The National Security Agency built a version of Linux with more security tools that its technologists believe could help make the country's computing infrastructure less vulnerable. They won over the Linux developer community with the changes. But its success depends on the adoption by U.S. companies and government agencies, something that remains very much in doubt.
I get asked, by more junior Linux users, and people just looking to try it out, which distribution of Linux I use or recommend. It occurred to me that I never actually published an answer to this question, even though it is, by far, the question I am asked most often. I think my stock answer is maybe slightly unusual only because, unlike most of the rest of the Linux-using world, I hate every distro I've ever tried.
The Gentoo Foundation's Gentoo Linux has quickly grown into one of the world's most popular Linux distributions. However, Gentoo's non-commercial status, as well as its reputation as a bleeding-edge distribution for Linux system tweakers, has so far dimmed its prospects for enterprise adoption.
That said, Gentoo Linux is maturing quickly, and the system's source code-based software installation mechanism makes Gentoo a flexible distribution and a good fit for testing the latest versions of key open-source software components.
Linux kernel maintainer Alan Cox has given an insight into the experience of working with Linus Torvalds, the founder of Linux who maintains its development kernel.
During a talk last weekend at the Free and Open source Software Developers European Meeting, FOSDEM, on the challenges of maintaining a stable Linux kernel, Cox revealed that although Linus is good at developing code, he does not enjoy some of the other jobs that go along with software development such as bug fixing and beta testing.
One of the birds of a feather evening sessions at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo was called Year of the Linux Desktop ... Again. And the consensus among the handful of nighthawks at the session was that this still won't be desktop Linux's year.
Vendors such as Red Hat, Novell and Xandros have high hopes for their desktop Linux offerings. But they can't point to many user success stories -- certainly none on the scale of Linux server installations.
It's only been about two years since Linux started becoming a significant factor in mobile phones, an arena that has been dominated by Symbian, Microsoft, and proprietary operating systems. With the burgeoning complexity of mobile phones, feature phones, and smart phones -- plus increasing time-to-market pressures -- there's a clear movement toward off-the-shelf, third-party operating systems based on industry standards, and Linux figures to be a major beneficiary of that trend.
While chatting over dinner with the executives of a middleware company during the recent RSA conference for encryption and security in San Francisco, I heard about a secret project. It concerned the development of a version of Linux that runs smoothly as a task under Windows. The project was completed and then shelved. Whether it will ever reemerge is doubtful, but it does offer some interesting possibilities and hints as to what Microsoft may be up to with MS-Linux. The immediate usefulness of Linux running under Windows is obvious.
Version 2.6.12 of the Linux kernel is likely to include packet filtering that will work with IPv6, the latest version of the Internet Protocol. Netfilter/iptables, the firewall engine that is part of the Linux kernel, already allows stateless packet filtering for versions 4 and 6 of the Internet protocol, but only allows stateful packet filtering for IPv4. Stateful packet filtering is the more secure method, since it analyses whole streams of packets, rather than only checking the headers of individual packets -- as is done in stateless packet filtering.
Believe it or not, a Windows Web server is more secure than a similarly set-up Linux server, according to a study presented yesterday by two Florida researchers.
The researchers, appearing at the RSA Conference of computer-security professionals, discussed the findings in an event, "Security Showdown: Windows vs. Linux." One of them, a Linux fan, runs an open-source server at home; the other is a Microsoft enthusiast. They wanted to cut through the near-religious arguments about which system is better from a security standpoint.
THE LINUX 2.6 kernel suffers from multiple security vulnerabilities, according to the advisory outfit Secunia.
The four vulnerabilities, which rate a medium warning, mean that local users to gain access to potentially sensitive information, cause a denial of service attack, or bypass certain security restrictions.
The first flaw is caused by insufficient permission checking in the "shmctl()" function. Once written to disk, sensitive information could be revealed to anyone with read access to the swap area, or physical access to the machine.
