The Flash 9 beta for Linux has finally been released! There are two packages available, a Mozilla/Firefox plugin and a GTK based standalone player. The player does not include full-screen mode and the standalone player doesn’t have SSL support just yet, both of which will be available in the final release.

The release has been tested on Red Hat Enterprise 3 &4, SUSE 9.x and 10.1 by Adobe. I can confirm that everything works fine under Ubuntu too. You should be able to install it by simply removing all previous Flash versions and copying libflashplayer.so to either ~/.mozilla/plugins/ or /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/.

It looks like Linux has been confirmed for the PS3. Terra Soft Solutions today announced that:

Yellow Dog Linux v5.0, Terra Soft’s next generation Linux operating system for Power will support PLAYSTATION 3, providing an end-user experience far surpassing previous versions.

Under basic agreement with SCEI, Terra Soft was granted a unique opportunity to develop and bring to market a complete Linux OS for the Sony PLAYSTATION 3.

The most interesting thing about this to me is the fact Enlightenment E17 will be the desktop environment of choice for possibly thousands of new Linux users. I’ve flirted with E quite a few times in nearly 10 years since it’s original release. It has always been the most beautiful, elegant and revolutionary window manager and then desktop environment out there.  The ability to customize Enlightenment to what ever suits your taste is one of the best things about it and I hope this is maintained in the PS3 release and it’s not locked down by Sony.

I’m guessing that YDL Linux will run in a Cell Secure Processing Vault to try and prevent any backdoors which could allow the execution of backup copies and such from within the Linux environment. YDL v5.0 will be available through YDL.net Enhanced accounts, through the Terra Soft on-line Store, retailers, and public mirrors world-wide. The PS3 is starting to look very tempting again, even with it’s high price tag.

An exploit has been found in the NVIDIA binary Linux X driver that allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code as root. The bug can be exploited remotely simply by visiting a malicious web page in a vulnerable X client. A proof-of-concept exploit is available. The open source “nv” driver is not effected by this exploit.

The overflow stems from a problem with how the XRender extension handles rendering glyphs to the screen. Any local or remote X client can gain root access using the exploit available above and using a short sequence of user generated glyphs, for example in Firefox using Flash, Java applets or embedded web fonts, the NVIDIA binary driver can be tricked into writing into an arbitrary location in memory allowing execution of code with root privileges. A simple HTML input field with a long value can exploit this causing a DoS.

There are reports that the problem is fixed in the latest Beta drivers and the open source “nv” driver is not effected. You should be able to revert to the “nv” driver by replacing the “nvidia” with “nv” under the driver section in your X config.

This exploit once again raises the issue of having, proprietary closed source code, unaudited by peer review, present in the kernel. Had this problem been found in an open source piece of code, a patch would be available within hours, if not minutes and the risk would be negated. There have been many calls for NVIDIA, going back to 2000, to open up the kernel module in question before and this will only add to those calls, but to be honest, I can’t see it happening anytime soon, they just wail on about trade secrets and the advantage their competitors (or competitor) would gain from this. I’m hoping that NVIDIA would like to prove me wrong!

People often ask questions such as “When will Photoshop be available for Linux?” or “Will [insert favorite application here] ever be ported to Linux?” without taking to time to look at the vast array of applications already available. Here is a quick rundown of what I consider to be five great Linux desktop applications. Some of these applications even surpass their commercial counterparts in term of innovation and features, and best of all, they are both free and free.

F-Spot

F-Spot is a photo management tool that lets you import, touch-up, organize and share your digital photos. F-Spot supports a wide array of file types, including RAW support, so you can import your photos from just about any device. When importing your photos or images, you can tag each batch of images for easy searching and sorting later on.

It’s easy to edit your photos in F-Spot, you can rotate, crop, resize, and adjust red eye and adjust other color settings. You can easily roll back your changes with versioning support and your original photos are left intact.

Once you are ready to share your photos, F-Spot allows you to easily export to a wide range of places, including Flickr, PicasaWeb, Gallery, CD and there is also also a static HTML export option.

The GIMP

The GNU Image Manipulation Program (The GIMP) can be used for everything from simple paint program to photo retouching, image composition and image authoring to batch image processing and conversion. The power of The GIMP lies in it’s extensible plug-in and extension system which allow you to script everything from the most basic task to highly complex image manipulations.

The GIMP comes with the usual full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush and Clone along with custom brushes and patterns. It also supports layers, a large range of filters for applying effects such as engrave, emboss, scratches, ripples and many more, animation tools and you can even run Photoshop plug-in filters.

Inkscape

Inkscape is a vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia Freehand. It supports shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping of objects. It can import from formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, SVG, Adobe Illustrator and others and exports SVG as well as other vector-based formats including DXF and of course PDF.

Some of the tools available include pencil, pen and calligraphy tools for drawing. Rectangle, ellipse, polygon and spiral shape tools and a text tool.

Inkscape is still a young project and is under active development, with new features being added often.

Gaim

Gaim is a instant messaging client that supports AIM,

ICQ , MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, SILC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, Lotus Sametime, and Zephyr messaging networks. With Gaim you can log into multiple accounts across different networks all from within the one client. Gaim has all the usual features of native clients including file transfer, away messages, and typing notification.

Gaim also has a plug-in system witch allows you to extend the application and add features such as encryption and graphical notifications and there are also a large range of themes available.

Songbird

Songbird is a digital jukebox built on the Mozilla XULRunner platform, the same platform that Firefox and Thunderbird are built upon and supports MP3, AAC, OGG, FLAC, WMA. However Songbird is more than just a simple audio player it provides an alternitave to iTune and Windows Media including support for services like Odeo, SHOUTcast, Amazon and last.fm.

Similar to Firefox, there is an extension system which will allow people to develop their own extensions to plug-in to Songbird one of the most interesting of which is the iTunes importer.

Although Songbird is still in the early stages of developemnt, it promises to shake up the media player world in the just same way Firefox has the browser world.

That’s five great applications for the Linux desktop. What other great Linux applications can you think of?

Update: Latest version available here

This is the first relase of my Social Bookmarks sidebar widget for WordPress. It is inspired by Pascal Belloncle’s Bookmarkit plugin for Typo and based upon Kaf Under’s excellent example WordPress widget.

The widget allows you to select a number of social bookmark sites which are displayed in the sidebar. This allows your readers to bookmark your blog or article, depending on the context, directly to the social bookmarking sites you have enabled.

To install the widget, simply download the widget from below, and upload the contents of the archive to your wp-content/plugins/widgets folder and activate the “Bookmark Widget” under your plugin settings. You should then be able to drag and drop the widget to your sidebar and select which bookmarking sites you wish to display.

You can see the plugin in action in my own sidebar on this site and you can download either a .zip or a .tar.gz version.

Please let me know of any bugs or suggestions you have.

I came across this story, and a few others like it over the last day or so banging on about how forking Firefox and removing it from distributions such as Debian and Ubuntu is such a “Bad Thing” along with comments like “Doesn’t the GNU organization have better things to do?”

First off, the reason Firefox is being removed from Debian is that Mike Conner from the Mozilla Corporation posted a bug report to the Debian project stating that shipping a browser called “Firefox” was a trademark violation:

“Firefox (the name) is equally protected and controlled by the same trademark policy and legal requirements as the Firefox logo. You’re free to use any other name for the browser bits, but calling the browser Firefox requires the same approvals as are required for using the logo and other artwork.”

And it’s not just the Debian Project who have expressed frustration with the Mozilla Corporation regarding Firefox, both Fedora and Ubuntu have also been having issues with regard to patching and security issues.

The main advantage of Gnuzilla and IceWeasel is simply an ethical one, they are entirely free software. IceWeasel will continue to synchronize with upstream Firefox releases in the future, so on a functional level, there should be very little difference.

The Mozilla Corporation seem to be loosing touch with the very open source community it grew from. I can understand that they want to protect their image and trademark, if they didn’t, there would be nothing to stop someone taking Firefox, bundling it with a ton of spyware and malware, and still being legally able to distribute it as “Firefox”. However, I think some compromise could have been reached, the likes of Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu hardly fall into that category.

Well it’s official, I am once again a student! Nearly 10 years after I finished school, I’m finally going to college. I decided to take two Open University courses, M150 - Data, Computing and Information and T175 - Networked Living: Exploring Information and Communication Technologies

So far everything is very straight forward and pretty much as I expected. Some things on the course are very, very simple but it is still interesting non the less. My main worry is that I’m not going to take it seriously and end up getting caught out further down the line.

How do other people deal with taking university courses in something which you have 8 years practical, hands on, experience with?