An anonymous reader writes "In an email sent to the fedora-announce mailing list, it has been revealed that both Fedora and Red Hat servers have been compromised. As a result Fedora is changing their package signing key. Red Hat has released a security advisory and a script to detect potentially compromised openssh packages."

walterbyrd and other readers are sending along the news that IBM is partnering worldwide with Canonical/Ubuntu, Novell, and Red Hat to offer Windows-free desktop PCs pre-loaded with Lotus software and ready for customizing by local ISVs for particular markets. The head of IBM's Lotus division is quoted: "The slow adoption of Vista among businesses and budget-conscious CIOs, coupled with the proven success of a new type of Microsoft-free PC in every region, provides an extraordinary window of opportunity for Linux." One example of the cooperation: "Canonical, which sells subscription support for Ubuntu, a Linux operating system that scores high marks on usability and 'the cool factor,' will re-distribute Lotus Symphony via their repositories. Symphony 1.1 will be available through the Ubuntu repositories by the end of August."

eldavojohn writes "Red Hat's CEO prophetically saith 'The clouds will all run Linux' in a brief interview before the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo. Here's the skinny: Red Hat management tools take a back seat to grid computing goals, high switching costs are the trick to surviving slow periods, Microsoft's interoperability tools are vaporware, they're striving to catch up to VMWare, Ubuntu is not the competition, JBoss is growing twice as fast as RHEL and Amazon pays the fee while Google wears its own Red Hat for free."

An anonymous reader writes "According to a report on heise, Intel is switching from using Ubuntu to the Fedora Project for the second version of the Intel supported Mobile & Internet Linux Project Moblin, citing a desire to use RPM package management." So far, of the various subnotebooks I've been glancing at over shoulders at OSCON, though, most of the ones with an easily identified operating system seem to be running Ubuntu.

alexs writes "Red Hat's response to update bind through RHN, patching the DNS hole, made a fatal error which will revert all name servers to caching only servers. This meant that anyone running their own DNS service promptly lost all of their DNS records for which they were acting as primary or secondary name servers. Expect quite a few services provided by servers running RHEL to, errr, die until their system administrators can restore their named.conf. Instead of installing etc/named.conf to etc/named.rpmnew, Red Hat moved the current etc/named.conf to etc/named.conf.rpmsave and replaced etc/named.conf with the default caching only configuration. The fix is easy enough, but this is a schoolboy error which I am surprised Red Hat made. Unfortunately we were hit and our servers went down overnight while RHN dropped its bomb and I am frankly surprised there has not been more of an uproar about this."

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from the University of Arizona have released a study that takes a look at the security of ten popular package managers. They were able to show all ten were vulnerable to attacks from a mirror or man-in-the-middle that allow an attacker to (along with other things) crash the system or obtain root access. Furthermore, the researchers created a fictitious administrator and company name and were able to lease a server and get it listed as an official mirror for all the distributions they tried (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, CentOS, and OpenSUSE). This raised the question: What keeps you up at night, the thought of attacks on your package manager or previously discussed and patched vulnerability in DNS?" justin samuel (one of the Arizona researchers) also points out a synopsis on CERT's blog.

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions the relevance of the recent opening of Java given the wealth of options open source developers enjoy today. Sure, as the first full-blooded Java implementation available under a 100 percent Free Software license, RedHat's IcedTea pushes aside open source objections to developing in Java. Yet, McAllister asks, if Java really were released today, brand-new, would it be a tool you'd choose? 'The problem, as I see it, is twofold,' he writes. 'First, as the Java platform has matured, it has become incredibly complex. Today it's possible to do anything with Java, but no one developer can do everything — there simply aren't enough hours in the day to learn it all. Second, and most important, even as Java has stretched outward to embrace more concepts and technologies — adding APIs and language features as it goes — newer, more lightweight tools have appeared that do most of what Java aims to do. And they often do it better.'" Since Java itself never mattered except to sell books, I still don't see why opening it matters.

hweimer writes "Most problems when opening Word documents under GNU/Linux are due to missing fonts. Therefore, Red Hat published a set of fonts metric-compatible with the Windows core fonts last year. However, there were some concerns regarding the licensing that prevented many other distros to ship them. We finally managed to settle these problems, leading to better document interoperability for all GNU/Linux users."

deadearth writes "At their annual summit, Red Hat announced they are open-sourcing the Red Hat Network Satellite product, calling it Spacewalk. This will be the new upstream for the Satellite system management solution. Here is the Wiki."

Bruce Perens writes "Red Hat has settled patent suits with Firestar Software, Inc., Amphion, and Datatern on a patent covering the Object-Relational Database Model, which those companies asserted was used in the jBoss Hibernate package — not in Red Hat Linux. The settlement is said to protect upstream developers and derivative works of the upstream software, thus protecting the overall Open Source community. Full terms of the settlement and patent licenses are not available at this time."

prunedude writes "The NY times is reporting that an American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L. To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day."

A. B. VerHausen writes "If you've given up on SETI, now you can let your idle computer help with other kinds of scientific research. Red Hat employee Bryan Che started a project called Nightlife. He wants people to 'donate idle capacity from their own computers to an open, general-purpose Fedora-run grid for processing socially beneficial work and scientific research that requires access to large amounts of computing power.'" Che hopes to have more than a million Fedora nodes running as part of this project.

Joyce writes "Novell today announced the availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Service Pack 2 (SP2), containing enhancements in virtualization, management, hardware enablement and interoperability. Several improvements specific to SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time 10 are also included. Delivering Xen version 3.2, SP2 includes several virtualization advances, including support for fully virtualized Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003 and the live migration of those Windows Server guests across physical machines. Advances in high availability and storage management such as updates to Heartbeat 2 and OCFS2 are also included." And an anonymous reader points out today's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 5.2, which brings "a broad refresh of hardware support and improved quality, combined with new features and enhancements in areas such as virtualization, desktop, networking, storage & clustering and security. Virtualization of very large systems, with up to 64 CPUs and 512 GB of memory, is now possible. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 Desktop includes enhanced support for laptop suspend/hibernate and resume, updated graphics drivers and a comprehensive update of desktop applications, including OpenOffice 2.3 and Firefox v3," and points out this guide for upgrading your RHEE system.

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."

bsk_cw writes "Today, many Linux users are getting blasé about the ease with which they can install Linux. Possibly, they've been spoiled by distributions such as Ubuntu, which is actually easier to install than Windows. Unfortunately, Fedora 9, the latest version of this community edition of Red Hat, was a bit too much of a blast from the past for Computerworld's James Turner." (Except for bits about the installation, the review is actually quite positive.)

BrianGKUAC writes "Fedora 9 has been released as of 10 AM Eastern Time this morning. Release notes can be found here. Some of the more interesting new features include a new package management system, which can be used as an alternative to pup and pirut, known as PackageKit. This release also includes GNOME 2.22 and/or KDE 4.0.3, and Firefox 3 beta 5. Overall, there are a lot of improvements worth looking at, and the Bittorrent seeds are already feeding the release fairly effectively."

According to a post made yesterday to the Fedora announce mailing list, a Fedora 9 preview has been cleared for launch. "This is a Preview release, it is fairly close to what the final product will be like. This is the most critical release for the Fedora community to use and test and report bugs on. This is the last major public release before the final GOLD Fedora 9 release on May 13th (we hope). [...] Live images, KDE Live images, CDs and DVD options are available. http://torrent.fedoraproject.org has a section marked 'F9-Preview.'"

eldavojohn writes "We recently discussed the Linux Foundation's decision to leave desktop Linux alone but Red Hat is also steering clear of that goal. The reason? It's too tough. From the company blog: 'It's worth pointing out what's missing in the list above: we have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future. An explanation: as a public, for-profit company, Red Hat must create products and technologies with an eye on the bottom line, and with desktops this is much harder to do than with servers.'"

eldavojohn writes "RedHat went to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals asking for limits on software patents yesterday. They have not uploaded their full brief yet online, but promise to post it soon. Here's a tidbit: 'Given the litigation risk, some open source companies, including Red Hat, acquire patents for the sole purpose of asserting them defensively in the event they are faced with a future lawsuit. Red Hat also provides open source intellectual property protections through our Open Source Assurance Program that protects our customers and encourages them to deploy with confidence. Our strategy is a prudent one and mitigates the risk of patent lawsuits, but it would be unnecessary if the system itself were fixed.'"