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?

Round up time again, and this week we’ve got some of the usual suspects, but some fresh faces to mix it up as well.

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So, if you’re like me and have voided the warranties of all the other electronics in your house, but have yet to sink your teeth into your poor little Western Digital MyBook World – likely cowering in the corner pleading for you to put down the screwdriver – here are some helpful resources on getting the most out this handy little NAS box that just so happens to be running BusyBox linux.

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A new month and a new set of Linux distribution releases. Check out what’s new and where to get it!

Also, in an effort to reduce the number of listings every week, we have decided to leave off alpha releases from now on. If your life depends on knowing every alpha release, drop us a line in the comments and we will look into bringing them back.

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Time again for our weekly distro release roundup. There’s a lot of small and specialized distros in this week’s list, so let’s get started.

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The folks over at TuxRadar (the website from the publishers of Linux Format, a great Linux magazine from the UK) have a great post titled “How the Linux kernel works” that gives a nice overview of the kernel. The article briefly goes over using system programming libraries, managing kernel modules, and using the /proc filesystem to tune the kernel. I’ve always enjoyed the articles from the TuxRadar / Linux Format folks  and this is another great one that I highly recommend.

Other kernel resources:

• The Linux Kernel Archives a.k.a Official Site of the Linux Kernel
• Kernel Newbies
• Linux Systems Programming: Talking Directly to the Kernel and C Library by Robert Love
• Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition by Jonathan Corbet, Alessandro Rubini, and Greg Kroah-Hartman
• Interactive Map of the Linux Kernel

Time for our weekly distro release roundup. We have another slew of Ubuntu-based alpha releases and numerous other new distro releases.

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I just read a post over at Linux Loop where the author asks and then answers the question “Why Do You Use Linux?”. I thought I would share the reasons why I use Linux and ask any readers to contribute their reasons either here or on the original post.

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The DEFCON organizers made the audio, video, and slides available for DEFCON 16 via RSS feeds. There were alot of interesting talks this year including

• David Maynor & Robert Graham’s “Bringing Sexy Back: Breaking in with Style” where they discuss turning Hollywood-fiction attacks into reality
• Dan “Fyodor” Lyon’s “NMAP: Scanning the Internet” where he discusses his results of a full internet scan using NMAP
• Jay Beale’s “Owning the Users with Agent in the Middle” where he talks about his new (and  just recently released) tool TheMiddler
• and of course Dan Kaminsky’s “Black OPS 2008″ where he discusses the new DNS vulnerability that he found last year

Links:

• Audio
• Video
• Slides (not currently working for me) UPDATE: slide links all appear to be working now