From the New Kernel to OpenStack and the Linux Desktop: This Week's Enterprise Linux News

A very fit (trimmer) Linux kernel 2.6.36 was released this week by NEC C&C prize winner Linus Torvalds. The new kernel includes a variety of important features, but the addition of the AppArmor security framework got top billing in news coverage. Championed by many for a number of years, AppArmor enables “network application security via mandatory access control for programs, protecting against the exploitation of software flaws and compromised system.”

Eric Brown has a good writeup on all the new features at LinuxDevices.com.

Earlier this year, I attended the OpenStack launch party at OSCON. This week, we were introduced to the project’s first official release (“Austin”) and were told that more than 35 vendors have gotten in on the action.

According to reporter Sean Michael Kerner from InternetNews, “OpenStack is currently comprised of an object store technology for cloud-based storage and a compute technology for cloud deployments. On the compute side, the Austin release of OpenStack will include support for the Xen virtualization hypervisor, thanks to code contributions from Citrix.”

Get all the details in Kerner’s writeup here.

Is desktop Linux dead? This tired question created quite a debate among bloggers this week. Stemming from a surprising stat in our recent Linux Adoption Trends report that showed 36.3 percent of respondents are using Linux on their desktop, PCWorld’s Robert Strohmeyer launched the first bomb with his story “Desktop Linux: The Dream is Dead.” Steven Vaughan-Nichols fired back saying, “I beg to differ.” While we’re finding more developer and enterprise workers independently choosing to use Linux on their work desktop, it is true that desktop Linux has very little market share. And, while that trend is expected to work its way into knowledge workers, today’s victories for Linux are clearly in mobile computing, the enterprise and in HPC. But like a good juicy Us Weekly story, this debate remains a fun one to watch and weigh in on.