Linux

From the time the Ubuntu distribution was first released nearly four years ago, the people behind it have tried to never put a foot wrong. Every single decision about the distribution has been geared to try and satisfy both their own brand of users and the general FOSS community.

Last week, however, Mark Shuttleworth, the head of Canonical, the firm that runs the Ubuntu project, made a decision that he will come to regret: to sell proprietary codecs for the distribution. Let me say it again - Shuttleworth will come to rue this move.

The world has changed in the last 10 years. Humans finally have hover cars, unlimited energy and a cure for cancer. Well, not exactly, but Linux is almost ready for the mainstream desktop. Which is just as exciting. Sort of.

Before we crack open the Canonical-branded champagne, there are one or two things to sort out. Linux still has a reputation for being too finicky, technical and 'just for geeks'. This needs to be killed as quickly as possible. How? By putting the latest distributions through the ultimate in scientific usability studies: the girlfriend test.

There's no doubt that Linux is a secure operating system. However, nothing is perfect. Millions of lines of code are churned through the kernel every second and it only takes a single programming mistake to open a door into the operating system. If that line of code happens to face the Internet, that's a backdoor to your server.

Nokia's Linux-based web tablets may soon gain faster processors and built-in 3G cellular modems. Nokia executive Ari Jaaksi revealed today in a keynote at the Open Source in Mobile show that Nokia will add 3G/HSPA capabilities to an OMAP3-optimized Maemo 5 release for the tablets.

Windows Vista has been out for almost two years now but it still suffers from stability and compatibility issues, let alone an insatiable desire for beefier hardware. You don't have to live with it; here are five reasons why Linux makes a better choice for your computer.

The art of burying invisible malware deep inside a Linux machine is about to go mainstream, thanks to a new open-source rootkit released Thursday by Immunity Security, a firm that supplies tools for penetration testers.

When implemented, Immunity's DR, or Debug Register, makes backdoors and other types of malware extremely difficult to detect or eradicate. It's notable because it cloaks itself by burrowing deep inside a server's processor and availing itself of debugging mechanisms available in Intel's chip architecture. The rootkit, in other words, mimics a kernel debugger.

In May of 2008, researchers found a flaw in the Debian GNU/Linux operating system's random number generator, making any OpenSSL keys generated during the past 20 months so predictable that they could be correctly guessed in a matter of hours. In this tip, let's look at how this flaw came about and whether it has security implications for organizations other than those that use Debian.

Not many things make the founder of the Ubuntu distro Mark Shuttleworth nervous, but recommending people replace Windows with Linux on their desktop, it seems, is one of them.

This coming from someone who's been catapulted out of our atmosphere to spend time in the freezing vacuum of space. Shuttleworth, though, reckons people should think about why they want to change Windows for Linux, and re-engineer their infrastructure and the way they are working, rather than doing a simple rip and replace.

In an interesting post on Lifehacker, the editors ask the readers "Why did you switch to Linux?" The question drew quite a lot of interesting responses, including some very offbeat reasons for why people made the switch. If you're under the impression that people switch solely for rebellious or "fight the man" reasons, here are some of the more interesting responses and trends that they point to.

Canonical is the latest Linux vendor to patch a vulnerability in the open-source operating system's kernel that could have left the door open for hackers to find their way into users' machines.

In an email sent overnight on Monday, the Linux vendor warned users to update all machines running recent versions of Ubuntu, ranging from 6.06, which was released back in mid-2006, to version 8.04, which came out earlier this year. The problem also applied to other versions of Ubuntu such as Kubuntu, Edubuntu and Xubuntu.