Review: The fast-moving Red Hat distribution polishes SELinux, adds new tools and improves performance.

In its first five releases, Red Hat's Fedora Core has represented the Linux technology vanguard. And so it is with Fedora Core 6.

During tests, Fedora Core 6 impressed eWEEK Labs with the progress it has made toward making Security-Enhanced Linux—and the dramatically improved security protections that SELinux helps afford—more palatable. We also liked the look of Fedora Core's new graphical and command-line tools for managing Xen virtual machines, although, as with every Xen product we've yet tested, plenty of rough spots remain.

Solid security

One of Fedora Core 6's most distinctive features is its leading-edge support for SELinux, which bolsters the security of the Linux machines on which it's deployed by meting out to applications and users only those rights explicitly granted by policy.

Fedora Core 6 ships with a targeted policy turned on by default. The targeted policy covers a limited number of system services, and we could enable or disable specific protections through Fedora Core 6's security-level configuration tool.

New in Fedora Core is a handy troubleshooting tool for SELinux. This tool prompted us from the notification area in our system tray when an application we ran triggered an SELinux denial. For example, we installed VMware's VMware Workstation on one of our test machines but hit a wall while creating a new VM. We found on VMware's Web forum a familiar solution to our problem—deactivate SElinux.

Instead, we installed Fedora Core 6's new troubleshooting tool, restarted our test box and ran VMware Workstation again. This time, the troubleshooter informed us that SELinux had prevented VMware Workstation from making its stack executable. We were able to turn off this portion of SELinux's policy, and VMware Workstation then ran without problems.