Distributions

A quick look at Ubuntu 5.10 Preview

The Ubuntu Linux 5.10 (Breezy Badger) Preview was released earlier this month, so we decided to take a look. The Preview is very close to what the final release will look like and it has been quite stable on my old test box so far.

Ubuntu has plenty of documentation on the wiki site, available in many different languages. For those who don't have much experience in installing Linux distributions you can find instructions for downloading the iso image, burning a CD, installing the operating system, and beyond.

The installation is straightforward and took me about one and half hours to get to a usable desktop system. My test box is somewhat old and slow, a legacy from LWN's training days, with a few newer components. The processor is a P2-350, with 192 Mb of RAM, and a 20 Gb hard drive.

Upon completing installation I decided to get at least some of the updates that were available. The system told me there were some 370 updates available. I deselected some of them, based on the fact that this computer does not currently have access to a printer, speakers, or a CD burner. Those things belong to another box, and the monitor, keyboard and mouse are shared by means of KVM switch. Once I had the system busy downloading and installing nearly 300 updates, I starting getting some work done, logging on to the LWN server and firing up a couple of emacs windows over the SSH connection. These remote sessions were very responsive considering that the system was busy downloading updates.

I have not been using this release for very long, but so far I have not found any show stoppers. Ubuntu 5.10 Preview is a nice system, easy to install and easy to use.

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Ubuntu Colony CD 5

The Ubuntu Colony CD 5 is ready. This is the fifth in a series of milestone CD images released during the Breezy development cycle, and it's likely to be the last before the stable Breezy release.

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Debian Project news

Colin Watson has announced his resignation as Debian Release Manager. "[It] became clear that a combination of my work commitments, the preparations for my wedding in August, moving house, and acquiring a new stepson were leaving me less and less time for release management work, and furthermore that each time I tried to get back on top of things I was spending too much time getting up to speed and not enough time doing useful work."

Numerous bugs have been closed recently. "Three massive closings were done within the RFP (request for package) and ITP (intent to package) WNPPs, and one more was done to the ITA (intent to adopt) ones."

A new archive has been announced for the preservation of materials (video, audio, slides, example code used, etc.) gathered, used at or derived from real life meetings.

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Mandriva Upcoming Product End of Life Notice

Here's a reminder from Mandriva that the End of Life status for some Mandriva products is approaching. Mandrakelinux 10.0 will no longer be supported as of the 30th of September, 2005. Mandrakelinux 10.1 will be entering base support at the same time.

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Whitebox Linux Shutdown

Whitebox Linux did shut down this week in anticipation of power outages caused by Hurricane Rita. As of this writing the server is back up.

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The Linux HomeDistro web site

The Linux HomeDistro web site focuses on those distributions which are suitable for home PCs. "The HomeDistro site reviews Linux distributions and ranks them for home PC use. Helpful tips and package suggestions are offered plus there is a forum to allow input."

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Xubuntu

The Ubuntu MOTU are working on Xfce flavored desktop system. "The initial participants are the MOTU Xfce team and various other people who have expressed interest in xfce+ubuntu in the past months (you know who you are) but everybody else's contributions are welcomed. We intend to release as close to breezy as possible so in the coming weeks there's going to be plenty of work to be done."

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Debian Weekly News

The September 27 issue of the Debian Weekly News is out; this week's topics include GL library duplication, whether libc5 should still be supported (seven years after libc6 came out), a possible Debian OpenSolaris port, and more.

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Fedora Weekly News #15

This week's Fedora Weekly News looks at Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7, Xorg package update problems, news for ASUS K8N-DL owners, the Fedora FAQ merger effort, meeting minutes for Fedora Documentation and Fedora Marketing, a review The Present and Future with Fedora Core 4 and more.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of September 26, 2005 is out. This edition covers a new IRC channel for ebuilders, a reminder for the European Gentoo developer conference call for papers, and several other topics.

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Fedora updates

Fedora Core 4 updates: xorg-x11 (several bug fixes), shadow-utils (rebuild), system-config-netboot (bug fixes), squid (update to STABLE11), selinux-policy-targeted (fixes from rawhide), system-config-bind (bug fixes and updated translations), x86info (update to 1.15), xinitrc (bug fix), audit (bug fixes, update man page), openobex (added `OBEX_ServerAccept' to the exported symbols), selinux-policy-targeted (put back in role sysadm_r unconfined_t), ruby (new upstream release), shadow-utils (useradd -l option returns), policycoreutils (update to rawhide version).

Fedora Core 3 updates: system-config-netboot (bug fixes), xorg-x11 (several bug fixes), squid (update to STABLE11), ruby (new upstream release).

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Trustix Secure Linux TSL-2005-0050

Trustix has fixed a variety of bugs in anaconda, cvs, initscripts, mod_security, mrtg, php, quagga and setup.

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ISP-Server Setup - Ubuntu 5.0.4 "The Hoary Hedgehog" (HowtoForge)

HowtoForge demonstrates how to set up a server on Ubuntu 5.04 "the Hoary Hedgehog". "This is a detailed description about the steps to be taken to setup a Ubuntu based server (Ubuntu 5.0.4 - The Hoary Hedgehog) that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters (web server (SSL-capable), mail server (with SMTP-AUTH and TLS!), DNS server, FTP server, MySQL server, POP3/POP3s/IMAP/IMAPs, Quota, Firewall, etc.)."

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Auditor: The security tool collection (Linux.com)

Linux.com takes a look at the security tools in the live CD Auditor. "Let's say you've been called in to examine a possible compromised server, and until the integrity of the server has been established you are not allowed to install any forensic software or even take the server offline. You can take your Auditor CD and start running the chkrootkit utility to see if any known rootkits are installed on the server. If you find any suspicious activity, you can take a disk image with the dd command and examine it for any possible rootkits or strange processes."

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Asianux 2.0 (Linux.com)

Linux.com looks at Asianux 2.0. "Despite its ostentatious goal of becoming "the" Asian Linux, Asianux enters an Asian Linux market that is already extremely competitive, with Novell SUSE, Turbolinux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and The Sun Wah Linux Distribution, which are all jostling for a piece of Asia's Linux market. The three Asianux companies have plans to expand the distro's reach and introduce Malaysian and Indian companies to its fold. If they can successfully execute this strategy, Asianux will expand to a larger portion of Asia. If the companies build on Asianux as a common platform, and localize it, it will provide a definite edge to the distribution over other Asian distributions. In the current climate in Asia, where piracy is rampant, Asianux won't take market share away from Windows, since to Windows users, Asianux looks no different than their current operating system, and both come at the same price."

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