There has been lots of activity the past little while on the software development front. Here is a sampling of few things that caught my eye.
SUSE Enterprise Linux 10
On Monday, Novell released the long awaited SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Desktop version 10. Guru Lab's Linux courseware and classes cover both SUSE Linux Enterprise as well as Red Hat Linux Enterprise and we are working on releasing updated materials to cover this new version 10 release (and later this year, RHEL5).
Major Squid Release
The Squid web proxy server has a new major v2.6 release after several years. Some of the new features include better scalability, a "totally transparent" mode which rewrites layer 3 and 4 address and port numbers, support for Negotiate/Kerberos authentication, hardware assisted SSL support, and many other features. I authored the Squid chapter and lab used in our GL275: Enterprise Linux Services class and I'm excited about adding coverage the new v2.6 features. Too bad that none of the 2006 Enterprise Linux releases will include Squid v2.6.
Compiz in Fedora
On the Fedora Core v6 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux v5 development front there has been a few things of note. The OpenGL window and compositing manger, Compiz has been added to rawhide. It seems that 2006 is the year of ubber eye-candy in Linux. I doubt it will ship as part of RHEL5, but FC6 desktops should be all set. On difference between SUSE and Fedora is that Compiz sits on top of AIGLX instead of XGL. A Red Hat developer provides some more details in a post to the fedora-devel-list.
Essential Perl Modules now in Fedora
Several years ago when we added comprehensive LDAP coverage to the GL275 class we ran into a deficiency. We teach the best practice approaches to using LDAP as a NIS replacement. That often involves importing user accounts into LDAP from files in /etc. The PADL migration tools leave a lot to be desired from a functionality and user friendliness perspective. So I wrote a new migration tool in perl called "ldapmigrate". Of course when communicating with the LDAP server it is best to do so over an encrypted SSL/TLS connection. To that end my "ldapmigrate" script makes use of the perl modules IO-Socket-SSL and Net_SSLeay. By having those two modules installed the perl LDAP module can make the encrypted connections. Although SUSE included those modules as part of the distribution, Red Hat did not and I filed a bug report in 2003 to add them. In the interim we compiled and provided those modules in class. Finally, today they were added to rawhide so those modules will part of Fedora Core v6 and RHEL5.
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