Linux

All Windows 8 licensed hardware will be shipping with secure boot enabled by default in their replacement for the BIOS, Unfied Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). So far, so good, who doesn’t want more security? The fly in the soup is that by default only Windows 8 will run on these systems, so no Linux, no BSD, heck, no Windows XP for that matter. Fedora Linux, Red Hat’s community distribution, has found a way: sign up with Microsoft, via Verisign to make their own Windows 8 system compatible UEFI secure boot key. A lot of Linux people hate this compromise.

After years of battling Linux as a competitive threat, Microsoft is now offering Linux-based operating systems on its Windows Azure cloud service. 

The Linux services will go live on Azure at 4 a.m. EDT on Thursday. At that time, the Azure portal will offer a number of Linux distributions, including Suse Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2, OpenSuse 12.01, CentOS 6.2 and Canonical Ubuntu 12.04. Azure users will be able to choose and deploy a Linux distribution from the Microsoft Windows Azure Image Gallery and be charged on an hourly pay-as-you-go basis.

Even a small business generates giant quantities of data, and a good business intelligence suite helps you analyze and make sense of it all. When you have an accurate picture of where you are, you'll see where you can go, and any of these excellent Linux-based small business intelligence suites will take you there. 

Canonical has released desktop and server versions of its Ubuntu 12.04 distribution dubbed Precise Pangolin, which comes with three years of support. 

Canonical's Ubuntu 12.04 is the first long term support (LTS) release in two years and is the first to feature the Unity desktop. Canonical has also introduced a number of cloud specific services in Ubuntu 12.04 server including metal-as-a-service and its recently announced AWSOME APIs.

Canonical said it has "no interest" in Linux kernel development. Two weeks ago a Linux Foundation report showed that since version 2.6.32, Microsoft had committed more code to the Linux kernel than Canonical. Since then, Canonical has faced claims from rivals that it does not contribute to Linux as much as it should given its popularity. 

Back in February, we introduced you to the mini $35 computer called Raspberry Pi, and it sold out instantly. After a few bumps in the road, it appears that the first round of orders are starting to be delivered, according to the organization behind the project:

A new version of NVIDIA's proprietary UNIX graphics drivers for Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD fixes a security vulnerability (CVE-2012-0946) that allowed attackers to read and write arbitrary system memory in order to, for example, obtain root privileges. To take advantage of the vulnerability, an attacker must have access permission for some device files – which, for systems with these drivers, is typically the case for users who can launch a graphical interface as 3D acceleration and some other features cannot be used otherwise.

A zero day exploit has been discovered in popular wireless Linux manager WICD that allows an attacker to spawn a root shell on a target machine.

The privileged escalation exploit affects the latest versions of WICD (pronounced wicked) and was successfully tested on a handful of Linux distributions including the latest release of the penetration testing operating system BackTrack. It was not yet tested for remote exploitation vectors.

Red Hat announced the results of its fiscal year, stating that the company surpassed 1 billion dollars in revenue. More importantly, Red Hat is said to be the first open source company ever to achieve this level of earnings, a feat that shows how viable the “free” software business has become.

After slightly more than ten weeks after the release of Linux 3.2, Linus Torvalds has released Linux 3.3. 

For a long time, code from the Android project has not been merged back to the Linux repositories due to disagreement between developers from both projects. Fortunately, after several years the differences are being ironed out, various Android subsystems and features have now been merged. This will make things easier for everybody, including the Android mod community, or Linux distros that want to support Android programs.