Fedora 8 Released 194
Cat in the Hat writes "Fedora 8 has been officially released. Ars Technica has a run-down of what's new in Fedora 8, including the PulseAudio sound daemon, Nodoka visual style, and a new authentication system. 'Another major change in Fedora 8 is the new PolicyKit authentication system that makes authority escalation more secure. Instead of providing root access to an entire program when it needs higher privileges, PolicyKit makes it possible to isolate individual operations that require higher privileges and put them into system services that can be accessed through D-Bus. Another advantage of PolicyKit is that it will give administrators more control over which users and programs have access to individual operations that use escalated privileges.'"
Re:Back on Track (Score:1, Interesting)
Fast torrent this time (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Yet ANOTHER sound server? (Score:5, Interesting)
The guys behind PulseAudio really "get it". They even decided to drop their typically-awful open-source project name "PolypAudio" in favor of the infinitely better "PulseAudio", for wider acceptance. You've got to give them points for that; the GIMP could learn a thing or two from them.
Re:Yet ANOTHER sound server? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Yet ANOTHER sound server? (Score:3, Interesting)
Finegrained security (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure I like that one too much. Finegrained security models have always been a bloody nightmare, one way or another, and very often don't get used/are switched off, resulting in the opposite effect of that intended. Look to Vista to see why it sn't a good idea - users feel their are being bugged by constant dialog boxes asking them to confirm that it is OK to do trivial tasks, or asking for administrator passwords etc. People just want to get on with life, so this is a huge irritation - it may be true that all you need is to spend a little time and effort on setting it up, but people in general are not security minded and meticulous. This is, by the way, why Windows became so popular despite the huge problems with security and stability - a PC was almost an appliance that allowed you to use the internet and write documents, you just turned it on and used it.
Vista isn't the only example of finegrained security, only the latest and perhaps the one that has succeeded in pissing off most people. Oracle has it's own, very finely grained model, which I have never seen used seriously; and then there is RACF on IBM's mainframes, not a joy to work with either, IMO.
I think the basic UNIX security model is just about as much as most people want to bother with.
Re:finer grained priv levels (Score:3, Interesting)
Even with decus the agenda was mostly controlled by DEC, and directed at selling more stuff. I knew most of the answer you gave to the GP's question, but I never played with that feature, even though I had seen it used.
If there was most open source stuff available specifically for VMS I would have learned more. Unfortunately the freeware CD which DEC put out mainly contained ported UNIX apps.
Re:Waiting for Fedora 9 (Score:3, Interesting)