Eric Paris of the SELinux project announced the creation of the SELinux sandbox, a method to confine untrusted binaries on the LKML today.

The idea is to allow administrators to lock down tightly untrusted applications in a sandbox where they can not use the network and open/create any file that is not handed to the process. Can be used to protect a system while allowing it to run some untrusted binary.

This definitely appears to be an interesting new development for SELinux. A great place to run suspect code or maybe even windows binaries via WINE.
I’ve used SELinux a little bit in the past, but usually found it incredibly complex to learn for the basic home network uses I wanted to have it for. This new feature may get me to put some real effort towards actually making the leap and committing myself to learn how to properly implement and use it.
Related books:

• SELinux by Example by Frank Mayer, David Caplan, and Karl MacMillan, published by Prentice Hall
• SELinux by Bill McCarty, published by O’Reilly & Associates

Sorry for the lateness again, these holiday weekends get crazy. Not too many releases this week but one of them has managed to create some buzz…

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Pretty short release list this week, everyone must’ve been out enjoying the nice weather

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Michael “Monty” Widenius, the founder of MySQL and founder of Monty Program AB, announced the creation of the Open Database Alliance with Percona, a MySQL services support form.  The Open Database Alliance is

a vendor-neutral consortium designed to become the industry hub for the MySQL open source database, including MySQL and derivative code, binaries, training, support, and other enhancements for the MySQL community and partner ecosystem. The Open Database Alliance will comprise a collection of companies working together to provide the software, support and services for MariaDB, an enterprise-grade, community-developed branch of MySQL.

The goal of the Open Database Alliance is to unify all of the MySQL-related development going on. This definitely makes me feel alot better about the future of MySQL after Oracle’s acquisition of Sun. I still worry that Oracle will work at closing off development of MySQL or withhold key features for paying customers, but having a new project spearheaded my Monty gives me hope that we will always have an open source version that can compete with Oracle’s version.

Linux Journal published an article that alerted me to the relaunch of Linux.com. The Linux Foundation acquired the Linux.com domain name from SourceForge earlier this year and has been promising a relaunch. From the LJ article:

One of the most intriguing aspects of the new and improved Web site is the “Linux Guru” feature. Registered users can earn points and work their way up to guru status by participating in various activities around the site. The top five contributors will be invited to the annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, and the top 50 will be showcased in the Foundation’s annual report. Each year, one user will also be crowned the “Ultimate Linux Guru” and win a fully-loaded Linux notebook computer, signed by Linus Torvalds.

The site has five main features that are an important aspect of working with and understanding Linux:

• News – Original content and analysis are featured in this section, along with content from FOSSBazaar, MoblinZone, and other Foundation workgroups.
• Community – Here’s where registered members can connect and network with each other, and create groups that focus on specific niches in open source.
• Distribution Central – Highlights of this section include original content provided by community managers and representatives of each distribution, and also provides a place for leading distros to interact with users right inside the Linux.com ecosystem.
• Learn – This is where users will find Man Pages, HowTos, and other Linux documentation, as well as a forum for posting questions and getting answers from the community.
• Directory – This section houses a collection of user-contributed software and user-reviewed applications, books, hosting services, and the like.

The new look is definitely an improvement from the old site and I see some nice content & links. Congrats to The Linux Foundation on a great relaunch!

This week we’ve got the first release candidate of the much anticipated Linux Mint 7 as well as a new version of FreeBSD to go over, so let’s get started.

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Debian recently announced a switch from GLIBC to EGLIBC, the embedded optimized version of GLIBC. Aurelien’s blog post lists the reasons for switching as  (quoted from post):

• More friendly upstream (especially with regard to embedded architectures): “Encourage cooperation, communication, civility, and respect among developers” (as opposed to this).
• Stable branch with fixes for important bugs (a real one, not like the GLIBC one which is left unchanged).
• Better support for embedded architectures.
• Support for different shells (GLIBC only supports bash).
• Support for building with -Os.
• Configurable components (do we really need NIS or RPC support in debian-installer?).
• Better testsuite for optimized or biarch packages.

This is definitely a big change that I haven’t seen any other distributions make before and I wonder what this means for a popular Debian-based distribution such as Ubuntu?

Computerworld recently published an article concerning the performance of SSD drives over time. The long and short of it is that SSD’s do experience slower performance over time. The article is fairly long and they go in depth to uncover what causes the slowdown, but it’s definitely a recommended read for anyone considering an SSD at this point.

Dan Lynch, co-host of the Linux Outlaws podcast, has written a post about the state of Libre.fm, a free and open-source replacement for Last.fm. He says that Libre.fm is coming along quite well and offers a simple hack to make your Last.fm-enabled media players post to Libre.fm instead of Last.fm. Libre.fm was originally launched by Matt Lee in the wake of the short-lived plan by Last.fm to charge users for their streaming services who are not located in the US, UK, or Germany. Another great benefit of Libre.fm is that your content is licensed under the GNU Affero GPLv3 which means that your content is yours and you are free to export it from the service as you see fit.

Related Links

• Libre.fm
• Dan’s original post on the creation of Libre.fm
• My Libre.fm account

Sorry for being a little late this week. We have a slew of*BSD releases plus a few other linux distros to cover this week…

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