Linux-based operating systems are built through an open-development model, which can afford organizations an early view of—and an opportunity to influence—the technologies and implementations that will eventually work their way into these companies' infrastructures.

What's more, these early looks extend beyond points on a presentation slide deck to comprise runable code that's gathered into fast-moving, community-supported Linux distributions that administrators can begin testing in advance of the long-lived, enterprise-oriented releases to come.

I examined the principal security-related developments in three such vanguard Linux distributions—Canonical's Ubuntu Linux 8.10, Novell's OpenSUSE 11.1 and Red Hat's Fedora 10, each of which are now available in beta form.

Ubuntu Linux 8.10, which is slated for release at the end of October, ships with a new encrypted private directory feature that enables users to store sensitive data securely without incurring the performance overhead of full-volume encryption.

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