Stories about: Debian

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.

Curl Wednesday announced support for Ubuntu Linux, which will allow desktop Ubuntu users to easily see Curl-enhanced Web content on their computers without having to manually configure a player.

Julie Bort talks with Jeremy White about Wine. 1.0 coming up.

If there is a single complaint that is laid at the feet of Linux time and time again, it's that the operating system is too complicated and arcane for casual computer users to tolerate. You can't ask newbies to install device drivers or recompile the kernel, naysayers argue.

Since the dawn of time -- or, at least, the dawn of personal computers -- the holy wars over desktop operating systems have raged, with each faction proclaiming the unrivaled superiority of its chosen OS and the vile loathsomeness of all others.

Windows may boast the lion's share of the desktop education market, but the economic and technical benefits of open source software has seen many schools and education institutions implement various flavours of Linux across their desktops and server back-ends.

Security researchers have uncovered "critical" security flaws in a version of the Linux kernel used by a large number of popular distributions.

Microsoft's aggressive defense of its intellectual property, which includes claims that Linux violates a number of its patents, is nothing more than "a marketing thing," according to Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel.