costela writes "LWN points out that the Gentoo project fired out an alert about one compromised rsync server." From the message itself: "However, the compromised system had both an IDS and a file integrity checker installed and we have a very detailed forensic trail of what happened once the box was breached, so we are reasonably confident that the portage tree stored on that box was unaffected." Update: 12/03 22:54 GMT by T : One more damage report: gibson writes "The Free Software Foundation recently discovered that its software host site was compromised a month ago. The compromise appears to be the same as the recent attacks on the Debian servers. The site is shut down until Friday while they install replacement hardware and verify the authenticity of the hosted source code."

ilbrec writes "Looks like NTT DoCoMo will be using Linux on their 3G phones next year. This actually was reported yesterday in Japan (here), but I could not find any article in English until now. While it's not clear who will be making the Linux phone for them, I would certainly be interested in seeing them once they are out. No word on this anywhere at DoCoMo's website at all, however." Reader paku adds links to similar coverage in Forbes and in Japan Today.

nileshch writes "The ongoing community-driven Linux Bangalore 2003 is upto a record of sorts. There are, hold your breath, 96 scheduled talks. That's about 96 hours of open-source talk in three days! The first day with 30 talks is already over with star speakers like Nat Friedman, Miguel De Icaza and Sirtaj Singh Kang enthralling the audience with their refreshing perspectives on Linux and Open Source. Rasmus Lerdorf and Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! Inc, amongst others, are also scheduled to talk at the event."

caseih writes "A very neat hack uses the real ntfs.sys driver (obtained from your own windows XP partition and used via a wine-like layer (borrowed from ReactOS) to mount an ntfs partion with full read/write access. While not an ideal solution and certainly not free as in speech, this is an ideal stop-gap measure for many people trying out linux. I think that we'll probably see this in Knoppix pretty soon."

Zelligar writes "You may want to check into the brewing trademark issues between SSC/linuxgazette.com and the linuxgazette.net people - linuxgazette is a volunteer gazette, hosted by SSC for a while, and now SSC is taking it over - and threatening trademark litigation to boot! Here is one story and another on the subject."

DarkSarin asks: "I have a rather serious problem: I managed to accidentally delete some files (rather important ones at that!) while trying to back them up to cd (I was using a GUI burning software that will remain nameless for now). How do you recover accidentally deleted files in Reiserfs? This thread (started by me) indicates that you can't recover them. Note that I had found a way to rebuild the tree, but that didn't work. It seems odd to me that you wouldn't be able to recover accidental deletions, but that really does seem to be the case. Help? Please?"

penguinrenegade writes "Element Computer has come out with the first sub-$1000 Tablet, and it doesn't come with Windows. It's not running a stripped OS like Windows CE, but a full-fledged copy of Lycoris Desktop/LX. This company seems to really have it in for Microsoft, with a 'No Windows' policy. Good to see someone finally standing up against paying the Microsoft tax. Maybe now we'll start seeing Linux only OEMs and resellers." Also on the tablet computer front, SeanAhern points out Cringely's latest Robert X. Cringely column, in which Cringley makes the case that Apple is readying a tablet computer for market, and "suggests that 'until next year, the parts won't have been there to make tablet PCs successful. What's missing has been the killer app, and what kept a killer app from appearing was a lack of hardware support, which I believe will be over soon,'" writing "He's got some interesting ideas about where Jobs might go with his Digital Hub idea." (This is an Antaur-based machine, not the Toshiba tablet mentioned in October.)

mbanck writes "The cause of the recent Debian Project server compromise has been published by the Debian security team: 'Forensics revealed a burneye encrypted exploit. Robert van der Meulen managed to decrypt the binary which revealed a kernel exploit. Study of the exploit by the RedHat and SuSE kernel and security teams quickly revealed that the exploit used an integer overflow in the brk system call. Using this bug it is possible for a userland program to trick the kernel into giving access to the full kernel address space'. This issue has been fixed in 2.4.23. Thus, the Linux kernel compromise was not Debian specific."

joestar writes "MandrakeSoft just announced the release of the MandrakeMove release candidate, a special desktop version of the Mandrake Linux distribution that boots live from the CD and uses a USB key (included in the retail version) to automatically store personal data. It looks a bit like Knoppix, but comes with more features, such as the capability to eject the MandrakeMove CD-ROM during its use, in order to read audio or video files from another CD! The download release candidate is available here."

An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices reports that Wind River, the world's #1 embedded software company, moved two steps closer to Linux today, with a pair of announcements that it has joined two key organizations. Wind River has joined the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and says it plans to contribute to the OSDL's Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) working group. Wind River also announced that it has joined the Eclipse Consortium, an industry group devoted to an open cross-vendor platform for development tools integration, and that it is committed to the Eclipse platform 'to enable global enterprises to standardize embedded development on a single, open standards-based integrated development environment (IDE).' This follows an October Linux tools announcement which it called 'just the first step.'" We had also covered the initial announcement.

An anonymous reader writes "In an interview with Red Hat Asia Pacific boss Gus Roberston, he tells ZDNet why he believes Unix will be dead since in future, there will only be two operating systems left (for corporations). "We don't see ourselves competing against Microsoft. We are taking market share away from Unix," he said. However, IDC counters Robertson's claim saying Unix market share has actually been increasing in that part of the world."

Ridgelift writes "This article indicates Red Hat Linux is about to receive certification under the Common Criteria (CC) Scheme worldwide. This has been a long road for Red Hat, and 'once successfully certified in the UK, Red Hat products will be recognised as certified and approved by information security agencies from all 19 countries participating in the Common Criteria program.' This means Red Hat will sit alongside Sun Solaris, HP-UX and IBM's AIX."

AEnertia writes "Novell have been quick in moving ahead with their recent aquisition of SuSE. I was browsing their site when I found this page describing their new certification (CLE) under their certifications programs. Looks like they are positioning their well respected certification program for their newest asset."

Bob Plankers writes "By now we've all heard about IBM's Blue Gene/L, LLNL's remarkable new supercomputer which is intended to be the fastest supercomputer on Earth when done (360 TeraFLOPS). IBM has released some new photos of the prototype, and renditions of the final cluster. Note that the racks are angled in order to permit hot air to escape vertically and reduce the need for powered cooling. The machine uses custom CPUs with dual PowerPC 440 processing cores, four FPUs (two per core), five network controllers, 4 MB of DRAM, and a memory controller onboard. The prototype has 512 CPUs running at 700 MHz, and when finished the entire machine will have 65536 dual-core CPUs running at 1 GHz or more. Stephen Shankland's ZDnet article also mentions that the system runs Linux, but not on everything: 'Linux actually resides on only a comparatively small number of processors; the bulk of the chips run a stripped-down operating system that lets it carry out the instructions of the Linux nodes.'"

swillden writes "Iain Barker and some other Linux Kernel Mailing List readers have discovered that several manufacturers of DVD players based on the Sigma Designs EM8500 chipset are distributing Linux, both in the devices and as binary-only firmware upgrades, but not providing source. Apparently, Sigma Designs provides its customers with a copy of the kernel as part of a chipset SDK, and those customers are making and selling devices without complying with the terms of the GPL. It's not clear if this is because Sigma didn't tell its customers about the GPL and their obligations, or if they're all ignoring it on their own. Maybe they've all bought licenses from SCO and therefore don't have to comply with the GPL? The LKML post contains a list of some of the infringers."

MikeCapone writes "As if we didn't already have enough articles about Linux kernel releases, Marcelo Tosatti has released the final 2.4.23 Linux kernel. Check out the changelog at Kerneltrap."

mbanck writes "James Troup (part of the Debian System administration team) has published more information on the recent compromise of four debian.org machines. The attack vector seemed to be a sniffed password of an unprivileged account, from which the attacker somehow managed to gain root and install the suckit rootkit and crack the other machines. As the machines were fairly uptodate with respect to security, an as-of-yet unknown local root exploit might be in the wild, so keep an eye on your boxen.Note that the main ftp archive running on a sparc machine was not compromised, so the exploit might not yet be ported to non-i386 architectures."

emgarf writes "Today, on the first anniversary of the MEPIS Project, MEPIS LLC announced the release of MEPIS Linux 2003.10 for Pentium processors. MEPIS Linux is a desktop Linux that is designed for both personal and business users. MEPIS Linux offers a live/installation/recovery CD, advanced automatic hardware configuration, XP/NTFS support, ACPI power management, WiFi support, personal firewall, KDE 3.1.4, OpenOffice 1.1, Mozilla 1.5, and much more."

smarquard writes "Open source has arrived in Africa in a big way. Idlelo: First African Conference on the Digital Commons, in almost-the-southern-tip-of-Africa Cape Town from 11-15 Jan 04, has attracted a strong lineup of African OSS advocates, as well as international OSS and IPR figures like Richard Stallman (FSF), Loic Dachary (FSF France), Rishab Ghosh (Infonomics), Wendy Seltzer (EFF) and Dimo Calovski (UNCTAD). Could this be the turning point for a continent that least needs to be locked into paying inflated license fees to US corporations ? The conference is co-hosted by African OSS lobby group FOSSFA and the University of the Western Cape."

An anonymous reader writes "Linus Torvalds has released his final 2.6.0-test kernel, calling it the 'Beaver In Detox'. Following this release, Linus says that 2.6 development will be led by Andrew Morton. The kernel's name refers in jest to the previous release, which Linus had named "Stoned Beaver". It contains a fix for the aic7xxx driver, proper error handling in do_fork(), some firewire fixes, and correction of a few skbuff leakage points. Download it from a kernel.org mirror."