Free Republic

In the olden days the topic of software freedom was central to Linux and free/open source software. Software freedom needs to remain front and center. Remember Richard Stallman's Four Freedoms?"Nobody should be restricted by the software they use. There are four freedoms that every user should have: the freedom to use the software for any purpose,the freedom to change the software to suit your needs,the freedom to share the software with your friends and neighbors, andthe freedom to share the changes you make." Another way to say this is we should always have the freedom to tinker.We used to take these freedoms...

Red Hat is aware that the patch for CVE-2014-6271 is incomplete. An attacker can provide specially-crafted environment variables containing arbitrary commands that will be executed on vulnerable systems under certain conditions. The new issue has been assigned CVE-2014-7169. ...

A remotely exploitable vulnerability has been discovered by Stephane Chazelas in bash on Linux and it is unpleasant. The vulnerability has the CVE identifier CVE-2014-6271 and has been given the name Shellshock by some. This affects Debian as well as other Linux distributions. You will need to patch ASAP. Bash supports exporting shell variables as well as shell functions to other bash instances. This is accomplished through the process environment to a child process.  The major attack vectors that have been identified in this case are HTTP requests and CGI scripts.  From Akamai:  Akamai has validated the existence of the vulnerability...

Credit: Thinkstock RHEL/CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, and OpenSuse have far more similarities than differences, but choosing the wrong one for the job can make life much harder Unlike most other desktop and server operating systems, Linux comes in a wide variety of flavors, each based on a common core of the Linux kernel and various GNU user space utilities. If you're running Linux servers -- or Linux desktops, for that matter -- you should understand the important differences and be discerning about which flavor of Linux is best suited to any given situation. This article will help you do...

The Windows 9 OS will finally get a very coveted feature, multiple desktops, but the Microsoft developers are still pretty far away from what you can get on Linux. The Linux platform has always taken pride in this cool feature. Having multiple desktops is a great way to increase the productivity and there are numerous means to implement it. Lots of Linux distributions have this option, which is used in various ways. Ubuntu has had multiple desktops (or virtual desktops) for many years, and this particular option has been refined over time. Basically, users can add as many desktops as...

Over the years, we've heard from countless Microsoft Windows fans as to why they believe using Linux was nearly impossible. These folks would cite everything – from poor hardware compatibility to a lack of popular software. And I suppose at one time, some aspects of this were true. But in 2014 when people still claim that using newbie friendly distributions like Ubuntu are too difficult, this nonsense needs to be put to rest once and for all. This article is but a small step in what I hope will be a wake up call for naysayers.Linux Myth #1: Most people...

One of the most common expressions that you will hear in the Linux community is platform fragmentation, and it's also one of the contra arguments that people spout when citing reasons not to get a Linux OS. I'm here to tell you why platform fragmentation is actually a good thing. First of all, let’s explain what people mean by platform fragmentation, which is also sometimes referred to as desktop fragmentation. The Linux ecosystem is populated by hundreds of active Linux distributions, some of them more popular than others. There are lots of different desktop environments and some of them might...

The Linux project has just turned 23 and it's now the biggest collaborative endeavor in the world, with thousands of people working on it. Back in 1991, a young programmer called Linus Torvalds wanted to make a free operating system that wasn't going to be as big as the GNU project and that was just a hobby. He started something that would turn out to be the most successful operating system on the planet, but no one would have been able to guess it back then. Linus Torvalds sent an email on August 25, 1991, asking for help in testing...

Windows Phone cracks, Blackberry's out of juice and even Apple's squeezed The Google spawn's market share is up a third compared to the same quarter in 2013. Every other mobile operating system is not even eating Android's dust – they're so far back on the road they can see the plume of dust Android throws up are falling behind and don't even look to have a chance of choking. We offer that analysis because, as the chart below shows, Android's nearest rival – Apple's iOS – now has just 11.7 per cent market share.Top Five Smartphone Operating Systems, Worldwide Shipments,...

In the world of consumer electronics, if you don't give the buyer what they want, they'll go elsewhere. We've recently witnessed this with the Firefox browser. The consumer wanted a faster, less-bloated piece of software, and the developers went in the other direction. In the end, the users migrated to Chrome or Chromium.Linux needs to gaze deep into their crystal ball, watch carefully the final fallout of that browser war, and heed this bit of advice:If you don't give them what they want, they'll leave.Another great illustration of this backfiring is Windows 8. The consumer didn't want that interface. Microsoft,...

Linux. It’s been around since the mid ‘90s, and has since reached a user-base that spans industries and continents. For those in the know, you understand that Linux is actually everywhere. It’s in your phones, in your cars, in your refrigerators, your Roku devices. It runs most of the Internet, the supercomputers making scientific breakthroughs, and the world's stock exchanges. But before Linux became the platform to run desktops, servers, and embedded systems across the globe, it was (and still is) one of the most reliable, secure, and worry-free operating systems available.For those not in the know, worry not –...

Introduction This is part 2 of a series looking to help people find the best Linux distribution for them. In the first part of the series, I looked at some of the best Linux Desktop Environments so that you could eliminate distributions which only use desktops that won't work for you and your setup. The title of this post says it all really. Here are the 5 distributions I would turn to if I wanted to use Linux and I didn't want to be too hassled setting things up and they just work. Notice that the title includes the...

I have tried and enjoyed a number of great Linux distributions over the years. Some were more popular than others. But the one thing they all have in common is each provides the end user with hidden benefits and unexpected disadvantages over proprietary desktop operating systems.In this article, I'll explore what make the Linux desktop a superb fit for some users while providing thoughts on overcoming the challenges had by others.Desktop Linux is free Perhaps one of the most stunning benefits of the Linux desktop is the price – zero. Modern Linux distros designed for desktop end users remain completely...

For some time now, there has been much talk about the Raspberry Pi revolutionising the teaching of computing in schools. Linux User & Developer has devoted much space and attention to the growing number of Jamborees and the increasing attention teachers are giving to the small, £25 bare-bones machine. It is, say advocates, the perfect way to introduce children to the world of computing, allowing them to see and actually interact with the innards of the machines they are using. It is, they add, a great platform for programming and for creating all manner of electronic wonders.But for former journalist...

The true measure of any great gaming platform is not the number of games available. Nor is it the need to have the same games as other competing platforms (the Playstation 4 doesn't need Mario games to be considered successful). And it really isn't even about how many total games are sold, though that certainly helps. The measure of a great gaming platform is if people want to use it to play games on... rather than another platform. At least on occasion. For example: The SEGA Genesis. That beautiful console sold substantially less than the Super Nintendo. But it was...

Malware dubbed Mayhem is spreading through Linux and FreeBSD web servers, researchers say. The software nasty uses a grab bag of plugins to cause mischief, and infects systems that are not up to date with security patches. Andrej Kovalev, Konstantin Ostrashkevich and Evgeny Sidorov, who work at Russian internet portal Yandex, discovered the malware targeting *nix servers. They traced transmissions from compromised computers to two command and control (C&C) servers. So far they have found 1,400 machines that have fallen to the code, with potentially thousands more to come. […] Mayhem spreads by finding servers hosting websites with a remote...

Infections found in Australia and New Zealand. A new malware that runs on UNIX-like servers even with restricted privileges has already infected machines in Australia and is actively hunting for more targets, a new research paper has shown. Three researchers from Russian web provider Yandex - Andrej Kovalev, Konstantin Ostrashkevich and Evgeny Sidorov - said in the technical analysis of the malware, published on security and anti-virus specialist publication Virus Bulletin, that Mayhem functions like a traditional Windows bot. -snip- According to the researchers, Mayhem appears to be the continuation of the Fort Disco brute-force password cracking attack campaign that...

AMD has just published a massive patch-set for the Linux kernel that finally implements a HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) in open-source. The set of 83 patches implement a Linux HSA driver for Radeon family GPUs and serves too as a sample driver for other HSA-compatible devices. This big driver in part is what well known Phoronix contributor John Bridgman has been working on at AMD.********************** Heterogeneous System Architecture has been talked up for a while now by AMD as well as ARM vendors and now finally for open-source enthusiasts we can finally start seeing the advantages of the CPU and...

For years, Linux has ruled supercomputing. So, it came as no surprise to anyone at the Linux Enterprise End-User Summit near Wall Street that once again the Top500 group found in its latest supercomputer ranking that Linux was the fastest of the fast operating systems. With 97 percent of the world's fastest supercomputers running Linux,the open-source operating system has eliminated almost all its rivals. As one Red Hat representative said, "The only thing that would be surprising about Linux being the top dog would be if anything else even came close." He doesn't have any reason to worry.In the latest contest, not only...

Mint KDE 17 is finally released!