geekinchief points to a just-posted interview at Laptop Magazine "with Canonical's market manager, Gerry Carr, where he talks about Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Some interesting details: Canonical does not plan to make the Netbook remix available for download or sale. It will only come pre-installed on new systems. It will boot in 5-10 seconds."

Linux.com (who shares corporate overlords with Slashdot) is reporting that gNewSense has gone 2.0. For the uninitiated gNewSense is a stripped down version of Ubuntu's Hardy Heron for the free software purist. Removing over 100 pieces of proprietary code and firmware, gNewSense offers a user the ability to run an OS where everything is able to be studied, changed, and redistributed. "gNewSense is a great alternative to Gobuntu, the Canonical-sponsored free derivative of Ubuntu. According to its wiki page, the 8.04 version of Gobuntu hasn't been released due to a less-than-optimal reaction from the community. Gobuntu used the same repositories as Ubuntu, and the Ubuntu live CD can achieve the same installation as Gobuntu by merely selecting the free-software-only option in the installer (press F6 twice at the boot menu). Also, Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, has indicated that he would rather focus on gNewSense because the work on that distribution can help the Ubuntu community as a whole. "

dinotrac writes "Somebody special is coming over for dinner. You're not a chef, but you can cook well enough to get by, so you grab your best cookbook and get to work. That's the idea behind O'Reilly's Linux Networking Cookbook, by Carla Schroder. Carla has gathered a group of networking recipes that a reasonably Linux-savvy reader can use to address network needs like a seasoned sysadmin. If you want to find out how to hook your Linux workstation to a LAN, get another book. If you are reasonably comfortable with Linux, need to set up an LDAP server, configure single sign-on with Samba for a mixed Linux/Windows LAN, set up a VPN, or troubleshoot network problems without some uppity online geek telling you to RTFM, this book may be what you're looking for." Read below for the rest of Dean's review.

jlunavtgrad writes "I recently attended an embedded engineering conference and was surprised at how many vendors were selling tools to analyze source code and scan for bugs, without ever running the code. These static software analysis tools claim they can catch NULL pointer dereferences, buffer overflow vulnerabilities, race conditions and memory leaks. Ive heard of Lint and its limitations, but it seems that this newer generation of tools could change the face of software development. Or, could this be just another trend? Has anyone in the Slashdot community used similar tools on their code? What kind of changes did the tools bring about in your testing cycle? And most importantly, did the results justify the expense?"

Nic Doye writes "Dag Wieers responds to Mark Shuttleworth's recent request to ask major Enterprise Linux distributions to synchronise releases, claiming that it 'is no more than a wish to benefit from a lot of work that Novell and Red Hat are already doing in the Enterprise space.' He's confessing to playing Devil's Advocate here, but it is an interesting view from someone with a large amount of experience in the Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS space."

voodoosws points out on Mark Shuttleworth's blog Shuttleworth's call for synchronized publication of Linux distributions, excerpting: "There's one thing that could convince me to change the date of the next Ubuntu LTS: the opportunity to collaborate with the other, large distributions on a coordinated major / minor release cycle. If two out of three of Red Hat (RHEL), Novell (SLES) and Debian are willing to agree in advance on a date to the nearest month, and thereby on a combination of kernel, compiler toolchain, GNOME/KDE, X and OpenOffice versions, and agree to a six-month and 2-3 year long term cycle, then I would happily realign Ubuntu's short and long-term cycles around that. I think the benefits of this sort of alignment to users, upstreams and the distributions themselves would be enormous. I'll write more about this idea in due course, for now let's just call it my dream of true free software syncronicity."

SecurityBob writes "Debian package maintainers tend to very often modify the source code of the package they are maintaining so that it better fits into the distribution itself. However, most of the time, their changes are not sent back to upstream for validation, which might cause some tension between upstream developers and Debian packagers. Today, a critical security advisory has been released: a Debian packager modified the source code of OpenSSL back in 2006 so as to remove the seeding of OpenSSL random number generator, which in turns makes cryptographic key material generated on a Debian system guessable. The solution? Upgrade OpenSSL and re-generate all your SSH and SSL keys. This problem not only affects Debian, but also all its derivatives, such as Ubuntu." Reader RichiH also points to Debian's announcement and Ubuntu's announcement.

An anonymous reader writes "gNewSense DeltaH (2.0), a second major release of a GNU/Linux distribution with focus on freedom, has just been released. It is based on Ubuntu 8.04 which was released less than week ago. gNewSense is one of the few GNU/Linux distributions listed as free by the GNU Project."

Geoffery writes "Some analysts foresee a less than rosy future for projects such as Debian, claiming free coding is all well and good, but that without a solid financial backing — such as the models adopted by Red Hat and to a greater degree Novell/Suse — Debian will ultimately hit a brick wall. ZDNet interviews Steve McIntyre, the new man leading the organization on issues of 'community registrations' and future plans."

An anonymous reader writes "Mauricio Piacentini writes about a deployment of systems running Linux and KDE in Brazil's schools; some 52 million students are to be served by this initiative. 'What is interesting about this project is that it not only provides infrastructure (computers and net connectivity) but also open content to students in public schools. The software installed on these systems is "Linux Educacional 2.0," a very clean Debian-based distribution, with KDE 3.5, KDE-Edu, KDE-Games, and some tools developed by the project.' The distro comes in Portuguese only at this time." quarterbuck notes that Linux is making other inroads in the BRIC economies (Brazil-Russia-India-China): India and China are getting a custom-designed Ubuntu laptop from Dell, and Russia is making their own Ubuntu laptop this year.

Nate2 writes "The Hardy Heron has taken flight: it's the second LTS (Long Term Support) release of the world's most popular distro. New features include the Wubi Windows installer and Firefox 3 beta 5. Grab a copy here, and check out Linux Format's overview of the release."

maemst writes "Can you code 24 hours non-stop? Hackontest is a new Google-sponsored 24-hour programming competition between different open source projects. Its goals are to enhance Free Software projects according to user needs and to make visible how enthusiastically open source software is being developed. During the current online selection process users and developers of open source software may submit feature requests and rate and comment them. On August 1st, 2008 the Hackontest jury will pick the three most promising teams. Each team will receive a free trip to Switzerland on September 24/25, 2008 to participate in the competition located in Zurich. Hacking 24 hours inside an etoy.CONTAINER, the teams and their virtually present communities will implement certain features based on the online ratings and jury selection. In the end, the Hackontest jury evaluates the code and awards the winners with a total of USD 8500. The jury is made up of 10 renowned open source contributors: Jeremy Alison (Samba), Jono Bacon (Ubuntu), Brian W. Fitzpatrick (Subversion), Martin F. Krafft (Debian), Alexander Limi (Plone), Federico Mena-Quintero (GNOME), Bram Moolenaar (vim), Bruce Perens (OSI founder), Lukas K. Smith (PHP) and Harald Welte (gpl-violations.org)."

andremachado writes "Two academic management researchers, Siobhán O'Mahony and Fabrizion Ferraro, performed a detailed scientific study about Debian Project governance and social organization from the management perspective. How did a big non-commercial non-paying community evolve to produce some of the most respectable Operating Systems and applications packages available? Organizations without a consensual basis of authority lack an important condition necessary for their survival. Those with directly democratic forms of participation do not tend to scale well and are noted for their difficulty managing complexity and decision-making — all of which can hasten their demise. The Debian Project community designed and evolved a solid governance system since 1993 able to establish shared conceptions of formal authority, leadership, and meritocracy, limited by defined democratic adaptive mechanisms."

wazza brings us a story about the Philippine government's weather service (PAGASA), which has recently used an eight-PC Debian cluster to replace an SGI supercomputer. The system processes data from local sources and the Global Telecommunication System, and it has reduced monthly operational costs by a factor of 20. Quoting: "'We tried several Linux flavours, including Red Hat, Mandrake, Fedora etc,' said Alan Pineda, head of ICT and flood forecasting at PAGASA. 'It doesn't make a dent in our budget; it's very negligible.' Pineda said PAGASA also wanted to implement a system which is very scalable. All of the equipment used for PICWIN's data gathering comes off-the-shelf, including laptops and mobile phones to transmit weather data such as temperature, humidity, rainfall, cloud formation and atmospheric pressure from field stations via SMS into PAGASA's central database."

stoolpigeon writes "The Apache web server has been the number one http server on the internet since 1996. It has also become an integral part of many open source and proprietary software systems. It runs on diverse hardware, in locations all over the globe, hosting sites large and small. In November of 2003 Ken Coar and Rich Bowen had their "Apache Cookbook" published by O'Reilly. The duo brought years of experience in working with and documenting the Apache server to the plate. Now, over 4 years later they have published the second edition. Four years is a long time, but it would be reasonable to ask if this new edition is worth purchasing, especially if one already owns the first edition." Read below for the rest of JR's review.

An anonymous reader writes "Two months ago I donated my old PC to my little sister, who is 7 — I had promised she would get her own computer as soon as she can read and write properly. I then proceeded to answer her questions about how it works, as far as she inquired, and tried to let her make some choices when installing Debian (she can already use GNOME). As I explained password protection and encryption to her, I was pleasantly surprised when she insisted on protection measures being as strong as possible, so that no one else can screw with her computer. She knows that my younger brother has to endure strict parental control software that was installed on his machine without his consent. The significant problem is that she cannot permanently memorize abstract passwords, even if they are her own creation. I talked with a teacher who assured me that this is common at her age. My parents would probably be able to guess non-abstract passwords. What mechanism of identifying herself does the Slashdot crowd suggest?"

derrida writes "Because the traditional System V init daemon (SysVinit) does not deal well with modern hardware, including hotplug devices, USB hard and flash drives, and network-mounted filesystems, Ubuntu replaced it with the upstart init daemon. Several other replacements for SysVinit are also available. One of the most prominent, initng, is available for Debian and runs on Ubuntu. Solaris uses SMF (Service Management Facility) and Mac OS uses launchd. Over time, Ubuntu will likely come to incorporate features of each of these systems into Upstart. Furthermore, heading in a different direction from its main rivals, Ubuntu Linux will use KVM as its primary virtualization software. Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server both use the Xen virtualization software, a 'hypervisor' layer that lets multiple operating systems run on the same computer. In contrast, the KVM software runs on top of a version of Linux, the 'host' operating system that provides a foundation for other 'guest' operating systems to run in a virtual mode." Slashdot shares a corporate overlord with Linux.com.

aquatix writes "This local root exploit (Debian, Ubuntu) seems to work everywhere I try it, as long as it's a Linux kernel version 2.6.17 to 2.6.24.1. If you don't trust your users (which you shouldn't), better compile a new kernel without vmsplice." Here is millw0rm's proof-of-concept code.

stoolpigeon writes "As a dba, I'm constantly looking to learn more about networking and system administration. Both can have quite an impact on the performance of my piece of the puzzle. A welcome addition to the materials to help me learn about networking is Carla Schroder's "Linux Networking Cookbook". This book is just right for the person like myself who enjoys learning by getting hands-on experience with the technology. The scope is wide and so someone with a great depth of networking experience may find that the treatments of each is a bit shallow. On the other hand, that wide scope means this book may hold something new, even for someone with some level of experience." Read on for the rest of JR's review.

Opurt writes "On the first day of the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Boston this week, a roundtable session focused on the vision for the upcoming Hardy Heron Ubuntu release. Unlike Gutsy Gibbon, which brought a handful of experimental features along with some new functionality, the focus with Heron will be on robustness as it will be supported on the desktop for 3 years. 'The Compiz window manager, which adds sophisticated visual effects to the Ubuntu user interface, will be a big target for usability improvements. Keyboard bindings and session management were noted as two areas where Compiz still needs some work.' PolicyKit and Tracker will also be significantly tweaked, while Heron is also likely to see a complete visual refresh."