AEton writes "According to this Extremetech article, X-Tra Fun has developed a Bluetooth module for the Gameboy Advance which is expected to ship by Christmas 2003. The $49 module includes Bluetooth connectivity, although a cellphone or other Bluetooth device with Internet access is required to use the Internet, and it comes with an embedded eCos Linux kernel with a Web browser and 255 pages' worth of cache. A $99 upgrade adds a Secure Digital card slot and a dongle!"

An anonymous reader writes "Thought the Firebird naming conflict was over? Think again! (If you thought, "What naming conflict?", go to the back of the class and read Slashdot's, previous coverage.) MozillaZine has got an exclusive interview with Christopher Blizzard, mozilla.org staff member, Red Hat employee and author of the Mozilla branding strategy. It's one the first official statements from mozilla.org (Mitchell Baker published a letter that she sent to the Firebird database project admins a few days ago). As well as the interview, MozillaZine also takes a look at some of the more recent media coverage of the conflict, which is overwealmingly biased in favour of the Firebird database project (who still haven't adequately explained how it was different when they picked the same name as the older Firebird BBS). Compare and contrast with MozillaZine's interview of Ann Harrison of the Firebird database project."

andyring writes "According to Cnet, RedHat and Fujitsu signed a partership agreement where the companies will jointly develop and market for Fujitsu's products. Fujitsu hs a strong presence in Asia, a place Microsoft has been trying to cultivate."

DarkOx writes "There is a new patch from Ingo Molnar which can prevent overflow attacks. The scoop from KernelTrap is as follows: Ingo Molnar has announced a new kernel-based security feature for Linux/x86 called 'Exec Shield'. He describes the patch, which is against the 2.4.20-rc1 kernel, as: 'The exec-shield feature provides protection against stack, buffer or function pointer overflows, and against other types of exploits that rely on overwriting data structures and/or putting code into those structures. The patch also makes it harder to pass in and execute the so-called 'shell-code' of exploits. The patch works transparently, ie. no application recompilation is necessary.'"

HTMLSpinnr writes "Red Hat announced today it's release of GinGin64, a "Technology Preview" (read: not beta) of Red Hat's AMD64 technology. You can grab a copy here or at one of Red Hat's various mirrors. Though the version number listed in the release notes is 8.0.95, inside sources say it's based on Red Hat 9 plus some updates."

Dan writes "Jason Ish has updated the redhat/base OpenBSD port from Red Hat 6.2 to Red Hat 8.0. The email note is a few days old, but the port seems to have been committed yesterday. So far he has tested with Opera and Netscape. If you run any Linux apps on OpenBSD, you are encouraged to test these commits and provide feedback. (Several people have reported success running Opera 6.12, Opera7 with some tweaks, and Netscape)."

Sanjay writes "Official from Sun spokesman. Sun is considering using AMD's Opteron chip in a server it expects to deliver to the market shortly. Intead of fighting Win of Wintel (like Redhat is doing), Sun can choose to fight both with Linux AMD's servers and also fight with HP/IBM as Itanium is anyway a non starter. Sun can rise again! "

Slashback is packed tonight with updates and clarifications on several fronts: read on below for, among other things, BitTorrent download stats after the recent Red Hat 9 release, the BSA's questionable statistical methods when it comes to calculating incentives and losses in the source-secret software world, and (can you believe?) yet another way to assemble an eerie pulsing light fixture.

Gentu writes "Red Hat Linux 9 has been released to the official mirrors, brace for impact! Additionally, OSNews features an interview with Red Hat Linux's manager, Matt Wilson and they discuss everything from mp3/dvd playback, to Randr, dependancy policies and more." Also on the Red Hat front, DdJ writes "So, I noticed that Red Hat's stock price jumped up a bit this morning, and checked the news to find out why. It turns out they've released a new portal product and a new CMS product. Both appear to be based on Java/Tomcat, which would mean it's not Zope-based or Zend-based. But, they're supposedly open source. Anyone have any further info on this stuff yet?" Update: 04/08 05:24 GMT by T : Don't forget that the new Red Hat release is available through BitTorrent, too.

Matt2000 asks: "With the growing number of package updates that cross my inbox for my redhat systems, and with the vast majority being buffer overflows, or overflows of some kind doesn't it strike anyone that there must be a better way? Instead of spending time auditing every piece of software for mechanically preventable bugs, why isn't there a common, audited virtual machine that people can build net facing services on? I would guess that sshd, httpd, and sendmail would be good candidates to start, as they are the most common and the most exploited. And please don't freak out performance junkies, if you run a website that serves 70,000 people a second and need to run native apache, then do so. Just accept that it will be less secure."

petabyte writes "Now that RedHat 9 is out, here's something for the rest of us. OpenSSH 3.6 has been released today. Is has several new features including a progress meter for sftp and bandwidth limiting for scp. I haven't installed it yet but I'm sure the packages will be hitting mirrors soon enough. There's even a new T-shirt."

Red Hat Linux 9 is out, and as of today the ISOs are officially available to Red Hat Network subscribers ($60/yr). Or, as of right now, you can grab the same ISOs using BitTorrent. For those unfamiliar with this free/Free P2P download protocol, an introduction follows, written by ololiuhqui. Update: 03/31 23:45 GMT by J : After roughly four hours, BitTorrent has transferred over 500 full copies of all 3 ISOs, and a total of over 1.5 TB, at 170 Mbytes/sec. Thanks to the more than 3000 people who helped each other download the data, and especially to the more than 200 who got full copies and still have their clients open, to keep serving data to everyone else :)

Garfunkel writes "Looks like Red Hat is breaking tradition and skipping 8.1 and 8.2 and jumping directly to 9.0 RHN subscribers get it a week ahead on March 31st. Available to the rest the world a week later (April 7)." The website refers to the upcoming release simply as "9" -- which doesn't rule out future point releases, but could it be?

Dman33 writes "Redhat Linux seems to be gaining an even stronger share in the server and workstation market as HP is announcing worldwide sales and support of the popular distro. Infoworld has a writeup on the announcement and the press release straight from HP is a good read regarding the initiative."

OldBen writes "RedHat has announced the product stable to replace the mainstream releases for enterprise use. RedHat Enterprise Linux AS replaces Advanced Server (with quite a price hike to go along), ES is targeted at "entry-level" servers, and WS is for workstations. See the details at RedHat's website."

mackman asks: "I was wondering if anyone has ever though about using their DNS servers to provide mirror information? A specially formated TXT-record could easily provide a DNS-cache-friendly mirror listing. A TXT-record would just need a list of servers and paths, or perhaps a more complicated mapping for servers which only mirror a subset of the original site. This would allow for much more flexibility than a basic round-robin A-record scheme. For example, instead of pounding the Red Hat web server to get a mirror listing (or relying on Slashdot posts for that matter), why not do a 'dig -t txt mirrors.redhat.com'? Of course we could build this into download managers like wget."

randal writes "A security vulnerability in the Sendmail Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) has been identified by ISS. This bug can give an attacker the ability to gain remote root access to the targeted system. There is no known exploit code of this vulnerability in the wild at this time, but everyone should upgrade immediately. This issue affects all versions since 5.79. Open Source sendmail users can get source for the newest version (8.12.8) as well as patches for 8.9, 8.11, and 8.12 from sendmail.org. Commercial Sendmail customers can find patches at sendmail.com/security. Most major OS vendors will be releasing patches immediately." Update: 03/03 19:23 GMT by T : Reader Patchlevel points out that RedHat and OpenBSD have already issued patches.Update: 03/03 20:45 GMT by T : Reader Claude Meyer links to an update from SuSE, too. Update: 03/03 22:52 GMT by T : djcatnip points out that Apple has released a software update to patch OpenSSL and Sendmail for Mac OS X 10.2.4, and the Slackware site says they have updated to 8.12.8 as well.

Dan writes "Matthias Scheler has imported XFree86 4.3.0 into NetBSD current, it is only tested under NetBSD-i386 at the moment. Also, as part of updating the toolchain, Matthew Green has imported the latest GNU binutils (2.13.2.1) into NetBSD-current. The new GNU binutils adds support for hppa and x86_64, improved support for existing architectures and is known to work for almost all CPU types NetBSD currently supports. Updates of gdb and gcc will follow."

Mark writes "As this news.com article states, 'Red Hat and Oracle plan to announce on Thursday that the companies have teamed to get Linux evaluated under the Common Criteria, a certification that could open doors for the broader use of open-source software by government agencies.' It looks like this will be an important step in getting Linux to be more widely adopted in governments around the world."

doom writes "There seems to be some interest just now in technical books based on freely licensed content, so I thought I would discuss the Dossier series from Rich Morin's Prime Time Freeware project." Doom has provided an overview of this series; read on below to find out for yourself why he says man pages and other free documentation are worth paying for in dead-tree format.