What Linux distribution is right for you? ZDNet wants to help you decide, and has evaluated several Linux distributions, including Red Hat, Debian, SuSE, Slackware, and TurboLinux. The evaluation’s stated goal is to find the “perfect balance between utility, productivity, and support.”

From a Reuters report (on Yahoo): “VA Linux Systems Inc. on Thursday posted a large fourth-quarter loss, three months after
the company said it would exit the computer hardware business and focus on providing software and services for the alternative Linux operating system.

VA Linux posted a fourth-quarter loss of $290 million, or $5.58 per share, compared with a loss of $47.5 million and $1.15 per share in the year-ago quarter.” (Editor’s note: VA Linux is the parent company of OSDN, which operates NewsForge).

Network World Fusion reports that Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. will construct a Linux supercomputer to aid its drug research and development efforts. The hardware end of the cluster features 56 computers each running 2 933MHz Pentium III processors, and will be provided by OSDN/NewsForge parent VA Linux. The software end of things will be handled by Boston’s Blackstone Computing. A Vertex spokesman said Linux was chosen for its ease of use: “It’s very important for our scientists who don’t want to become computer jockeys.”

Web Developer Amita Guha was surprised to find her Internet access had been terminated, and even more surprised to find out the reason why. It turns out that the MPAA sent a letter to her ISP accusing her of copyright violations — an accusation she denies, and that the MPAA or her ISP have yet to provide any proof of happening. And apparently, this is all quite legal and acceptable, thanks to the U.S. version of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Read the first-person account at Salon. Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing out this piece.

ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/linux-2.4/. Intermediate diffs are available from http://www.bzimage.org.

2.4.8-ac10
o Fix the USB device timeout problem (Pete Zaitcev)
o rio usb locking fixes (Oliver Neukum)
o Fix vm86 v segment reload part 1 (Andi Kleen)
| Still not all sorted yet
o Airo driver update (Javier Achirica)
o Fix bugs in usb skeleton driver (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o Add support for USB clie serial devices (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o USB config fix for serial debug (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o Add support for massworks id75 usb (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o Rationalise lvm version numbers (A J Lewis)
o LVM locking changes (Joe Thornber)
o Pull pv flush out of lvm ioctls (Heinz Mauelshagen)
o Switch to lv_v5_t structures/types in LVM (Heinz Mauelshagen)
o Defer LVM I/O when moving an extent (Joe Thornber,
Andreas Dilger)
o Fix bmap/blkszget issues in LVM (Andreas Dilger)
o Tidy naming/devfs registrations for LVM (Patrick Caulfield)
o Protect LVM snapshot flag removal, don’t
extend or reduce dropped snapshots,
o Handle ELF loader setup arg pages failures (Evgeny Polyakov)
o Add udelays to cmpci to see if it fixes
the problems a few people have (me)
o Put config hooks in to make qlogicfc firmware
optionally loadable for weird hardware (me)
| Needs a suitable firmware file adding ..
o Update pci.ids for a couple of parisc things (Helge Deller)
o Irda warning fixes (Pete Zaitcev)
o Squash smp race in dsbr100 driver (Oliver Neukum)
o Console locking fix on VT_DISALLOCATE race (Jani Jaakkola,
Andrew Morton)
o ipv4 raw socket oops fix (Octavian Cerna)
o Actually use our msr register defines (Dave Jones)
o Correct polish translation info typos (Steven Cole)
o mm compile warning fix (Rik van Riel)
o Updated 3ware driver (Adam Radford)
o Add Sharp PC-RJ/AX to bad apm list (Arjan van de Ven)

2.4.8-ac9
o Possible usb -110 error fix (me)
o Page laundering fix (Rik van Riel)
o Add another vaio to the byteswap list (Martin Mueller)
o Fix typos in ide blacklist (Arjan van de Ven)
o UMSDOS split directory entry handling (Istvan Varadi)
o Update Configure.help further (Steve Cole)
o Fix bogus mtrr warning on dual pentiums (Dave Jones)
o Update scsi tape driver (Kai Mäkisara)
o Change memory probe constants on AWE32/64 (Dave Fennell)
o Tiny endian reiserfs fix (just cosmetic) (Jeff Mahoney)
o Make the md resync delay message informative
rather than scary (Corin Hartland-Swann)
o USB printer fixes (Oliver Neukum)
o Add the SIS735 to the SiS AGP (Adrian)
o Kill bogus export_objs entry in lib/Makefile (Keith Owens)
o VIA rhine fixes (David Woodhouse)
o Next set of superblock changes (Al Viro)
o Don’t reissue a pid that has a tgid matching
it still in circulation (Dave McCracken)

VA Linux (NewsForge’s corporate parent) has posted a letter to SourceForge users at SourceForge.net. The letter describes VA’s new business model, including SourceForge Enterprise Edition, which VA will distribute to its corporate customers under a combination of the Mozilla Public License (version
1.1) and a proprietary software license. SourceForge.net users should expect no changes there, the letter says.

The Register reports that British five-letter license plates with no space between the letters may be a thing of the past. So beware the L7NUX license plate on eBay, unless you want to frame it.

From LinuxSecurity.com: “The dump(8) command (installed as /sbin/dump) and the dump_lfs(8)
command (installed as /sbin/dump_lfs) are setgid tty. dump(8) and
dump_lfs(8) did not drop those setgid tty rights while performing
functions other than those the rights were provided for, including
execution of a user supplied RCMD_CMD environment variable.”

The Financial Post’s take on HP’s new Linux security distribution: “Linux got a big boost yesterday as computer giant Hewlett-Packard Co. announced it would use the operating system to power
everything from cell phones to stereos.” More from IDG News Service.

Posted at LinuxSecurity.com: “The OpenSSL libcrypto includes a PRNG (pseudo random number generator)
implementation. The logic used for PRNG was not strong enough,
and allows attackers to guess the internal state of the PRNG.
Therefore, attackers can predict future PRNG output.”