Linux

The openSUSE project has announced that the upcoming sixth milestone release of version 12.1 of the openSUSE operating system will be reclassified as a beta.

Linus Torvalds has published the fifth release candidate of Linux 3.1. As the main server for kernel.org is not completely back up and running after the break-in that was made public last week, Torvalds uploaded the git repository with the mainline Linux sources to GitHub.

As Linux fans know, there are two kinds of hackers: the good guys who develop free software, such as the Linux kernel, and the bad guys who break into computers.

The bad guys paid the good guys an unwelcome visit earlier this month, breaking into the Kernel.org website that is home to the Linux project. They gained root access to a server known as Hera and ultimately compromised "a number of servers in the kernel.org infrastructure," according to a note on the kernel.org website Wednesday.

With security constantly in the news lately, you can't help but feel ill at ease and vulnerable -- vulnerable to teams of hackers whose only motivations are to expose and attack their victims. Perhaps you think you've done due diligence by keeping your patches updated, installing security fixes, and maintaining a corporate firewall.

When Linus Torvalds released Linux 0.01 on the internet 20 years ago, his idea of a free Unix clone to which anyone could contribute touched a creativenerve in people. Today, it would be impossible to imagine an IT world without Linux.

The Fedora Project has made the first and only alpha version of Fedora 16 available to download. It was originally scheduled for release a week ago, but was delayed a week due to a series of problems. As a result, Fedora has also put back all subsequent scheduling by 7 days, so that Fedora 16 (named after Jules Verne) is, barring further delays, now expected to arrive on 1 November.

For the security conscious, there is always room for another weapon against attackers. Firewalls, intrusion detection systems, packet sniffers — all are important pieces of the puzzle. So too is Honeyd, the "honeypot daemon." Honeyd simulates the existence of an array of server and client machines on your network, including typical traffic between them. The phantom machines can be configured to mimic the signature and behavior of real operating systems, which will trick intruders into poking at them — and revealing themselves to your security staff.

Linux 3.0 is official here, but users expecting a swathe of fundamental changes to the kernel will find little to surprise them as the project celebrates its twentieth birthday.

Announced by Linux founder Linus Torvalds - on his Google+ profile, oddly enough - Linux 3.0 was expected to be earlier this month, but the discovery of a small bug in pathname lookups by Hugh Dickins lead to some last-minute changes being required.

I’ve been a distrohopper for as long as I can remember. What is a distrohopper you might be wondering? Well it’s a guy or gal who loves using different desktop distros and who frequently hops from one to another. I wrote a column about the Psychology of a Distrohopper a while back that explores what exactly goes on in the minds of distrohoppers.

Here’s a brief excerpt from that column that helps define what distrohoppers are interested in:

The 343 changes made by Microsoft developer K. Y. Srinivasan put him at the top of a list, created by LWN.net, of developers who made the most changes in the current development cycle for Linux 3.0. Along with a number of other "change sets", Microsoft provided a total of 361 changes, putting it in seventh place on the list of companies and groups that contributed code to the Linux kernel. By comparison, independent developers provided 1,085 change sets to Linux 3.0, while Red Hat provided 1,000 and Intel 839.