Happy new year everyone! Today we are introducing the third beta release of Linux Security 7.00. This is mainly a bug fix release and does not contain any completely new features. We have also extended our list of supported platforms with 32-bit versions of Asianux 2.0, Asianux 3.0, and Miracle Linux 3.0.
Some other new supported platforms are also on their way, including Fedora Core 7 and Turbolinux 11, but could not quite make it into this release.
Please find the full product package here: f-secure-linux-security-7.00.70103.tgz (MD5,
SHA1).
Be sure to read the release notes before installing. As usual, any comments and feedback you might have is greatly appreciated, so please send them to the address at the bottom of this page!

Even though it’s just barely 10 days since we announced our last 7.00 beta release, we’re today presenting another one.

This time around we’ve got a couple of new features, although most of the work has gone into overall quality and stability improvements, much like with the last release. The manual scanning wizard has been redesigned to show a progress bar during scanning, and the Summary screen has gotten a new row showing the current Integrity Checking status, which also gives the user an opportunity to initialize the file system baseline and enable the rootkit protection through a wizard. The on-access scanner component has been removed from the `fschooser‘ program - instead the user can disable the Real-time Scanning feature completely by setting “Virus Protection” and “Integrity Protection” to “Disabled” in the web user interface.

Here are the usual links - full package: f-secure-linux-security-7.00.64805.tgz (MD5, SHA1). As always, please read the release notes and send us feedback to the address at the bottom of this page.

Hot off our build and test systems comes the Linux Security 7.00 Beta release!

Since Technology Preview 3, we have mostly been working on bug fixing and stability improvements. There has been quite a lot of “behind the scenes” work in our infrastructure - such as enhanced test environments - that may not be immediately noticeable, but in the long run it will result in a higher over-all quality of all our releases. Apart from those quality improvements, the manual scanning wizard through the web user interface has gotten a facelift, so that it will now do scanning in the background, providing better feedback for the users.

The beta package can be downloaded here: f-secure-linux-security-7.00.6442.tgz (MD5, SHA1). As always, please read the release notes and send us feedback to the address at the bottom of this page.

Today, we are pleased to announce the release of Technology Preview 3 of our upcoming product Linux Security 7.00. It has been a bit over month since we released Technology Preview 2. Last month we have concentrated on improving performance and quality of existing features. Some of the improvements are:

• The on-access scanner cache has been moved from the user-level scanning daemon to the Dazuko kernel module, significantly improving the overall performance for on-access scanning
• Alert screen in Web User Interface has a button for displaying a printable version of the alerts
• A GUI program fsgav has been introduced for scanning files and testing integrity
• It is now possible to specify default directories for manual scanning and scheduled scanning tasks. These directories are used in Web User Interface when using the Manual Scanning Wizard or creating a new Scheduled Scanning Task.

The same disclaimer applies as with the last two Technology Previews, even though stability should have improved: preferably test this in a virtual machine environment or a non-critical machine that you don’t mind crashing. This Technology Preview supports upgrade from Linux Server Security 5.30 and later, but it should only be used for testing purposes.

You can download the package here: f-secure-linux-security-7.00.6395.tgz (MD5, SHA1). Please read the release notes and send us feedback to the e-mail address at the bottom of this page!

Today, we’re pleased to announce the release of Technology Preview 2 of our upcoming product Linux Security 7.00. In July we released Technology Preview 1, and since then we’ve been doing our best to work towards our goals for the next major release. Many of us have been on vacation on and off during the last two months, so as usual during the summer the activity is a little bit lower than other times of the year. Still, we’ve added a couple of new features since the last technology preview:

• Firewall rules can now be applied to any interface
• We have a first stab at GNOME Nautilus integration using the Nautilus Actions extension

Not all changes are visible though, we’ve also been working with quite a few “under the hood” changes. There are some major performance improvements in the pipeline, but unfortunately they didn’t make it to this preview build. The same disclaimer applies as with the last Technology Preview, even though stability should have improved: preferably test this in a virtual machine environment or a non-critical machine that you don’t mind crashing.

You can download the package here: f-secure-linux-security-7.00.6357.tgz (MD5, SHA1). Please read the release notes and send us feedback to the e-mail address at the bottom of this page!

As of yesterday, Linux Client and Server Security 5.30 is no longer a supported version. This was a nice release, at least from our perspective. It introduced several new and improved features:

• Scanning core placed in its own rpm package, the f-secure-security-platform.
• The core introduced riskware scanning.
• Database updates abandoned the old HTTP download client and replaced it with Automatic Update Agent. AUA is a robust background daemon with advanced binary diff capabilities that save bandwidth.
• We took into use syscall hooking in the dazuko driver for Linux 2.6 kernels. This made it possible to provide scan-on-close functionality and support Red Hat kernels. Earlier versions required Red Hat customers to recompile a kernel with capability as a module.
• Firewall rules wizard was introduced in the web user interface.
• Support for servers running Samba. (That was easy. We just tested that realtime protection works with Samba.)
• We shipped a guide for integrating with popular mail transport agent software.

Today, this fine release is history. We encourage everyone to upgrade to Client or Server Security 5.52. You will get:

• Support for 64 bit Linux distributions.
• Command-line-only installation mode for customers who don’t need anything else.
• Rock-solid stability. We’ve worked very hard to eliminate any possibility for system hangs and fixed lots of bugs.

A company called Untangle arranged a test for Linux anti-virus products (Be careful! The page has links to live viruses!)

Because the test did not look very well set up, we chose not to participate in it. Others have already commented on the merits of the test arrangements, so I won’t go into more details in here.

However, curiosity got the best of me and I downloaded the test set and tried it on F-Secure Linux Server Security 5.52. Of the 34 files in the test set, we detect 31 as infected. The remaining 3 files are password-protected zip files, which obviously cannot be scanned.

So, we did rather well in the test after all. But you don’t have to take my word for it. For good testing of anti-virus software see Virus Bulletin and AV-Comparatives where our software has always gotten top scores.

Just had a look at Symphony OS 2007 which we found inside Linux Format September 2007 issue DVD. Symphony is a Ubuntu based Linux distribution which uses the Mezzo for desktop environment. Mezzo in turn is a FVWM-based usability driven desktop project aiming to give us a new way of presenting information. The four hot corners of the screen are very well utilized and all the applications and files are visible on the desktop, instead of hidden inside complex menus.

While Symphony OS still has some bugs and the overall experience felt a bit sluggish, it seems like something to keep an eye on.

I’ve been participating Guadec 2007 this week in Birmingham. There has been some really interesting presentations about the future of`desktop computing and what are the possible ways in which Gnome could go forward. Online Desktop seems to be the next big thing and there have been some concrete improvements in that direction. One good example of this is the Pyro Desktop, which was released here in Guadec just a few days ago. Also, Telepathy framework seems to be strongly supporting the connected lifestyle of today’s computer users. As mentioned in some presentations, it seems that Open Source Software has the advantage of being able to make bold moves without having to worry too much about backwards compatibility and other such things that commercial desktop systems often have to face.

Mobile computing seems to be another hot thing and Nokia has been widely visible in the conference with Maemo, their Gnome based desktop used in the 770 and 800 devices.

On the usability side, MacSlow was here presenting his lowfat approach, which was even nicer when seen live than watching the videos from his website. I am definitely going to install it and try it out. MacSlow also had a very focused and
clear picture on how to improve the usability of desktops, so lowfat is definitely not only about showing cool bling bling :) And speaking of bling, there is also a new library called clutter which is able to do some neat stuff on your screen. Check out the demos.

This is also a ten-year birthday for Gnome, which is nice. Gnome has definitely come a long way to be where it is today. And, as Jono Bacon said in his keynote speech, even if Gnome kind of competes with KDE, in the end it does not really matter which one wins or is more popular. We still have a Free Software desktop system, something which did not exist ten years ago.

We here at the F-Secure Linux team are currently working hard on our next major release, preliminarily scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2007. There’s going to be quite a few changes, and the whole feature set is not even completely decided yet. A lot of it depends on customer and partner feedback during the project as well as from previous versions, which is why we have decided to make a public Technology Preview at this relatively early stage. It should be noted that this is in early alpha stage - although we continuously test our builds and try to make sure it doesn’t crash and burn too badly, some of it contains very new code working deeply within your kernel, still wet behind its ears. In short: do not run it on a production machine under any circumstances. It can possibly crash your computer, and even (although unlikely) make it unable to boot without deep repair magic involved. I recommend using a virtualized environment (such as VMware) to try this out.

Despite these warnings, based on what we’ve heard from customers, I think this release has some eagerly-anticipated features.

Here’s a short summary of the things we’re bringing out:

• Our current sister products Linux Client Security and Linux Server Security will be merged into one product called F-Secure Linux Security. By using different keycodes, the user can choose what feature set to purchase.
• On the same theme, you will be able to entirely disable parts of the product that you do not need. For example, on a centrally managed installation where the end-user need not interact with the product, one can disable the web user-interface to conserve resources. If you already have an existing firewall management infrastructure in place, you can disable the firewall component. This has previously been done by many customers by simply removing the corresponding .config file in /etc/opt/f-secure/fsma/modules, but hopefully you can now do the same in a much cleaner and well-supported way.
• The installer will be simplified to not ask any questions upon installation. Instead, the customer can tweak needed settings using command-line tools, the web user-interface or the Policy Manager after installation. Of course, we will still support supplying the --auto command-line option to configure the product directly upon installation.
• We will provide better integration with the modern desktops with native alert notifications.
• Of course, under the hood there are tons of changes aimed at improving stability, usability and support for new technologies and platforms. One notable change is that we have decided to drop support for some old platforms like Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8, where maintaining compatibility would increase complexity regards to both product code base and testing efforts, with little added benefit. However, the final set of supported distributions is not decided yet - it will be decided as the project nears completion, after discussions with customers and partners.

To check out the Technology Preview, first read the release notes! Really, please do. It contains important information about known problems and the new installation and setup procedure. We haven’t got any manual ready yet, so the release notes is the closest thing you’ll get.

Then, download the package: f-secure-linux-security-7.00.6275.tgz (MD5, SHA1).

Please email us your feedback about the Technology Preview! You can find the address at the bottom of the page. If your feedback includes a bug report, please remember to mention which distribution (name and version) you’re using as well as kernel version.