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Distributions

Caldera

We have gotten a note from Caldera regarding updates for the wu-ftpd hole. An update is now in place, and their security updates page has been updated to reflect all of the patches they have made available recently. Erik also noted that Caldera users have never been vulnerable to the reported problems with pine/metamail, explaining why no update for that problem was released. It is good to see their commitment to improving their security-related communications.

Here is their official advisory as well.

Andrew McRory's HakPack has been updated to include 2.2.2 Linux kernel binary and source RPM packages. HakPack is a set of RPMs that bring an OpenLinux 1.3 system up to the point where it can run a 2.2.X Linux kernel. HakPack is available on the Caldera ftp site.

Debian

Debian has an official release candidate for Debian 2.1. Brian White officially announced restrictions in uploading changing to the i386 version to allow the other ports to catch up by the planned March 2nd release date.

Debian will have a booth at LinuxWorld next week, so here is your chance to stop by and meet some of the Debian developers.

A new version of mutt with a fix for the the metamail vulnerability was uploaded to Debian last week.

A final test build of XFree86 for the slink release has been done. Branden Robinson sent out this note and Steve Dunham followed upwith links to sparc binaries.

A Debian distribution based on FreeBSD was suggested this week, generating a long discussion. The Debian Weekly News reports that "Most of the favorable opinions expressed were based on the argument that there should be a Debian distribution for as many open source UNIX variants as possible. This was countered with the argument that this would drastically increase the workload of the package maintainers. "

This week's Debian Weekly News was published on February 22nd.

A new mailing list for debian-gtk-gnome has been created and imlib/gtk/gnome package maintainers should probably get signed up for it. Along similar lines, Jim Pick has put together a proposal for creating Staging Areas for project like gtk-gnome that are changing too rapidly to integrate well even into the unstable tree.

Definite Linux

Rpms for the latest lsof hole are available from the Definite Linux website.

PROSA Debian GNU/Linux

PROSA is a Linux distribution for Italian speakers. It is based on Debian GNU/Linux 2.1. Check out their announcement for more details. Prosa is also offering commercial support for this distribution.

Red Hat

Red Hat has made detailed instructions available on how to upgrade your Red Hat 5.2 system to use the new Linux 2.2 kernel. Michael O' Shaughnessy was kind enough to send us a pointer to the instructions.

Red Hat has released an update for the lsof vulnerability. This appears to be a relatively minor hole on Red Hat systems, but it's probably a good idea to drop in the update anyway.

Frank Heldt sent in a report on RawHide 1.2.9 which was extremely favorable and he felt boded well for the quality of the eventual Red Hat 6.0 (or however it is named) release.

Slackware

Slackware will have a booth at the LinuxWorld Expo. The Slackware site promises installs, information, demos, and not-to-be-missed t-shirts.

/usr/bin/filesize has been patched to fix a bug dealing with filenames containing white space, which was reported by Rene Seindal.

Slackware wu-ftpd was upgraded to 2.4.2-beta-18-vr14 on February 22nd to fix problems that caused the previous version of wu-ftpd to hang.

Enscript-1.6.1 was added to slackware on February 24th.

SuSE

SuSE's official advisory on the ftp security problems was published Thursday, February 18th. It provides pointers to updated packages for ProFTPD and wu-ftpd.

Lenz Grimmer of SuSE sent us this note correcting some of his instructions (quoted in the February 18 LWN) on how to use GNOME with SuSE 6.0. He claims to be looking for a brown paper bag...

Trinux

InfoWorld wrote an article on Trinux entitled "Trinux introduces the Linux-shy to the world of security tools with compassion and ease". What can we say? They like it a lot. "This miniature version of Linux is the Swiss army knife of network and system security."

February 25, 1999

Please note that not every distribution will show up every week. Only distributions with recent news to report will be listed.

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