The latest stable edition of Ubuntu Linux has been released and is ready for people to download. This release is a standard release cycle, so it is supported for 18 months.

Dnsmasq, the DNS/DHCP server used by most embedded Linux devices has been updated to protect against the DNS cache poisoning vulnerability released earlier this month. Secunia has detailed information on the exploits. There is also an article on Slashdot regarding the issue.

For users of OpenWrt? based firmware, X-Wrt? has released the 2.45 version of Dnsmasq as an ipkg here.

Netgear seem to have cottoned onto the idea of running a Linux based firmware on one of their wireless routers. Although, it's a little late in the game, it is good to see more of the big companies getting on board.

Waugh Partners have posted their findings on the Australian Open Source Industry & Community Census 2007.

Check it out here.

National ICT Australia develop a short range, low cost Wifi device that can communicate at 10 times the speed of current 802.11g standards.

Read the Zdnet Article to find out more.

Well incase you have been living under a rock for the past couple of days, Tropical Cyclone Helen looks set to give Darwin a shakeup.

For those who havent done so already, it is strongly advised to take steps to stow and secure all wireless gear ASAP as today is likely our last chance to do so.

Some more information can be found here -
http://www.bom.gov.au/weather/nt/
http://www.weatherzone.com.au/synoptic.jsp
https://metocph.nmci.navy.mil/jtwc/warnings/sh1008.gif


Hopefully it stays on track below us.
Eitherway, tonight, we dine in Hell!

Asides from an updated version of Gnome and 3d Desktop effects out-of-the-box, Gutsy Gibbon adds more much wanted features to Ubuntu. One of which is the Restricted Driver manager:


This should make it a whole lot easier for users to use hardware such as their Wireless cards.

There is also the added bonus of having the NTFS-3g driver integration... meaning you can now write to your NTFS partition. So, for those dual booters, life should be a bit easier, as you can move data to and from your Windows partition (before it was read-only).

The Ubuntu mirrors are available here.

7.09 is mainly a bug fix of 7.07 and doesn't seem to include any new additions to the svn trunk. Available at the usual location on OpenWRT

http://downloads.openwrt.org/

Waugh Partners is launching the first national research project to study companies and contributors involved in the Australian Open Source industry and community.

With growing demand for Open Source skills and technology, it's the perfect time to launch a major research effort to understand the strength of Open Source in Australia, the economic potential for the broader Australian ICT industry, our skills capacity, and the symbiotic relationship between the Open Source industry and community around it.

Please fill in the survey.

The Freifunk team have been doing a lot of work on the firmware and have released firmware version 1.6.2 (stable) earlier this month. This is after nearly a years worth of development in the 1.5 (development) tree.

Thanks to Rip for making us aware of the new version.

You can download the latest firmware from Freifunk's download page (grab the -en for English).