Red Hat

Linux seller Red Hat, tangled in a legal wrestling match with the SCO Group, has hired a new top lawyer from IBM.

The Linux company is set to release a new version of its Fedora software, and has upgraded its enterprise product with support for new processors and servers. Red Hat, the top-ranked seller of the Linux operating system, has expanded chip support for its corporate version of the open-source operating system and plans a major change to Fedora, its hobbyist product, in coming days. In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, Upd. 2, released on Wednesday, the Linux seller added support for Intel's 64-bit "x86" processors and IBM's Power processor-based JS20 blade servers.

After SCO, the company most hated by Linux fans is quite possibly … no, not Microsoft, but Red Hat. I often hear longtime Linux enthusiasts say things like "Red Hat has betrayed Linux" and "Red Hat wants to be the next Microsoft."

Red Hat's primary target has been Unix, the operating system on which Linux is based, running on higher-powered networked computers called servers. But with its Red Hat Desktop product, the Raleigh, N.C.-based company directly aims for Microsoft and its Windows stronghold.

Red Hat initially won't tackle the entire desktop software market, aiming instead for corporations whose employees need only basic computing features such as word processing and Web access. But the company does have bigger aspirations.

Red Hat's newest version of Linux has been granted a significant security certification, bringing the company a step closer to competitors. Version 3 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been certified to meet Evaluation Assurance Level 2 (EAL2) of the Common Criteria certification, Red Hat said on Thursday. The internationally recognised Common Criteria certification is a typical requirement for government customers.

Wind River, a major force in software embedded in devices such as cell phones or factory robots, has signed a deal with leading Linux seller Red Hat to jointly develop a version of the open-source software, the companies plan to announce Monday.

Under the deal, both companies' engineers will create Red Hat Embedded Linux, a variant of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Wind River will be the "premier" sales channel for the software and will support it in its development tools, according to the companies.

A test release of Fedora Core 2 is now available from Red Hat and at distinguished mirror sites near you, and is also available in the torrent. Fedora Core has expanded in this release to four binary ISO images and four source ISO images. This test release is specifically designed for testing the 2.6 kernel, GNOME 2.5, and KDE 3.2. Please file bugs via Bugzilla, Product Fedora Core, Version test1, Architecture i386 so that they are noticed and appropriately classified.

Like the original x86 architecture release, the AMD64 architecture has three binary ISO images and three source ISO images. This is a single (we hope and intend) test release specifically to check hardware support; the package set is the same versions as an updated Fedora Core 1 for x86 system will have. Please file bugs via Bugzilla, at http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/ (Product "Fedora Core", Version "test1", Architecture "x86_64" so that they are noticed and appropriately classified.

Red Hat Inc. released an update to Ethereal that repairs two buffer overflow vulnerabilities found in the open-source network monitoring software.

The overflows could crash Ethereal on Red Hat Linux 9 running on the i386 architecture. All versions of Ethereal prior to version 0.10.0, which was released Dec. 12, are affected.

In its alert, Red Hat said it was not known if anyone exploiting these vulnerabilities would be able to remotely execute code.

Red Hat began public testing this week of an update designed to make its new premium Linux product work better on IBM servers and computers that use Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron chip.

Update 1 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 is expected to be final in mid-January, spokeswoman Leigh Day said on Friday.