Stories about: Fedora

Linux vendors are rushing to patch a privilege escalation vulnerability in the Linux kernel that can be exploited by local attackers to gain root access on the system.

Hewlett-Packard is developing servers based on a low-power microprocessor design from ARM Holdings, and claims it can slash power and space requirements by as much as 90 percent for companies running certain Web-based applications, HP announced Tuesday.

Red Hat announced Tuesday that it is acquiring Gluster, which makes open-source software that clusters commodity SATA drives and NAS systems into massively scalable pools of storage, in a cash deal valued at about $136 million. Gluster is also a contributor to the OpenStack cloud project and Red Hat is promising this involvement will continue. Indeed, Red Hat is now uncharacteristically saying its support of OpenStack will grow even beyond Gluster to the next release of Fedora.

As Linux fans know, there are two kinds of hackers: the good guys who develop free software, such as the Linux kernel, and the bad guys who break into computers.

If you've got a library of downloaded videos and want to watch them on your smartphone or tablet, you might find out they're the wrong file type. Some tablets and phones can only play specific file types, and only a few devices support high definition files. The easiest thing you can do to get these files playing is to transcode them to a different file type and resolution that matches your device. Our software of choice for this purpose is Handbrake -- it's a lightweight, powerful and very easy to use video transcoder that works on Mac OS X, all flavours of Windows and Linux.

Ubuntu Linux was a pleasant surprise.

Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth is a big fan of Google Chrome, and says the browser could replace the standard Firefox in future versions of Ubuntu Linux.

It's not every week that sees the launch of a major release from one of the most popular Linux distributions. This week, however, we've had the benefit of not just one but two such landmark debuts.

Between the launch of a new Linux kernel update and the news that open source has achieved mainstream business use at last, it's been an exciting week in the world of open source software.

The next version of Fedora will be the first major Linux distribution to use the radically updated GNOME as its default desktop interface.