Unix Tutorial Digest: Interesting Links #1

Every week there’s a few announcements or articles which I find particularly interesting, and so I’ve decided to share them with you. I’m not a Unix guru (yet), but if any of the listed materials require further explanation – do feel free to ask and I’ll be glad to help.

Ubuntu 8.04.1 release

About a week ago, the first update to Ubuntu 8.04 was announced – Ubuntu 8.04.1 TLS. I have completed my experiment of using Ubuntu Hardy as my desktop OS a few weeks ago, and so haven’t upgraded yet – but I think this release is not so useful for anyone who’s been automatically updating their system – it’s just another milestone and a way to download a complete Ubuntu 8.04.1 as one image.

The highlights for me would be Firefox upgraded to the final 3.0 release and Gnome upgrade (it’s 2.22.2 in this release).

Gentoo Linux 2008.0 release

For some of you, it’s probably been a long-awaited release. Move to 2.6.24 kernel provided support for much more hardware, and this is bound to look good with the updated and much improved Gentoo installer.

Read more in the official Gentoo Linux 2008.0 announcement.

Cache poisoning vulnerability in DNS

Dan Kaminsky has found quite a nasty weakness in DNS implementations: deficiencies in the DNS protocol and common DNS implementations
facilitate DNS cache poisoning attacks.

Thanks to the seriousness of the problem and a great coordination, most of the vendors were given the time to publish a fix, so the Vulnerability Note VU#800113 contains a comprehensive list of vulnerable implementations of DNS (both server and client sides are affected, by the way!) and links to fixes provided by various vendors.

Whether you’re managing a server farm or just a Linux desktop – be sure to update!

Wine 1.1.1 release

Things are going much faster with Wine development after the 1.0 release – it didn’t take long for the 1.1 to appear, and now almost every other week brings another great update with tons of bugs fixed.

Wine 1.1.1 release includes more than 50 bugfixes and hundreds of changes since Wine 1.1.0, notably the fixes for Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Microsoft Office 2007 installers, as well as improved video playback and many other improvements.