http://www.osnews.com/ Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2008, David Adams OSNews version 4 donotreply@osnews.com (Adam Scheinberg) donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Sat, 17 May 2008 04:17:18 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com/ 120 http://www.osnews.com/story/19733/Anatomy_of_Security-Enhanced_Linux_(SELinux)/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19733/Anatomy_of_Security-Enhanced_Linux_(SELinux)/ Linux has been described as one of the most secure operating systems available, but the National Security Agency (NSA) has taken Linux to the next level with the introduction of Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux). SELinux takes the existing GNU/Linux operating system and extends it with kernel and user-space modifications to make it bullet-proof. If you're running a 2.6 kernel today, you might be surprised to know that you're using SELinux right now! This article explores the ideas behind SELinux and how it's implemented. Sun, 11 May 2008 23:48:23 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Eugenia Loli-Queru) Linux 21 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News http://www.osnews.com/story/19697/Btrfs_0.14_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19697/Btrfs_0.14_Released/ The (unstable and development-oriented only) filesystem Btrfs version 0.14 has been released. "Btrfs is a new copy on write filesystem for Linux aimed at implementing advanced features while focusing on fault tolerance, repair and easy administration. Initially developed by Oracle, Btrfs is licensed under the GPL and open for contribution from anyone." Wed, 30 Apr 2008 12:55:49 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Linux 18 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News diegocg http://www.osnews.com/story/19657/Finally_Secure_Real-Time_on_the_Desktop/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19657/Finally_Secure_Real-Time_on_the_Desktop/ Lennart Poettering of Red Hat, PulseAudio maintainer has blogged in detail about the impact of Real-Time Group scheduling in 2.6.25 kernel. The Real time patches come from -rt patchset maintained by Ingo Molnar of Red Hat which aims to make Linux the first general purpose operating system with hard real time features. Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:34:31 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (David Adams) Linux 25 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News Rahul http://www.osnews.com/story/19655/Jealousy__Novell_Red_Hat_and_the_Linux_Desktop/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19655/Jealousy__Novell_Red_Hat_and_the_Linux_Desktop/ "Recently, both Novell and Red Hat went on record as dismissing the idea that the consumer Linux desktop is going to be taking off anytime soon. It's not? Has anyone told Asus and Xandros? Everex and gOS? How about Dell and Ubuntu? They're all doing great with consumer Linux desktops." The enterprise Linux leaders are not the ones making strides on the desktop. Does that mean that the Linux desktop has no future, or just that they've let their business focus let them drop the ball on that segment of the market? Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:26:08 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (David Adams) Linux 57 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News sjvn http://www.osnews.com/story/19645/Linux_2.6.25_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19645/Linux_2.6.25_Released/ Linus Torvalds has released version 2.6.25 of the Linux kernel. "It's been long promised, but there it is now. Special thanks to Ingo who found and fixed a nasty-looking regression that turned out to not be a regression at all, but an old bug that just had not been triggering as reliably before." Thu, 17 Apr 2008 05:43:51 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Linux 35 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News RJop http://www.osnews.com/story/19642/Atheros_Hires_ath5k_Developer/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19642/Atheros_Hires_ath5k_Developer/ LWN reports: When kernel developers talk about problematic hardware vendors, Atheros often appears near the top of their lists. So this announcement from Luis Rodriguez, a developer of the reverse-engineered ath5k driver, is intriguing: "I write to you to inform you that I have decided to join Atheros as a full time employee, as a Software Engineer, to help them with their goals and mission to get every device of Atheros supported upstream in the Linux kernel." What will come of this remains to be seen, but if it truly signals a change of heart at Atheros, it is a most welcome development. Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:05:27 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Linux 8 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News Rahul http://www.osnews.com/story/19637/Running_Linux_on_PS3:_Slimming_Down_X11/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19637/Running_Linux_on_PS3:_Slimming_Down_X11/ The Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) runs Linux, but getting it to run well requires some tweaking. In the third and final article of this series on PS3 Linux Peter Seebach talks about ways to get X11 slimmed down to fit on a smaller memory budget. Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:34:30 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (David Adams) Linux 18 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News LinucksGirl http://www.osnews.com/story/19633/The_Linux_Foundation_and_the_Future_of_Linux/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19633/The_Linux_Foundation_and_the_Future_of_Linux/ "I came away from the second annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit with mixed feelings. I mean, it's hard not to support the group that pays Linus Torvalds to spend his time continuing to lead the poster-boy project for free and open source software. But at the same time, those golden chains are my biggest concern about the Linux Foundation." Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:06:24 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Linux 28 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News melkor http://www.osnews.com/story/19617/SymphonyOne_2008.1_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19617/SymphonyOne_2008.1_Released/ The SymphonyOS project released a new version. "The SymphonyOS Project is pleased to announce the release of SymphonyOne 2008.1, our first major release in almost a year. SymphonyOne is an almost 100% rewrite of all the Mezzo desktop code taking advantage of more features of fvwm to provide a smaller footprint and more stable environment. Based on Ubuntu 7.10, SymphonyOne provides a complete desktop environment and full Ubuntu compatibility on systems with as little as a 200mhz processor. SymphonyOne also introduces our new WebApps system which allows you to make any website into a program in your programs menu which runs as it's own process in it's own window." Fri, 11 Apr 2008 19:26:10 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Linux 8 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News ryanpq http://www.osnews.com/story/19616/Linux_Faithful_See_Ray_of_Light_Shining_on_Client_OS/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19616/Linux_Faithful_See_Ray_of_Light_Shining_on_Client_OS/ "Linux, long the laggard to the Windows desktop, is pushing into emerging markets, onto mobile devices and other client form factors, and is poised to give Microsoft something to really compete against, according to attendees at the annual Linux Foundation Summit. While the Linux desktop has yet to hit its stride, the operating system is showing up and lowering prices in everything from mobile phones, tablets, global positioning systems and even gas pumps." Fri, 11 Apr 2008 14:38:18 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Linux 20 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News Puskas http://www.osnews.com/story/19595/Linux_Driver_Project_April_Status_Report/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19595/Linux_Driver_Project_April_Status_Report/ Here's an update on the Linux Driver Project. "The Linux Driver Project is alive and well, with over 300 developers wanting to participate, many drivers already written and accepted into the Linux kernel tree, and many more being currently developed. The main problem is a lack of projects. It turns out that there really isn't much hardware that Linux doesn't already support. Almost all new hardware produced is coming with a Linux driver already written by the company, or by the community with help from the company. There are two main classes of hardware, video input devices and wireless network cards, that is not well supported by Linux, but large efforts are already underway to resolve this issue, with the wireless driver issue pretty much taken care of already, however there are a few notable exceptions. Because of this, our main effort has turned into one of education. Educating vendors of how to become members of the Linux kernel community, proper coding standards and procedures, and how to get their code into the kernel tree." Tue, 08 Apr 2008 12:40:13 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Linux 34 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News SEJeff http://www.osnews.com/story/19592/Review:_Dreamlinux_3.0/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19592/Review:_Dreamlinux_3.0/ DistroWatch takes a look at Dreamlinux 3.0. "Dreamlinux is still beautiful and now that the look has been recreated for a GNOME version and in the implementation of CompizFusion, it should appeal to a larger audience. It very well could be a viable alternative to Ubuntu. Overall, Dreamlinux was a fairly solid release. I had issues with the installer, wireless and suspend support, and some applications were a bit crashy. But it looks good, comes with some good application choices (except Iceweasel that I find buggy), and the Dreamlinux tools were nice. So, I have mixed feelings. I don't feel comfortable recommending it across the board. If you like the appearance, features, and software stack, then perhaps it'd best to try it on your hardware to see if it's for you." Mon, 07 Apr 2008 22:15:04 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Linux 11 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News http://www.osnews.com/story/19585/Mini-Review:_Linux_Mint_4.0_Daryna/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19585/Mini-Review:_Linux_Mint_4.0_Daryna/ From Linux Mint's About page: "Linux Mint's purpose is to produce an elegant, up to date and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop distribution." To reach this goal, lead developer and founder Clement Lefebvre used (surprisingly) Ubuntu as the base, and added multimedia codecs to the distribution, by default. Later on, Mint deviated more from Ubuntu by adding its own artwork, web-based package front-end, and configuration tools (MintTools) to the mix. I installed the latest stable release, Daryna (4.0), released on 15 October of last year, to see what's what. Sun, 06 Apr 2008 21:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Linux 31 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 Feature http://www.osnews.com/story/19578/GoboLinux_014.01_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19578/GoboLinux_014.01_Released/ GoboLinux 014.01 has been released. "We are pleased to introduce GoboLinux 014.01, the new release of GoboLinux, the Linux distribution featuring a rethought file system structure. This release is our first 'point release', providing a stability update for our latest major release, GoboLinux 014, which was released three months ago." Fri, 04 Apr 2008 14:49:03 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Linux 58 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News lucasvr http://www.osnews.com/story/19564/Linux_Kernel_Community_Grows_But_Elite_Group_Remains/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19564/Linux_Kernel_Community_Grows_But_Elite_Group_Remains/ "While Linus Torvalds' name is synonymous with the Linux kernel, Al Viro's may be one day, too. Viro has contributed 1571 changes to the kernel, which sits at the core of the Linux operating system, over the past three years, according to a new report from the Linux Foundation. That's more than any other individual developer, the report states. In contrast, Torvalds, the kernel's creator and steward, contributed 495 changes. Viro couldn't be reached for comment about the report." Wed, 02 Apr 2008 17:59:46 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Linux 14 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News Cain Boro