Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C programming language dead at 70

Rumors that Dennis Ritchie had passed have been confirmed. Dennis was known for developing the C programming language and being a key developer of the UNIX operating system. He was 70 years old. <Dennis Ritchie (wiki)>

[Link] Gentoo Pleas For Help

Donnie Berkholz (September 14, 2011)

<LWN.net : The state of Gentoo>

[Link] Reverse Connection ICMP Shell

(Friday, 15 April 2011)

<Reverse connection: ICMP shell>

Linux Version Number Bumped to 3.0

Linux 3.0 was committed July 22, 2011. The version numbering was bumped up from 2.6.xx to 3.0 in honor of 20 years of Linux, without the large changes a major version number change would normally imply.

InfoWorld (July 22, 2011)

<InfoWorld - Linux 3.0 a steady step forward>

Geany text edittor

I wanted to take a second to point out a great tool that some might otherwise have overlooked; <Geany>. Based on <(Wiki)Scintilla>, Geany is a light weight, cross-platform, text editor with a familiar layout. Once the packaged plugins are all enabled, Geany goes from, light weight, simple IDE, to system administration and configuration portal with out missing a beat.

• <Geany - Homepage>
• <Geany - Screenshots>
• <Geany - Download>

Geany is a tabbed file editor with a familiar layout. A left column shows a tree based navigation panel. This doubles as a file browser, project file browser, and symbol list for the current file. A panel across the bottom can switch between compiler output, messages, and a terminal.

The IDE capabilities of Geany are pretty simple. It has most the text editing bells and whistles one is accustomed to, including code highlighting, text folding, and auto-completion. Aside from the integrated terminal, Geany can be configured to do simple make, build, and execute operations, although there doesn't seem to be any debugger integration.

When run with elevated privileges, Geany makes a handy GUI administration tool. Quick file navigation, tabbed file editing, and a terminal combine to make an efficient GUI administration tool. If your already running a GUI, you can be terminal warrior and still have the luxury of a GUI file editor.

Geany is a very light weight text editor released under the GNU General Public Licence. It's light weight GTK+ base makes it great for most window managers and platforms. Geany is a common project, included in most Linux repositories (like Ubuntu), that even has a Windows binary release available.

Geany is definitely a light weight, handy, and flexible tool that shouldn't be overlooked.

[Link] Another List of 50 Top Linux Apps

laptoplogic.com (Jan 23, 2009)

<Top 50 Linux Alternatives to Popular Apps>

[Link] Slackware 12.2 Released

Slackware 12.2 Released (Dec 10, 2008)

A quick look at what Slackware 12.2 ships with:

• Linux kernel  2.6.27.7


• Xorg X server  1.4.2


• Xfce  4.4.3


• KDE  3.5.10 (4.1 is in /testing directory)


• HAL

<Slackware 12.2 Release Announcement>

[Link] 100 Best Open Source Security Tools

A great list of 100 open source security tools. They are categorized; each having a short description and link to it's home page. I can see most of my favorites in the list.

Masters in Criminal Justice (Nov 26, 2008)

<100 Best Open Source Security Tools>

[Link] How-to Make a GRUB Background Image

MakeUseOf.com (Nov 29, 2008)

<How To Create A Custom Splashimage For GRUB>

Ubuntu Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities Advisory

Ubuntu

Ubuntu has released a security advisory (below), detailing 9 potential kernel vulnerabilities. The advisory appears to encompass all Ubuntu's and suggests a kernel image upgrade. This will require a reboot and require a reinstall of all third party kernel modules that are installed.

<Ubuntu: USN-679-1: Linux kernel vulnerabilities> (Nov 27, 2008)

Fedora 10 is Here!

Fedora 10 is here!

<Get Fedora KDE> <Get Fedora GNOME>

<Fedora Torrents>

Major new features at a glance:

• Wireless connection sharing enables ad hoc network sharing


• Better setup and use of printers


• Virtualization storage simplified


• SecTool intrusion detection system


• RPM 4.6 is a major update


• Rewrite of the PulseAudio sound server


• Improved webcam support


• Better support for infrared remote controls

<Full release notes>

[Link] The 7 Deadly Linux Commands

Tech Source From Bohol (Nov 20, 2008)

<Tech Source From Bohol - The 7 Deadly Linux Commands>

[Release] OpenBSD 4.4 Released

OpenBSD

Free, Functional & Secure

"Only two remote holes in the default install, in more than 10 years!"

OpenBSD 4.4 released Nov 1, 2008:

<(Wiki)OpenBSD>

<OpenBSD 4.4 Release Details>

<OpenBSD Download Page>

[Link] Wikipedia adopts Ubuntu for its server infrastructure

ARS Technica (Oct 9, 2008)

<Wikipedia adopts Ubuntu for its server infrastructure>

FLOSS Weekly

FLOSS Weekly

  <FLOSS Weekly> is an audio netcast (also known as a podcast) about 'Free Libre Open Source Software'. Hosted by Leo Laporte and Randal Schwartz, supported by Cachefly, and hosted on <TWiT.TV> (This Week in Tech). This is all reminiscent of Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte's once very popular netcast, <Security Now>.
  For many of us Security Now paved our interest in podcasts, then renamed them to netcasts. Steve Gibson coined the term netcast when podcast's copyright status came in question. Security Now caught our attention with it's early networking, encryption, and security episodes. It pioneered as one of the first semi-professional tech shows with real topics. They brought tech media away from the trend of underground bumbled garage shows battling it out against commercial fluff-tech. Fusing a respectable quality show with respectable topics.
  Security Now has slowed down in it's innovation at over 160 episodes. Pushing of products as a shows topic seemed cool when it was great new software like <Tor> and <True Crypt>, but recent plug episodes have left a bad taste in listeners' mouths.
  <FLOSS Weekly> continues this start with a different focus, open source software. FLOSS Weekly started off slow, sometimes going 2 months without a new episode, but recently has began full steam carving a schedule that is fitting of the show's title. Let the show's topics do the talking:

---

<FLOSS Weekly 41: DotNetNuke> - The open source content management and Web application system that runs under the .NET framework. (September 19th, 2008)

<FLOSS Weekly 40: Jeff Robbins on Drupal> - Jeff Robbins talks about Drupal the popular open source PHP/LAMP web content management system. (September 12th, 2008)

<FLOSS Weekly 39: Simon Phipps> - Simon Phipps, chief open source officer of Sun Microsystems. (September 5th, 2008)

<FLOSS Weekly 38: Asterisk> - Asterisk, an open source PBXi, telephony engine, and telephony applications toolkit. (August 30th, 2008)

---

See the full list of 40+ episodes and growing at <TWiT.TV / FLOSS>.

Other episodes talked about open source software you shouldn't miss. Just to name a few:

Drizzle
SQLite
CouchDB
Smalltalk / Squeak
Django
WebDAV
OpenJDK
Blender

Fedora Servers Compromised

Fedora
redhat

  <Fedora announced> (Aug. 22, 2008) that some servers were illegally accessed 'last week'. One of the compromised servers was for signing Fedora packages. Despite being optimistic about the security of the passphrase used to secure the signing keys, Fedora has decided to convert to new signing keys.

  A RHL <security advisory> eludes to successfully compromised OpenSSH packages. "In connection with the incident, the intruder was able to sign a small number of OpenSSH packages relating only to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4(i386 and x86_64 architectures only) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (x86_64 architecture only)"

  RHL released an update to OpenSSH to address this as well as <script> to detect these black listed packages.

New PHP Features Coming v5.3

<Skip to the run down>

  PHP(Wiki) is becoming a popular web development language with the recent boom of LAMP(Wiki) servers.

  In general, PHP is a script language with very similar syntax to C/C++. It uses type safe(Wiki) variables that support arrays and tuples(Wiki)(associative arrays), much like Perl and Python.

  PHP is typically embedded into HTML pages (with the .php extension) on a web server. When a PHP page is requested, the PHP content is parsed server-side and only the resulting HTML is replied to the requesting browser.

  PHP 5.3 alpha <was released>(Aug 1, 2008). Version 5.2.6 was recently released in May and was the first release in a couple years. Version 5.2.6 was mostly security and bug fixes. Version 5.3 sports the most new features and improvements seen in a long time. The expected date for a stable PHP 5.3 is mid October 2008.



A quick rundown of some new features in PHP 5.3 Alpha:

 Namespaces(Wiki) - This should allow much shorter class names and grouping flexibility.

 Late Static Binding(Example) - For some more robust class inheritance.

 __callStatic(PHP.net) -  __call is a built in class member function that allows you to define behavior for calls to non-existent member functions. __callStatic extends this functionality to static member calls.

 Lambda Functions(PHP.net) - Quick, throw away, inline functions.

 Closures(PHP.net) - Associate a list of the parent scope's variables to be imported into a function. This also make Lambda functions much more useful.

 __DIR__ - This constant will replace the commonly used dirname(__FILE__) statement to retrieve the current script's directory.

 Phar - A PHAR file is a compressed archive and can contain a complete PHP application. Similar to a Java's JAR files, a Phar file could allow large multi-file PHP scripts to be distributed and used as one, compressed, file.

 PHP goes Windows 2000 and up only

<PHP.NET 5.3 Alpha1 Release announcement>(Aug 1, 2008)

New True Crypt Release Features Hidden, Encrypted, OS Partitions

   We know True Crypt as the free-open source application for Windows/Mac/Linux that creates on-the-fly-encrypted drive volumes. You create a file or volume with the combination of several heavy, industry standard, encryption algorithms. With the password, that file or volume can be mounted as a drive letter (in Windows).

   True Crypt has been around a while; it's based on E4M (Encryption for the Masses) and released it's first version at the beginning of 2004. It's popularity exploded when it was the featured topic of a <GRC's Security Now> audio podcast. This was near the popular beginning of the series, which then featured informative, weekly, encryption and network protocol discussions.

   Since it's start, True Crypt has acquired additional innovative features. It can encrypt entire partitions, like an entire hard drive, as well as devices such as USB flash drives. It later featured the ability to create <hidden volumes> through <steganography>(wiki) techniques (hiding the encrypted volume inside a larger one filled with cryptographically random free space).

   The new True Crypt version 6 can not only encrypt your hard drive/partition containing your operating system, prompting you for your password at boot up, but can also make that a hidden volume. This creates an innovative situation of <plausible deniability>.

<www.TrueCrypt.org>
<True Crypt Downloads>

Open Source Lojack System For Laptops (beta)

   <Adeona> is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. Adeona instead uses the open source <OpenDHT> distributed storage service to store location updates.
   Protect your laptop, for free, without giving away your privacy to a proprietary central server (and any organizations who could persuade them to share your location information).

(Windows/Mac/Linux)

"We are exploring the possibility of Adeona for mobile devices, like the iPhone or Windows Mobile."

Beta notes:
   The current version of Adeona is 0.2.1. This is a beta version. Being the first public distribution for deployment, Adeona has been made easy to uninstall. It also shows readily in your system process list. No mention of GPS support. Location information includes: internal IP address, external IP address, nearby routers, access point, photos (Macs only via <isightcapture>).

Which Linux Distros Are Dying

  An interesting post at CodingExperiments.com has been circulating for a couple days. It has graphed Google search trends for Linux distribution names. Showing a downward trend in Google searches for Debain, Fedora, Red Hat, SUSE, Slackware, and 'Linux' it's self. It shows a interesting gain for 'OpenSUSE', despite the drop in SUSE, and the expected gain dwarfing all others for Ubuntu.

View the whole article and graphs:
<CodingExperiments.com - Which Linux Distributions Are Dying?> June 30th, 2008

<Found noteworthy by Linux Today>