Stories about: Debian

One of the first commercial Linux distributions aimed at the average computer user, Linspire, has just been sold to Xandros and undergone a name change to Digital Cornerstone. Xandros may not be very commonly known, but it is the distro being used by Asus on the EeePC.

Java started down the road to openness more than a year ago. Today it's finally free.

Like the future, open source is already here, it's just unevenly distributed. In particular, Latin America is emerging as a real hotbed of not only free software coding, but free software uptake by governments - to an extent that puts the UK's pathetic bumblings in this area quite to shame.

The Dell M-Series blade server is being touted as using 19 per cent less energy than the company's previous blade offering while still providing a jump in horsepower. I had a chance to use this beast as part of the Interop iLabs, and after a false start caused by missing software in the pre-production unit, I found myself wondering if I had enough shekels to buy one for my lab. Instead of forcing me to surround my servers with additional out-of-band management gear, the M-Series has several cost- and labor-saving features built right in. Those features include IP KVM, intelligent power control, serial over IP, Virtual Media over IP, and power and environmental monitoring.

A Chinese Bluetooth technology vendor released a new version of its Bluetooth application software for ultra-mobile PC users running the Linux operating system.

Once upon a time, using open-source servers and applications for business was frowned upon in many circles. Today, you'd be hard pressed to find any sizeable infrastructure that doesn't leverage open-source code in some form or another, be it a few MySQL databases, Apache on the Web servers, or a pile of Perl, PHP, Ruby, or Python applications holding things together.

If you are running a Debian-based Linux system and haven't already caught up with the announcement [1] that there was a major flaw with the generation of SSH, OpenVPN, DNSSEC, SSL/TLS session keys and X.509 certificate key material, you might want to update your system to address the problem.

A recently disclosed vulnerability in widely used Linux distributions can be exploited by attackers to guess cryptographic keys, possibly leading to the forgery of digital signatures and theft of confidential information, a noted security researcher said Thursday.

Ian Murdock is vice president of developer and community marketing at Sun Microsystems. Prior to that, he was the founder of the Debian Linux distribution and CTO at the Linux Foundation. Paul Krill met with Murdock at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco last week to talk about open source and how Sun, with its OpenSolaris version of the Solaris Unix platform, will fare in the open-source arena versus Linux.

Bill Kendrick is a software machine. He is the lead designer and developer of New Breed Software, a company creating free and open source games, libraries, tools and utilities across a range of operating systems, mobile devices, hand held and home video consoles. He has personally created a diverse range of classic Web-based games that run across all browsers, and has worked as a professional video game developer since 2003.

Yet another six months has passed and another Ubuntu Linux release is out the door. April 2008 signals the release of Ubuntu 8.04, or Hardy Heron, and follows the Feisty Fawn and Gutsy Gibbon releases of 2007 with the intention making Linux as desktop friendly as Windows or Mac OS X.