srimadman writes “The Alpha 1 Release of Ubuntu 11.04, often known as ‘Natty Narwhal,’ is intended as a developer snapshot of the next major Ubuntu version, which is due in April.” So, if you want to try Unity and Wayland before your neighbors do, this is the time.
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An anonymous reader writes “Phoronix has published benchmarks of the past five years worth of Linux kernel releases, from the Linux 2.6.12 through Linux 2.6.37 (dev) releases. The results from these benchmarks of 26 versions show that, for the most part, new features haven’t affected performance.”
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diegocg writes “Version 2.6.36 of the Linux kernel has been released. This version includes support for the Tilera architecture, a new filesystem notification interface called fanotify, CIFS local caching, support for Intel Intelligent Power Sharing in i3/5 systems, integration of the kernel debugger and KMS, inclusion of the AppArmor security system, a redesign of workqueues optimized for concurrency, and several new drivers and small improvements. See the full changelog here for more details.”
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Linux 2.6.34 has been released. This version includes support for the Tilera architecture, a new filesystem notification interface called fanotify, a redesign of workqueues optimized for concurrency, CIFS local caching, support for Intel Intelligent Power Sharing in i3/5 systems, integration of the kernel debugger and KMS, inclusion of the AppArmor security system and several new drivers and small improvements. You can read the full changelog as well.
Trailrunner7 writes “The open-source Linux operating system contains a serious security flaw that can be exploited to gain superuser rights on a target system. The vulnerability, in the Linux implementation of the Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS) protocol, affects unpatched versions of the Linux kernel, starting from 2.6.30, where the RDS protocol was first included.” The article goes on to say, though, that “Linux installations are only vulnerable if the CONFIG_RDS kernel configuration option is set, and if there are no restrictions on unprivileged users loading packet family modules, as is the case on most stock distributions,” and that Linus Torvalds has committed a fix.
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Mark Shuttleworth has just announced the codename of the next Ubuntu release after Maverick. Ubuntu 11.04 will be called Natty Narwhal. The name follows the usual Ubuntu naming tradition of the codename consisting of an adjective and a name of an animal starting with the same letter, and following an alphabetic order. Continue reading to know more about the Narwhal.
In June 2009 we had some very good news about the integration of multitouch events support inside the Linux kernel. Since then, many multitouch device drivers were developed, mostly in collaboration with LII-ENAC, to take advantage from this. All the work was kernel-based, and multitouch supports needs more components to be added in a stack to get multitouch working out of the box. Canonical got interested in providing the needed user experience for multitouch by developing a new gesture engine that recognizes the grammar of natural hand gestures and provide them upstream in the stack as new events.
Lars T. writes “The H has a story about a Linux kernel bug that allows root level access. ‘According to a report written by Rafal Wojtczuk (PDF), a conceptual problem in the memory management area of Linux allows local attackers to execute code at root level. The Linux issue is caused by potential overlaps between the memory areas of the stack and shared memory segments.’ SUSE maintainer Andrea Arcangeli provided a fix for the problem in September 2004, but for unknown reasons this fix was not included in the Linux kernel. The bug is not related to the X Server bug found by Brad Spengler.” As the linked article notes: “SUSE itself has the fix and SUSE Linux Enterprise 9, 10 and 11 as well as openSUSE 11.1 through 11.3 do not exhibit this vulnerability.”
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An anonymous reader writes “Debian turns 17 today. Yes it has really come a long way from being Murdock’s pet project back in 1993 to being the distribution on which the most popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu, is now based.”
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