SilentBob4 writes "Adam Doxtater of Mad Penguin has published a preliminary layout for his proposed cross-distribution package manager capable of adding/removing software from any locale. He is suggesting the interface will basically allow for installation of several major package formats including RPM, DEB, TGZ, as well as source code with the ability to pass build time options. All of this will come at the price of standards of course, including naming, documentation, and package structuring. If this idea were to catch on, it would signify a major leap in desktop Linux usability. This might be a project that UserLinux might benefit from. Read the full column here (complete with GUI mockups)."

hkfczrqj writes "Knoppix has two more children. The first, 3.3-2004-02-09, an update with kernel 2.4-24-xfs, KDE 3.1.5, Mozilla 1.6, XFree 3.4. Also, and more important I guess, Knoppix 3.4 c't edition is out (torrent here). It is supposed to have kernel 2.6!" And it does. If you're looking for a way to test your setup with a 2.6 kernel without trashing a current install, this is a good way -- but note that the ct edition Knoppix boots into German (Shift-0 gets you an =, as in "lang=us") and kernel 2.4; you'll need to type "knoppix26" at startup to boot the new kernel. (You may find the excellent forums at knoppix.net helpful, too.) Update: 02/10 01:03 GMT by T : Note that the XFree version is really 4.3, not 3.4.

An anonymous reader asks: "I started using Linux years ago, with a Red Hat distribution. When Red Hat's custom configurations started getting in my way, I jumped ship to Slackware. I have never looked back except that I cannot stand the BSD style init scripts. I like having a full compliment of run-levels and control on the fly over which scripts will be running, and which ones will not. That is hard to achieve, when you put multiple configurations in the same file. I also liked having the scripts around to start, stop, and restart services. While I was rewriting my own startup scripts [based on Debian's scripts], I discovered that there is a third style, based on dependencies. AFAIK this is the style adopted by Gentoo. I don't want to start a distro war; but, I am curious about what kind of init scripts Slashdot readers prefer, and what they think are the benefits of each."

Oskuro writes "According to this story at news.netcraft.com, Debian was the fastest growing distribution in the last 6 months, closely followed by SuSE and Gentoo. RedHat, while still reigning, has started to lose sites in Netcraft's survey after they announced the end of support for their desktop releases. The survey is based on the stats from webservers which include the distribution name in their webserver's header." Maybe it would grow even faster when Java issues are worked out -- read more below on that.

evilmf writes "Well... I was on my daily "relaxing" read of the LKML when I've found an interesting announce about "Cooperative Linux", in this message from Dan Aloni. It allows you to run Linux on an unmodified Win2000/XP system, just launching another app. Dan says that Cooperative Linux is 'is stable enough (on some common hardware configurations) for running a fully functional KNOPPIX/Debian system on Windows,' and provides some screenshots in the project homepage."

thelenm writes "Red Hat announced today that the 7.x and 8.0 distributions have reached their errata maintenance end-of-life. Red Hat 9 reaches its end-of-life on April 30. The options for those who want to stick with Red Hat are Red Hat Enterprise Linux or the Fedora Project, as described on their Migration Resource Center page. Or of course, you might take this opportunity to select another option." This day's been a long time coming, but it's finally here.

An anonymous reader writes "Guillem Jover announced his plans to take over the non-Debian world and released a tool which converts in runtime any distribution to Debian. It does not convert in the sense of mapping all previous installed packages to the Debian counterparts, but installs a base system or tarball and cleans traces from the previous distribution."

jnf writes "And so he said it is released, and then jumped on a plane to Australia. Linus announced the release of 2.6.1 a few minutes ago, fixes include AGPGART, a fork() bugfix, and misc changes to XFS, and those are just the patches applied since v2.6.1-rc3. Full changelog is avialable, kernel at the usual places, i held off posting this until kernel.org was updated." 2.6.0 is now in Debian unstable...

Ms Pacman writes "This article is the fifth and final installment of Barry Smith's series on Debian-based commercial distros in a Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) environment. In this in-depth article, the newly released Xandros Deluxe 2.0 is being reviewed and compared to all previous distros Barry Smith used and reviewed the past 2-3 months. Of special interest is the blurb about Xandros' customer support."

nordicfrost asks: "My wonderful girlfriend and I have a dilemma. We want to talk to each other via the net to save money and still have a conversation. But she is a strictly Apple girl, and I'm a Debian man, who compromises with Windows at work. So, does anyone have the solution for an easy cross-platform voice chat application, preferrebly without having to altering my GF's firewall router via the phone?"

GaelenBurns asks: "I've got a project that I'd like the Slashdot community's opinion of. We have two distant office buildings and a passel of windows users that need to be able to access the files on either office's Debian server from either location through Samba shares. We tend to think that AFS would be the best choice for mounting a remote file system and keeping data synchronized, but we're having trouble finding documentation that coherently explains installing AFS. Furthermore, NFS doesn't seem like a good option, since I've read that it doesn't fail gracefully should the net connection ever drop. Others, such as Coda and Intermezzo, seem to be stuck in development, and therefore aren't sufficiently stable. I know tools for this must exist, please enlighten me."

An anonymous reader writes "Xandros is now shipping version 2 of their Desktop Linux distro and it's also possible to purchase a download version. Based on Debian (sarge), KDE 3.1.4, 2.4.22 kernel. Cool CD burning is integrated into the Xandros File manager. Screenshots are here."

A not-so-anonymous Anonymous Coward asks: "Someone has suggested to make a UserBSD instead of a UserLinux. From what Bruce Perens' anonymous 1-million-$ backers seem to want (no GPL-/Commercial dual-licensed development toolkit like Qt in any library, but only gratis LPGL stuff), this seems to make a lot of sense. After all, only the kernel would be different, the rest of the stuff (including the KDE or GNOME desktops) runs pretty much the same on BSD as it does on Linux. Is it possible to get the legal problems solved with licenses and still create a usable enterprise Unix desktop system on *BSD?" The idea, in and of itself, sounds fine, but does the choice of kernel really matter? What advantages would BSD have over Linux in such a project, and vice-versa?

Dan Clough writes "I found Linux Power Tools to be a useful book, although it does have some shortcomings. It's a 644-page, well-written book that covers almost all aspects of managing, administering, and optimizing a working Linux system. The book's cover claims the target audience as intermediate to advanced users, but I think that beginner to intermediate would be more accurate. More advanced users may find Linux Power Tools a little beneath their level." Read on for the rest of Dan's review.

hsoom writes "Debian Planet is reporting that unofficial sarge-based ISOs using the Anaconda installer can be downloaded from here. The features developed so far include '...changed the code that installs software to use APT instead of RPM, removed Red Hat-specific configuration hooks, and written a new tool called picax that builds Anaconda-based installation CDs from a Debian repository'. However there are features that are not yet working and it is not recommended for use in a production environment."

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."

saintlupus writes "I've got a question for the rest of the Slashdot community. I'm using an old clamshell iBook at work with Debian/PPC on it. As any Apple site can tell you, the iBooks of that era had a maximum resolution of 800x600. Now, I use a 19" monitor and a 17" monitor running together with Xinerama on my machine at home, and I'm used to that much space. I use WindowMaker on that computer, but on an 800x600 screen those Dock icons look the size of buses. Can anyone recommend a window manager that uses a minimum of screen real estate so that I can fit a bit more on the iBook's LCD?"

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."

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."