Linux Archive

Linux Journal is running a telling chapter excerpt from the book, "Exploring the JDS Linux Desktop," (O'Reilly) by Tom Adelstein & Sam Hiser. The excerpt is Chapter 9: "Using Windows Applications with Sun's Java Destkop System". Many people remain blissfully unaware that you can run a growing list of Windows applications on Linux. This development may disturb a certain tidy model of reality but it represents the overthrow of a major obstacle to the widespread adoption of Linux, that of "Application Availability." Full Excerpt | Linux Journal

Marcelo Tosatti released the official 2.4.29 kernel, unchanged from 2.4.29-rc4. Among many other enhancements and bug fixes, this release includes a number of local and remote security fixes, and thus is a recommended upgrade for users of the 2.4 kernel.

HP has demonstrated Linux running on 64 Itanium 2 processors without any loss of efficiency, and says it's seeing growing interest in open source from financial institutions. More.

"A study by not-for-profit IT security testing organisation Honeynet Project has shown that, on average, Linux systems today take three months to fall prey to hackers, up from 72 hours in equivalent tests conducted between 2001 and 2002..." Complete Story.

ELX(Everyone's Linux), is a Linux focused company based in India. ELX's first product, ELX Power Desktop, received very good reviews during its early stages but for the past several months, the product has been very quiet.

"If there's a real bottom line here, the one thing I'm clear on is that I haven't found it yet, but the questions raised have been more interesting that the answers -- so more help would be welcomed." Read the article at LinuxInsider.

Paul Starzetz has found a serious bug in Linux kernels. By exploiting the vulnerability local attackers could gain root privilege. All recent Linux kernels affected. The bug has already been corrected in recent released 2.4.29-rc1 Linux kernel.

The Linux server platform is becoming more varied -- and more capable, according to a recent report by IDC. The report noted that Linux is already well entrenched as a Web-centric server platform, in IT infrastructure roles and in the high-performance computing arena. In 2005, the report predicted, Linux will take on more workloads in the enterprise, such as hosting independent software vendor applications and databases.

2004 has been a rough-and-tumble year for Linux. PC Pro has a month-by-month summary of the major events in Linux news over the year.

The Linux kernel 2.6.10 was released, full details here.

Ubuntu Linux has posted a series of international screenshots of their 4.10 LiveCD (thanks to OSDir.com).This includes Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and French screenshots. Additional languages are soon to be added.

Uber-popular Linux live CD Knoppix will split into a "lite" version, optimized for older computer, and a "maximum" version targetting newer machines, which contains more Debian packages.

I noticed that IBM released a new Redbook this month: "Linux Client Migration Cookbook -- A Practical Planning and Implementation Guide for Migrating to Desktop Linux" Among the most interesting topics which are focused on the desktop deployment and technology are the chapters about "Migration best practices" and "Desktop automation and scripting".

I'm not upgrading my Fedora Core 2 machine to Core 3, even though the new version has been out for a couple of months. There's not anything wrong with FC3 itself, it's just that system upgrades are both a blessing and a curse.