"Before, Linux could run only on single- or dual-processor boxes," Yankee Group senior analyst Dana Gardner told the E-Commerce Times. "Now you're starting to see people many of these low-cost boxes in a gridlike fashion to perform highly intensive computing tasks." Read the part 1 of the article at eCommerceTimes. Sun stands behind Solaris from both a support and a legal standpoint, Sun's Bill Moffitt told the E-Commere Times. "As Scott McNealy says, it's a 'one-throat-to-choke' service," he said. "If there's a problem, you know who to call." Read the part 2 of the article.

Ark Linux 1.0 alpha 9, a Linux distribution designed primarily for new Linux users, has been released and is available for download here. Highlights of this release include, among the usual set of package updates and bugfixes, graphical bootup, semi-automatic recovery of corrupted XFree86 config files, and an improved network card configuration tool.The full release notes can be found here.

Los Alamos National Laboratory has been a long-time supercomputer user, which they primarily use for models used to simulate nuclear explosions and estimate the health of America's aging arsenal. They're about to install one of the world's most powerful Linux clusters, a new 2,816-processor, 1,408 node system called Lightning, built by cluster company Linux Networx. The cluster will be using Mellanox's InfiniBand server interconnect technology to connect the nodes.

The Mad Penguin web site offers a review of Libranet and also an interview with Jon Danzig, its founder.

Today we feature a very interesting interview with Havoc Pennington. Havoc works for Red Hat, he is heading the desktop team, while he is well known also for his major contributions to GNOME, his GTK+ programming book, plus the freedesktop.org initiative which aims to standardize the X11 desktop environments. In the following interview we discuss about the changes inside Red Hat, Xouvert, freedesktop.org and Gnome's future, and how Linux, in general, is doing in the desktop market.

In this final installment of the series on Twisted, the author looks at specialized protocols and servers contained in the Twisted package, with a focus on secure connections. One thing the servers and clients in Parts 1,2 & 3 had in common is that they operated completely "in the clear". Sometimes, however, you want to keep your connection free from prying eyes (or from tampering/spoofing).