Security and the way windowing is handled remain two of the diminishing differences between Linux and Windows, according to one of the main speakers at Microsoft's developer conference.
There is a remotely exploitable bug in all Linux kernel 2.6 series due to using incorrect variable type. Vulnerability is connected to netfilter subsystem and may cause DoS. It's disclosed only when using iptables with rules matching TCP options (i.e. --tcp-option). There is no difference what action is taking up by matching rule.
Automating software testing allows you to run the same tests over a period of time, ensuring that you are really comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges. In this article, Linux Test Project team members share their methodology and rationale, as well as the scripts and tools they use to stress-test the Linux kernel.
"This concept of seamless code migration offers a homogeneous OS for heterogeneous hardware. It is imperative in an anti-Microsoft, 'We don't want to be nailed down to one thing anymore' world. We want a choice," Terra Soft CEO Kai Staats told MacNewsWorld in an exclusive interview.
A friend of mine wrote to me and asked me how he could go about switching to Linux*. I sent him an email back with some suggestions about how to approach it and he suggested that I should share this with others, so here it goes.
Corey Touchet just finished up my review of the state of 64bit Linux on the desktop. He is focused on the problems he experienced and the total user experience while usable, does leave a bit to be desired.
Red Hat's Havoc Pennington blogs about the issue of dependency hell and weighs in the good and bad of static linking. He also links to an interesting article by Jono Bacon.
Public-sector deployments of Linux are continuing to grow at the expense of Unix and Windows. The latest Linux win is the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AOUSC), in Washington, which provides administrative support, program management and policy development services to U.S. federal courts.
Recently, I got my hands on version 0.2 of Cobind, a Linux lite desktop, based on Red Hat/Fedora Core 1, from a software company in Pittsburgh. Not yet in general release, Cobind is a one disc wonder.
"We now have two distinct classes of Linux users whose interests are not the same, and perhaps we have more than that if we want to talk about people who think of software in political rather than pragmatic terms. Can these factions work together, or will tensions between them eventually kill the free software and open source movements?"Read the editorial at NewsForge.
"I am not hearing of many wholesale swaps from Windows to Linux," says Laura DiDio of the Yankee Group. "A company has to have a self-sufficient, experienced I.T. staff that can write custom applications, and be willing to risk not having an indemnification policy."
Consider these memory requirements for Fedora Core 2, as specified by Red Hat: Minimum for graphical: 192MB and Recommended for graphical: 256MB Does that sound any alarm bells with you? 192MB minimum? I've been running Linux for five years (and am a huge supporter), and have plenty of experience with Windows, Mac OS X and others. And those numbers are shocking -- severely so. No other general-purpose OS in existence has such high requirements. Linux is getting very fat.
SciTech Software, Inc. today announced the official release of the world's first web-based, graphics-driver build system with support for Windows, Linux, OS/2 and more. With SciTech’s exclusive online build system users can now easily configure, build and install certified SciTech SNAP Graphics drivers on their home machines, for non-commercial use free of charge.
Can a company count on Linux to lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) of an enterprise system? Reaction to this question from CIOs and IT managers usually goes something like this.
During the majority of my time working with computers, Windows was the operating system of choice. Reason being, it's all I've known. In 2002, I took a college course titled "Linux Administration" which entitled me to a few cd-roms of Redhat 7.x. While this course was nothing more than a few extra credits for me, I fell in love with Linux and went through the entire textbook a week into the class. It was a nice feeling to use something "different" than what I was used to.
Ingo Molnar announced the availablity of support for AMD's NX, or "no execute" bit for the x86 architecture. Originally introduced by AMD with their Athlon 64 and Opteron processors and marketed as Enhanced Virus Protection, Ingo notes that support for this new bit was also announced by Intel, Transmeta and VIA.
Following recent discussions about tuning swapiness and dynamically allocating swap as needed, a new discussion ensued on the lkml questioning the need for swap altogether when a system has "sufficient" ram.
