second -- 40 times faster than the IBM "Deep Blue" supercomputer that defeated chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.

A spokesperson for SuSE Inc. announced that SuSE Linux AG's Chief Technology Officer Dirk Hohndel will begin serving as President of SuSE Inc., replacing current President Volker Wiegand. In addition, Holger Dyroff has been appointed Director of Sales North America.

"Since 7.0, though, SuSE has been packaging its own BLinux daemon which immediately looks for a Braille display on booting the installation CD. If such a device is found, the Yast2 installation tool switches to text-mode and the the screen reader is started."

This most notable new feature of APT 0.5 is the automatic configuration of build-dependencies for source packages via apt-get build-dep which will download a source package, satisfy build dependencies, and build it.

We'll be using Vgetty, part of the mgetty package. The official site is http://alpha.greenie.net/vgetty. You probably not have to visit the site because just about every distribution carries it. We grabbed the mgetty package off our SuSE CD. The version used is 1.1.12. Alternatively, you can download the release along with the mgetty source package from http://aplha.greenie.net/mgetty. The latest version on site that we saw on the site was 1.1.25. Grab the source if you like.

This is an entirely different way to handle access permissions, compared to the user/privilege model most UNIX systems currently use. SEL could implement that model along with a granularity that could modify user privileges based on the specifics of what is being executed and what files are being used. Pretty powerful stuff.

To overcome the inertia of its flagship OS, HP has opted to open up HP-UX to allow the best of both worlds: Linux's populist appeal and HP's bulletproof, if staid, image to create HP-UX 11i, Hewlett-Packard's most ambitious operating system to date.

In its typically quiet yet productive fashion, IBM is readying its next-generation Unix, AIX 5L, for an April release. The name alone indicates that the new version marks a radical departure from the current AIX 4.3.3: The L stands for Linux.

"There is little about KDE 2.1 that will instantly strike existing users as tremendously different, because many of the changes are under the hood. Instead of an instant "wow!," users are more likely to notice more subtle changes."