Guardian Digital released yesterday, December 4, 2007 the latest version of their security targeted distribution: EnGarde Secure Community 3.0.18 (Version 3.0, Release 18). ISOs for i686 and x86_64 are available for direct download and also as torrent images. The download size is very small ~570 MB but it includes all the necessary tools to run a secure standalone or application server.

Changes in 3.0.18 include among others:

• New Guardian Digital Health Center for proactive hardware monitoring
• FwkNop and PSAD Tools for new levels of Security (featured in the the new Linux Firewalls book by Michael Rash)
• New stress-kernel package with a new stress testing suite
• Several new packages such as drbd (8.2.1), dsniff (2.3), psad (2.1), quota (3.15), sdparm (1.02), stress-kernel (3.0).
• The latest stable versions of MySQL (5.0.45), asterisk (1.4.14), kernel (2.6.23), openswan (2.4.10), samba (3.0.27a), syslog-ng (2.0.5), webtool (3.18), etc.
• Numerous fixes and features enhancements

Read the rest of this entry »

I have finally found a WordPress plugin that I liked, to implement a poll inside the sidebar of this blog. This is a great wordpress plugin called Democracy.

My first question for all the readers of the site is “What is your favorite Linux distribution?”. I would like to know that, in order to be able to focus some more on some distributions and less on others.

Head over to the sidebar to vote and feel free to expand on your answer in comments below.

I am sure that by now all the world has already found out and tested the cool new tool google launched yesterday: google trends… It is a very nice tool that allows you to see the searches done by peoples, on any keyword you are interested, have evolved over time. This doesn’t show ‘exact’ results, but instead is shows a nice graph with a visual representation of the ‘trend’. Another cool feature is that you get also some details about spikes on searches (on the right), and information about the locations of the peoples doing the searches (on the bottom of the page). You can also restrict the trend search by region or only some year or month in time. Very cool.

Still what I have liked most is the possibility to compare the trend of searches between 2 or more keywords. Let’s look for example on a comparison of the searches performed by peoples containing some linux distribution names. This doesn’t result in how many peoples are actually using linux, or those distributions, but the interest of the general public in those names. Here is a real example:

debian redhat fedora centos

What does this show us? That redhat is going down… (not a surprise after the release of their rhel/fedora projects). Debian is strong and many peoples are still interested into it. Fedora took the interest over redhat (rhel as search term is negligible). Centos? Peoples don’t know to much about this cool project.

Read the rest of this entry »