It seems the Linux version of the popular IRC server Unreal IRCd was contaminated with malware ever since November 2009, without anyone noticing it. The announcement was made on the Unreal IRCd forums:

Swatch isn’t a cleverly designed watch from the 1980s but you’ll think it’s just as handy (and cleverly designed) as one. Like Logwatch, swatch is a perl script that watches your logs but swatch watches them for regular expressions that you configure. Swatch will notify you via mail or the console screen (stdout) when it matches the configured log file entries with your watchfor directives.

Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently compile and execute bytecode for dynamic languages. Parrot currently hosts a variety of language implementations in various stages of completion, including Tcl, Javascript, Ruby, Lua, Scheme, PHP, Python, Perl 6, APL, and a .NET bytecode translator. Parrot is not about parrots, though we are rather fond of them for obvious reasons.

BeRTOS is a real time open source operating system supplied with drivers and libraries designed for the rapid development of embedded software. Perfect for building commercial applications with no license costs nor royalties, BeRTOS allows you to cut the economic investment for your products.

OpenSVC is a GPLv2 project automating the low-level operations needed to bring up system resources (virtual machine container, IP, disk groups, filesystem mounts, application launchers) on a node and to replicate data to secondary nodes (in local or remote sites). OpenSVC can be coupled to a tiers heartbeat daemon to form a full failover clustering stack.

Last week when releasing the Linux 2.6.35-rc2 kernel, Linus was upset with the number of late merges and other commits that were receiving pull requests in the Linux 2.6.35 kernel development cycle when the work should instead be now about bug and regression fixes.

A survey from the Eclipse Foundation, which oversees development of the open source Eclipse IDE, shows that 32.7 percent of respondents use Linux as their primary desktop development system, up almost 6 points from 2009. Meanwhile, Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distro among Eclipse developers.

BROKEN LINKS in Linux file systems are not just annoying — they can also be a security risk. In a previous post, I discussed the potential dangers of unowned files and in this post I will talk about those annoying, resource consuming broken links usually considered simple file system “lint”.