Computer links and news time.
First, Fedora Linux's first release (Core 1) came out in the last week. Personally I'm not incredibly eager to try it out. I have Debian. Currently it seems as though Debian is everything Fedora Linux is meant to be, but it's just beginning, is backed by Redhat and with my next piece of news, is good for the community, and I'm sure it will be a top notch distro in no time.
So as a segue, being the GNOME user I am, I'm happy that Novell has recently purchased both Ximian and SuSE. This is another big step toward linux on more desktops. You may soon have a commercially supported distro, that has all of it's aspects (desktop environment, system configuration, install, etc) tied together nicely and complete.This is great news. Also, look to KDE news sites to see what this means for KDE as well. I'm sure KDE will live on just as strong too, though.
Next on my list: the recent attempt from a black hat to insert a back-door into the Linux kernel. There's not much to say that hasn't already been said. (see linux weekly news article) It would have been a locally exploitable back-door to allow any user gain access to root privileges. The attempt, also wasn't to put it in the official source, it was to try to put the exploit into an unofficial source. Interesting, but caught same day anyway.
Here's a nice piece of news that if it matters to you, then you probably already know already. Keith Packard (a big X Free developer) has some nice details (and screenshots) on his new X Extensions, Damage and Composite. When will these hit the main XFree again?
And lastly a bit of humour.
Apparently there is space for Klingon in Unicode. Chances are you already have a Klingon character set on your computer. Wow. Just wow.
psDooM. What is there to say. Who doesn't want to play a classic video game? Who wishes they could actually kill processes. Enter: psDooM. Finally you can kill that damn runaway process...with knives! (to the death!) Basically, in a nutshell, its a game of DooM where some of the demons have process ID's associated with them. Kill the demon, kill the process. Hurt the demons, renice the processes. System load too high? Injure a few demons. Angry at your computer? BFG a room of processes as root and watch all running programs die. Just awesome.