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A thread on the OpenBSD-misc mailing list compared the security of SELinux in the 2.6 Linux kernel to what's available in OpenBSD. The general opinion was that SELinux and its policy language are too complex, leading Damien Miller to note, "every medium to large Linux deployment that I am aware off has switched SELinux off. Once you stray from the default configurations that the system distributors ship with, the default policies no longer work and things start to break." Ted Unangst summarized, "the problem with security by policy is that the policy is always wrong."

Red Hat Inc., the world's biggest seller of Linux operating-system programs, said profit rose 64 percent after sales of new products topped analysts' estimates. The shares rose 5.1 percent in extended trading. Net income climbed to $18.2 million, or 9 cents a share, from $11 million, or 5 cents, a year earlier, Raleigh, North Carolina-based Red Hat said today in a statement. Sales rose 28 percent to $127.3 million for the quarter ended Aug. 31, beating analysts' estimates in a Bloomberg survey. The company also gave an earnings forecast that matched estimates.

The Ubuntu Linux team is planning to release Gutsy Gibbon, the latest version of its OS, tomorrow.

Security experts have discovered TIFF-based buffer overflow vulnerabilities in OpenOffice, which could allow attackers to remotely execute code on Linux, Windows or Apple Mac-based computers.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that the United States as a nation needs to 'financially incentivize the adoption of Electronic Health Record technology'. While the intentions are good, what this seems to translate into is a rush in the next few years to get EHR software installed at all costs. If this is done in an uncontrolled fashion with proprietary EHR software the long term consequences will be disastrous and expensive.

Contrary to yesterday's report, the lawsuit against Monsoon Multimedia for violating the GNU General Public License (GPL) in its distribution of BusyBox may not be headed for a quick settlement. Nor will the settlement necessarily be out-of-court. Yesterday, Monsoon issued a news release that announced that the company was in "settlement negotiations with BusyBox." Graham Radstone, Monsoon chairman and chief operating officer, said, "Since we intend to and always intended to comply with all open source software license requirements, we are confident that the matter will be quickly resolved."

Mathieu Desnoyers posted an updated version of his Linux Kernel Markers patchset explaining, "following Christoph Hellwig's suggestion, aiming at a Linux Kernel Markers inclusion for 2.6.24, I made a simplified version of the Linux Kernel Markers. There are no more dependencies on any other patchset." He continued, "the modification only involved turning the immediate values into static variables and adapting the documentation accordingly. It will have a little more data cache impact when disabled than the version based on the immediate values, but it is far less complex."

The One Laptop per Child project has announced a new scheme in the US and Canada to accelerate the machine's slow uptake. In other news from the organisation, learning programmes are set to begin in various African locations in October.

FaunOS offers a full KDE desktop system with a comprehensive set of applications as either a live DVD or a live USB flash drive. The USB format is the distro's primary focus. FaunOS is based upon Arch Linux, and ships with Arch's package management system. The more I tested FaunOS, the more impressed I was

GNU/Linux offers a bewildering variety of flavors -- or distributions, as they're called. To a newcomer's eye, many of these seem virtually identical to each other. Yet, the more you learn about a distribution and the community that surrounds it, the more different they become. Here, in alphabetical order, is a list of the seven distributions that have most affected GNU/Linux as a whole:

What's the best desktop Linux? For me, it's SimplyMEPIS 6.5, soon to be replaced by 7.0. But this is both a dumb question and a dumb answer. The real question is: What's the best desktop operating system for you?

More on Linux power saving tips: Intel last week launched LessWatts.org, a project focused on reducing power consumption on Linux servers and desktops. Get some handy tips on reducing your consumption.

Last year, we reviewed Neuro-Evolving Robotic Operatives (NERO), a unique game in which players train forces of autonomous bots, then pit those forces against each other in hands-off, artificial intelligence (AI)-only competitions. NERO spawned a new major release a few weeks ago, and like its eponymous operatives, it has learned some new moves over time. NERO is developed at the Neural Networks Research Group of the University of Texas at Austin's Computer Science department, both as a class project and for ongoing research into machine learning.

"Ok, I think I'm getting close to releasing a real 2.6.23," began Linus Torvalds in hisrelease announcement for the eighth release candidate of the upcoming 2.6.23 kernel."Things seem to have calmed down, and I think Thomas Gleixner may have found the suspend/resume regression that has dogged us for a while, so I'm feeling happy about things." Linus continued:"Of course, me feeling happy is usually immediately followed by some nasty person finding new problems, but I'll just ignore that and enjoy the feeling anyway, however fleeting it may be."The shortlog really is pretty short, and I'm appending the diffstat at the end too in case anybody cares, but basically it's just a number of fairly small but real fixes, with some support for a few new chips to the sky2 network driver.."read more |rsync.net - Offsite Unix Backups

Every time I write a review I get comments and e-mails asking me to review Puppy Linux. Puppy has lots of people who really seem to love and zealously support the distro. I invariably download a copy (most recently 2.17) and try and run it. I invariably give up on it very quickly.

One Laptop Per Child's "XO" device -- commonly referred to as the $100 Linux laptop -- will be offered as part of a "Give 1, Get 1" promotional program in the U.S. and Canada beginning Nov. 12, the organization's director of software said Sept. 24.

Red Hat is suffering from JBoss reflux, according to a pair of prominent open source software watchers. Credit Suisse analyst Jason Maynard has issued a fresh report in which he downgrades Red Hat to "neutral" from "outperform" due to what he sees as organizational struggles. The analyst once thought Red Hat's digestion of JBoss would result in a strong sales increase. Instead, Red Hat faces serious challenges learning how to be more than a one-trick Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) pony.

KernelTrap now provides a useful interface for reading numerous kernel-relatedmailing lists. At this time, we are actively archiving multpleLinux,OpenBSD,DragonFlyBSD,FreeBSD, andNetBSD mailing lists. In addition to providing a simple online browsing interface, we also provide multiple RSS feeds for each of our archived mailing lists.read more |Linux ThinkPads for Scientists

Forces are mashaling to oppose the open access movement, the open source-inspired movement to make academic research publicly available online. The American Association of Publishers (AAP) recently announced the creation of the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM), an apparent lobby group organized to resist efforts to compel academic publishers to make publicly funded research generally available. PRISM's methods appear eerily similar to those used to oppose legislation to make public documents available in an open format, as well as the actions against free downloads by such organizations as the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America.

The Brazilian winter was almost over, and while the mild winters in Florianopolis allowed me to work on the Agape, the coming of spring meant that it was time to set sail for new adventures.Grayson, the youngest of the Pollywogs, showed up early in the morning at the dock, as I got ready to sail."What are you doing?", he asked."I am getting ready to study algae", I answered."Algae!", he exclaimed,"why are you looking for that?"