SUSE Linux Enterprise
Server 10 is due for release in the summer of 2006; so what’s new? 

AppArmor – application level security service 

Xen 3.0 – includes fully integrated and supported version of
Xen 3.0 

Yast2 – Yast 2 updated to give consistent experience across
SUSE 

There isn’t a great deal of new stuff mentioned, not even in

the sixteen page downloadable PDF offered on their main page; most of the

content looks like a new marketing spin on old packages.

AppArmor interested me personally so I did a little digging

around on the net – what is it and what happened to SELinux???  Well the first question was not that hard to

find an answer to, a quick search on google came up with this source—AppArmor

basically allows you to trap an application so that it can only do what you

allow it to do in the policy definition, nothing more.  I found it interesting to see “AppArmor is

integrated with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 SP3 and openSUSE”; so it isn’t

really a selling point of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10!  On the question of AppArmor Vs. SELinux I

found an interesting journal entry here

(Thursday, February 9th, 2006). “Novell, who last year claimed to be the first

Linux distribution to ship with SELinux technology, suddenly announced that

they are dropping support for it. To replace it, they bought a product called

AppArmor and are now asking third party developers to use it instead of

SELinux… Not only is AppArmor divergent from upstream/community, but it is also

not suitable as a real alternative to SELinux, because it lacks the flexibility

and scalability of SELinux to address the full range of security concerns, and

its limitations are not just in implementation but architectural.”—good stuff,

the full entry is worth a read if you’re interested in the subject.