Linux

The Linux Foundation has selected a new CTO, Ted Ts'o, who has been known as the first North American developer of the Linux kernel, the foundation said on Thursday.

Ts'o has served as a foundation fellow and chief platform strategist. He is considered one of the most highly regarded members of the Linux and open-source community, according to the foundation. He replaces Markus Rex, who has returned to Novell to work as acting general manager and senior vice president of Novell's Open Platform Solutions business unit.

Over the course of recent years, some people have found the quality of most out-of-the-store firewall appliances either lacking functionality or worse, set at a price that has made them generally out of reach. Because of this issue, I thought it would be beneficial to write an article to better highlight what works and what does not with regard to turning an older PC into a standalone router/firewall appliance. The article covers in brief the following:

IPCop
pfSense
M0n0wall
SmoothWall
Linux LiveCD Router

Although GNU/Linux® has the reputation of being a much more secure operating system than Microsoft® Windows®, you still need to secure the Linux desktop. This tutorial takes you through the steps of installing and configuring antivirus software, creating a backup-restore plan, and making practical use of a firewall. When you finish, you'll have the knowledge and tools you need to harden your Linux desktop against most attacks and prevent illegitimate access to your computer.

In this tutorial

A new Tim Jones tutorial overviews GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) extensions to ANSI C that may be of special interest to Linux kernel and driver developers. Meanwhile, the GCC development team is readying a new 4.4.0 release with stricter preprocessor checks, among other new features.

Considering that Linux netbooks are designed to present a simplified interface that can be used by complete newbies, it's amazing how buzzy hackers have become about them. Even people who wouldn't consider themselves hardcore techies love to tinker under these machines' hoods.

Of course, after Apple develops an elegant and perfectly understandable mobile UI, Linux hackers want to tear it down. Bring on the OpenMoko, Android or Ubuntu Mobile for the iPhone.

I enjoyed a recent post by PlanetBeing on the Linux on the iPhone blog. It was an attempt to justify why someone would want to spend a tremendous amount of time to bring Linux to the iPhone, when he or she could “just develop on an open platform instead with no such wasted effort?” Good question, dude.

Google is tight-lipped about the Linux version of its Chrome browser, but the company's programmers have proved a bit more forthcoming with a brief announcement that they have a crude version of Chrome working on Linux.

"Dude, Gmail works in the test shell on Linux!" said programmer Dan Kegel in a note to the Chromium developers mailing list on Tuesday. It's pretty crude, though: the "enter" key doesn't work, for example. Chromium is the name of the open-source project behind Chrome. But what's a "test shell"?

As you have probably noticed, new versions have arrived of Ubuntu, Xubuntu and other derivatives. One of the most exciting new features has received far less publicity than it deserves - the ability to “install” it onto your USB flash drive with just a few clicks.

The advantages are obvious: just plug your flash drive into a computer and run your favourite operating system. What’s more, everything you do — installing applications, saving documents, editing preferences — will be saved to your flash drive and will be available to you every time you run it!

Over the weekend, a major G1 bug came to light. So what do you suppose happened when you typed Linux commands into any Android program under firmware 1.0 TC-RC29? According to Ed Burnette over at ZDNet, you executed them. Every keystroke was echoed to a root-authorized command shell. Typing telnetd started the telnet daemon. Typing reboot meant that, well, you needed to wait for a few seconds while your phone rebooted.

A remote buffer overflow vulnerability in the Linux Kernel could be exploited by attackers to execute code or cripple affected systems, according to a Gentoo bug report that just became public.

The flaw could allow malicious hackers to launch arbitrary code with kernel-level privileges. This could lead to complete system compromise or, in some cases if an exploit fails, result in denial-of-service attacks.