OStatic

Just last Thursday, I wrote a post proclaiming my undying love for how quickly open source projects tend to right themselves when sailing the choppy waters of software vulnerabilities. This time around, a vulnerability had been spotted in Firefox, affecting 3.x releases on all platforms. The fix was scheduled for release sometime this week, in the browser's 3.0.8 version.

Firefox 3.0.8 made an early arrival, however, and was officially released Friday afternoon (at 3:45 PST). For those keeping score, this was roughly two days after one of the vulnerabilities it patches was discovered.

Red Hat has rolled out the newest update of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, RHEL 5.3. In addition to virtualization and power-saving enhancements, this update is also shipping the first productized implementation of OpenJDK for Red Hat.

Via Linux Weekly News comes the tale of Fedora 10's recent troubles with D-Bus. Fedora recently issued a security update for D-Bus which broke a number of applications on generic Fedora systems. One of the areas affected was PackageKit -- essentially leaving those accustomed to updating their systems with the Fedora GUI tools unable to do so in this manner.

The fix detailed by Paul Frields (issuing the command su -c 'yum update' in a terminal window) is straightforward, but it has the Fedora community talking about how to minimize and handle update hiccups in the future.

Spring is in the air and that can only mean one thing: several popular Linux distributions are getting ready for their next releases. Which distro improvements may be meaningful for you?

Let's take a look at the upcoming versions of Fedora, Ubuntu, and openSUSE to see what's new, what's improved, and what will be worth the wait.