Linux Weekly News

Bringing you the latest news from the Linux World.
Dedicated to keeping Linux users up-to-date, with concise news for all interests
Published August 13, 1998

Sections:
Linux articles
Security
Kernel news
Distributions
Ports
Software Development
Free/Open-Source Software
Commercial/Press Releases
Announcements
Links of the week
Feedback and corrections

Other stuff:
LWN Archives
Linux Links
Linux Events Calendar
Daily Updates

Leading items

This week Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond, Ian Murdock, and Tim Sailor announced the formation of a new organization, called the "Open Source Initiative." Those of you who have not yet done so may wish to head over to this Slashdot topic to read their announcement, and the resulting discussion. Be warned that older monitors may not be able to handle this level of heat; view at your own risk.

We are, allegedly, a community of friends bound together by our appreciation of free software. Why is it that we feel the need to go after each other with such anger? Conflicts will happen in any situation involving more than one person, but it need not be so harsh, and so childish, over such small things. The Linux community is going to need to grow up a little, or we will soon find ourselves back in the marginal position from which we are only now emerging.

Let us look at the specific disagreements for a moment here. There seem to be objections to "self appointed politicians," and politics in general. Addressing the second point first: politics is part of the human condition, period. It's how we work out the ways in which we will relate to one another on all scales, from "who takes out the garbage today" to "who do we bomb today." It is inescapable. We need to learn how to deal with it.

Self-appointed leaders: we currently have no other type. We have no mechanism for formally appointing leaders, and it is not at all clear that we need one. If you are not happy with one of our "leaders," argue against them rationally, or ignore them. Today's self-appointed leader will become tomorrow's kook of the month if they try to lead in the wrong direction. Meanwhile, don't fault them for trying to push things forward. Many people want to see a future where free software is the norm; getting there will take politics, spokesmen, and leaders. Simply writing good code is, alas, not sufficient.

Even if you don't care if "the suits" adopt free software, even if you don't care about how many other people use free software, remember this: a larger free software community means more and better software. Look at the progress that projects like GNOME are making, and think about whether that would have been possible even a year ago. Even WINE seems to be getting somewhere, finally. Think about how long we waited in the 80's for GNU to produce emacs and gcc. The current situation is far better, and the efforts of the people named above certainly deserve some of the credit for that improvement.

That said, those who do find themselves in a leadership position within our community should feel themselves obligated to work toward consensus and peace. They should not promote divisions and conflict. They should understand that the old saying "no good deed goes unpunished" applies to them more than anybody, and react to flames accordingly. Leadership is a responsibility, and a heavy one at that.

Others complain about the "open source" trademark. It is true that having to put little (TM)'s and attributions on our writing seems like a step backward. It is true that Eric Raymond's call for us to help police the usage of the term does not sit well with everybody. But it is also true that Eric owns the term. And he did not snarf one that people were using; he did it right and made up something new. "Open Source" did not exist at the beginning of this year. Nobody is forcing the use of "open source," if you do not like it, do not use it.

Eric is trying to create a well-defined term as a defense against bogus "free software" claims. If our world continues to grow, we are going to need such a thing. The alternatives are worse: consider an attempt by the Software Publisher's Association to define "free software," perhaps by way of a government decree. One needs only look at the attempts to coopt the term "organic" in the U.S. to see the possibilities.

To summarize: it is too early to criticise the "Open Source Initiative," let's see who else they appoint to their board and what they do. We should not criticise our "leaders" for the mere fact that they are leaders. We need such people. We should not flame "open source." It should be treated like GPL'd software: use it according to its terms, or leave it alone. And let us all try to be a little more polite to each other, a little less inflammatory. World Domination awaits us, but we still have to earn it.

Speaking of our leaders: here is Richard Stallman's latest piece, entitled Free Software Needs Free Documentation. Herein he complains about the sale of manuals to publishers who disallow free redistribution of the material.

Back in early May we covered the Congressional attempts to codify "shrink wrap licenses" into law. The proposed law makes these licenses fully binding and strengthens them at the same time - even writing reviews of software, or posting about security problems could become illegal. Now Rob Clark has pointed us to this Dvorak column in PC Magazine which says that this law is alive and well. "The shrink-wrap license agreement will be stronger than ever, and we are going to have to get used to it." Some of us do not intend to get used to it; it's nice to have this reminder of what we are working for.

Also just announced is the Linux Compatibility Standards Project, which is a cooperative venture between Red Hat and Debian. Meanwhile, the Linux Standard Base project is having difficulties. Members of the group were divided over whether they should be producing a standards document or a working reference platform. Bruce Perens, an advocate of the latter course, sent out this message stating that he was trimming the group back and concentrating on the reference platform; he subsequently left the project entirely. The word is that the LSB will continue, though under whose leadership and in which direction is not entirely clear.

Got some feedback, some news to publish, or something else you would like to tell us? lwn@lwn.net is our address.

Or would you like to be notified when new editions of the Linux Weekly News are published? Click here and send a blank message.

Please see our contact page for other contact information.

Here is the permanent site for this page.

Need top-quality commercial Linux support? Please see our Linux support page.

    
[Articles]

Linux in the news

"Corporate America has em braced open-source software" according to this lengthy and favorable article in Techweek. It is pretty well done, even if their use of "open source" doesn't quite agree with the rules...

Here's a very positive article on CNN. It includes some interesting discussion on Sun and how they view the system: "'We don't see Solaris and Linux as competing products,' says [Sun's] Andres, 'because one is supported and one isn't.'" No comment.

How much would you pay for an open source magazine? Nicolas Petreley, who is working on such a scheme, asks the question and says "...the possibility of launching an open source web magazine is turning into a probability."

Chris Mason has published a couple of interesting articles on his Unixzone website. Renegade Marketing covers the advantage conferred by the ability of the Linux developers to say "no." It's Freeware, not Cheapware describs why he feels the Linux community will purchase the commercial software that has been recently announced. Today companies with solid products can generate significant revenue by offering their wares on Linux. We agree with him. Hopefully the market will prove us right over the next few months.

This article in ZDNet covers why SGI has started supporting the open-source samba project.

ZDNet did a a brief and favorable review of the Applixware office suite.

The Chicago Tribune's Jimmy Guterman reviews his 1998 technology predictions. "Prediction #5: The enterprise landscape shifts to Microsoft. Reality check: NT 5 is due to come out next year and its market share isn't increasing as fast as Linux's"

Mark Hall's Performance Computing rumor mill mentions MathSoft's release of Splus 5.0 on Linux. "Are the major UNIX vendors getting nervous? They should. Linux is one of the hottest topics inside enterprise IT shops"

Some coverage of Sun's announcement (free Solaris for noncommercial use): There is a fairly straightforward article in TechWeb which includes some talk with Larry Augustin. PC Week also ran a brief article noting that the source remains secret. "We won't be giving source code away [...] we wouldn't want to infringe on the Linux [OS] space. We want to see Linux grow." (Thanks to Michael Callahan for this one).

Jose Manuel Benitez pointed us to this introduction to Linux, in Spanish, as evidence of the growing impact that Linux is making in the Spanish press. (Here's the Babelfish link for those of us who don't read Spanish; click "Translate" once you get there).

From France, we get more Linux articles, including an article on Linux "at-work" in the Rhone-Alps, a page describing more than 30 examples of Linux in use in the enterprise and statistics on the operating systems used in the domain .fr. Fun stuff! (All found in Les Nouvelles Neuves de Linux).

Don't expect World Domination anytime soon, according to this Information Week column. The author is not truly down on Linux, but he does apply a bit of the "no support" FUD and predicts that corporate conservatism and inertia will keep Linux from getting too far in the near future. "...I suspect that five years from now, NT will dominate the desktop and will share the enterprise with Unix, not Linux."

Apple should release its source for MacOS X to keep developers from defecting to Linux; at least, a consultant is telling them so, according to this ZDNet article.

Here's a longish Wired News article on the push to get Apple to free some of their source. Those folks certainly see Linux as a threat to the future of the Apple platform...

Jesse Berst speaks out on open source in an AnchorDesk column. It's hard to say where he really stands... "...the greatest advantage of [open source software] may be its historical inevitability," but "I think Microsoft will be in power for decades."

Upside Magazine has this article on changes in the way that free software is "marketed." The tone is somewhat condescending, but the sense still seems to be that free software has "arrived."

The Walt's Tools and Tips column in Electronic Design magazine concerns Linux, and whether electronic design folks should be using it. The answer seems to be a qualified "yes."

Ralph Nader is working on another Microsoft conference, according to this ZDNet article. "Meanwhile, Nader's group is putting its money where its mouth is on the anti-Microsoft front. The non-profit already has installed rival operating system Linux in seven office computers that used to run Windows". Thanks to Tod Hagan for clueing us in on this one.

 
 
    
  Top / News / Security / Kernel / Dists / Ports / Devel / Free / Commercial / Announce / Links / Feedback  
    
[Security] A severe bug in Apache has been reported on Bugtraq, which allows a nasty denial-of-service attack. Unofficial RPMs for RedHat, Caldera, SuSE, TurboLinux and other RPM-based systems have been posted, as well as official fixes from Debian, Red Hat and S.u.S.E. Red Hat has also released a patch for their secure server product.

"The ADM crew" has released a security scanner for samba that they call ADMsmb. It is based on the source for smbclient and will perform a complete audit of samba for a specified host. The announcement managed to stay up on bugtraq for four days without anyone reporting a problem with the software, so either it works pretty well, or no one tried it ...

Michal Zalewski pointed out that the mail.local program, introduced with sendmail 8.9.1, comes with a large assortment of security problems.

 
    
  Top / News / Security / Kernel / Dists / Ports / Devel / Free / Commercial / Announce / Links / Feedback  
    
[Kernel] The current development kernel release is 2.1.115. With this release, Linus has announced a hard code freeze. Nothing but bug fixes will go in, with just a couple of possible exceptions. If this edge doesn't bleed enough for you, there is a 2.1.116 pre-patch available in the usual place; Alan Cox has also released a 2.1.115ac1 patch.

A number of people are reporting problems with pseudo terminals under 2.1.115. These problems are almost certainly the result of erroneous or truly ancient configurations which use an old (and no longer supported) form of pty numbering. A bit of the history of the problem was posted by Linus, those seeking a solution may want to have a look at Peter Anvin's summary of how to fix the problem.

If you're counting the days until the 2.2 release, you may want to watch Alan Cox's 2.1 showstopper list. And if you've not read Joseph Pranevich's summary of 2.2 changes (covered here a couple of weeks ago), here's another chance.

The 2.0.36 pre-patch is up to version 5. Earlier this week Alan Cox released a version that incorporated modular sound, as well as a new version of the AIC7xxx driver. Modular sound has since come back out; it will not go into the 2.0 kernel. The rest is still there; it can be found on Alan's FTP site.

Alexander Kjeldaas has written an FAQ for Linux capabilities. Capabilities allow the control of privelege in a finer manner than the traditional Unux "root/everybody else" scheme. Capabilities replace the "securelevel" scheme found in earlier kernels, so people who use securelevel may want to have a good look. The FAQ is located here.

Much, much discussion occurred on whether devfs should go into the 2.2 kernel. Very little was said, however, to add to the discussion as we reported last week. Richard Gooch has brought devfs up to version 52. Linus has said that devfs will "probably" go in, but a decision has not yet been announced.

Discussion also continued at length regarding the no-exec stack patch, which Linus has flatly ruled out. Not much new to report on this one either. Aaron Grier, however, posted about a project called Immunix which is putting together a version of Red Hat 5.1 compiled with their "StackGuard" compiler. This compiler puts in run-time checking for buffer overrun problems, thus catching problems before it is too late.

A new version of the umount system call got slipped in recently; this one is a two-argument version that supports a MNT_FORCE flag. This flag allows the unmounting of filesystems even when they are "busy." Some discussion happened regarding the proper name for this call; other systems which have adopted it simply call it "umount". That, of course, leads to incompatibilities with existing code, even if very few things call umount. The final decision on what to call it rests with the libc folks.

Alex Buell's framebuffer HOWTO is up to v0.13. Check it out on his web site. Slashdot also ran an article by Joseph Pranevich on the new framebuffer stuff.

Since we're a weekly publication, chances are we'll be behind a rev or two on the kernel release by the time you read this page. Up-to-the-second information can always be found at LinuxHQ.
    
  Top / News / Security / Kernel / Dists / Ports / Devel / Free / Commercial / Announce / Links / Feedback  
    
[DISTRIBUTIONS]

Caldera

According to Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at Sm@rt Reseller, Caldera will be launching their own certification program, the Certified Linux Engineer (CLE), in the first quarter of 1999. The announcement calls this the first Linux certification program. Although Red Hat has previously announced their Red Hat Linux Certified Engineer program, it is currently restricted to support partners and their exams and training programs are not yet going. The difference with the Caldera program seems to be that the title is "Certified Linux Engineer", not "Caldera Certified Linux Engineer". They are working with an independent third-party to build the actual testing and certification process.

We checked directly with Caldera and a press release with full details should be out sometime in the next ten days. Expect it to include actual dates and locations across the United States for introductory systems administration classes.

Debian

The review of Debian published in the Linux Gazette contains many compliments. This release is noteworthy for its skillful and painless handling of the lib5/libc6 issue, is one example. The author, Larry Ayers, used dpkg and dselect for his upgrade and installation processes rather than apt, which did color his final opinion. I predict that even with the installation improvements in Debian 2.0, it will continue to be a technical user's distribution.

SPI has chosen its new officers for the current term. For those that feared that Bruce's departure from Debian might spell a split between Debian and SPI, your fears are over. The officers, Ian Jackson, Martin Schulze, Dale Scheetz and Nils Lohner, are well known for their on-going work in the Debian area and are sure to run SPI for the best benefit of the Debian community. Here is the press release for more detailed information.

The issue of how to handle policy has resurfaced and appears to be moving forward. Manoj Srivastava described his proposal to use a group of policy maintainers, but leave policy decisions to the group of developers on debian-policy. With minor changes, his proposal seems likely to be adopted and at least four people so far have agreed to work as maintainers.

Red Hat

Marc Ewing has published an official paper outlining Red Hat's concerns with the Qt license and the reasons behind their decision not to ship the Qt library with Red Hat Linux. Among other things, he concludes that they can not ship KDE/Qt and stay within the GPL. Marc adds, it is of course Troll Tech's right to distribute Qt under any license terms they see fit, and correspondingly, it is Red Hat's right to choose whether or not to include Qt as a result. The decision will continue to differentiate Linux distributions, leaving individual users of Linux to decide what they want.

S.u.S.E.

We hear that the UK computer magazine PC Plus will be giving away the latest SuSE Linux as part of their cover CD for this month.
 
Please note that not every distribution will show up every week. Only distributions with recent news to report will be listed.
    
  Top / News / Security / Kernel / Dists / Ports / Devel / Free / Commercial / Announce / Links / Feedback  
    
[Ports]

Alpha

For those wanting to avoid the hassle and time to compile Mozilla on the Alpha, Kazushige Goto has put up a copy of his binary, statically compiled with Swim Motif. It is based on the 19980728 snapshot and some people testing it have run into minor problems. If you've been trying to compile Mozilla on the alpha and are looking for some tips, check out the recent discussions on the axp-list mailing list.

A couple of news articles for those interested in the future of Alpha. This one in TechWeb dwells on advanced optimization techniques, and talks about the Merced competition. This other, in Electronic News, is concerned with Compaq's position regarding Alpha.

Power PC

For those interested, Tom Rini pointed out that MkLinux can use 2.0.34 and 2.0.35. He provides modified versions of the patches and binary rpms on his homepage.

Sparc

Derrick J Brashear released another snapshot of his version of the stable kernel with a number of modifications to sparc-2.0.35 on August 5th.
 
    
  Top / News / Security / Kernel / Dists / Ports / Devel / Free / Commercial / Announce / Links / Feedback  
    
[Software Development]

Java

Stephen Wynne announced a test version of JDK 1.1.6 Version 3 for Linux on Intel. This one is strictly for the bold and brave.

The latest JDC Tech Tips covers filter streams and default constructors.

Those interested in Sun's Jini stuff may want to check out this InfoWorld article, which is a good basic description of how it goes together.

Python

A new version of the python distribution has been released. The new distribution includes new packages, updated packages and a fix for the xrpm problem. Oliver Andrich mentioned, by the way, that he could use a volunteer to help with supporting the Python distribution on S.u.S.E.

Greg Ewing has put out version 1.1 of Greg's GUI Framework. A tutorial has been added.

Tcl/tk

Version 1.2 of tclpp has been announced. The new release has added some new commands, support for nested classes and uses the Tcl 'package' mechanism for better version control.
 
    
  Top / News / Security / Kernel / Dists / Ports / Devel / Free
/ Commercial / Announce / Links / Feedback
 
    
[Free/Open-Source News]

Free/Open-Source Software News

Just after we published a newsletter saying that the GNOME 0.25 release was forthcoming, they went and did it. Here's their announcement.

A nice Linux success story, a group of high school students have put together their own Beowulf system. Way to go!

The PenguinPlay people are now having weekly IRC meetings (Sat, 21:00 GMT on EFNet, channel #gamedev) to facilitate their work in Linux games development. Everyone interested in the topic is invited. Summaries of the meetings are available.

Netscape/Mozilla

Things have been quiet in Mozilla land this week. We therefore offer you the latest Mozilla FAQ and take a guess that the heat of the summer has introduced a mild lethargy even in these hallways ...

Wine

Wine release 980809 is out. It appears to have a bug that has prevented compilation on several different platforms. This patch was posted by Ove Kaaven for the problem.

Wine headquarters has been revamped. Check it out and let them know if you have any difficulties finding what you need.

 
    
  Top / News / Security / Kernel / Dists / Ports / Devel / Free / Commercial / Announce / Links / Feedback  
    
[Commercial
        News/Press Releases]

Linux and the Commercial World

We received a note from the AT&T Labs regarding their DjVu document image compression software. They have modified their license for the software in response to complaints from the Linux community. At AT&T Labs, we read LWN and we support Linux. What a nice comment! We like them tremendously now ... Meanwhile, we are working to get a pointer to the new license, so we can find out what has changed.

Joel Moses pointed out to us that SysKonnect has Linux/x86 drivers available for their FDDI card.

Press Releases:

  • Al Guerra Enterprises has issued a press release covering the release of Apokalypse(tm), their Linux distribution for the Mac
  • O'Reilly announced their release of an updated version of "High Performance Computing"
  • Interbase has upgraded their Linux version to InterBase 5
  • Innosoft LDAP product for Linux.
  • Cayenne Software is now providing a version of their ObjectTeam component modeling tool for Linux. (See also their website).
  • MathSoft now supports both its S-Plus 5.0 software and its statistical data mining product line on Linux, due to requests from their international customers
  • The latest version of TowerJ from Tower Technology is out
  • AdvanSys' new Ultra-Wide SCSI Adapters include Linux in their supported platforms
  • Specialix ships Linux drivers on the CDROM that comes with their new SX serial device concentrators
  • Intraware is the exclusive electronic distribution partner for Informix's free Linux developer kit program
 
    
  Top / News / Security / Kernel / Dists / Ports / Devel / Free / Commercial / Announce / Links / Feedback  
    
[Announcements]

Software

Package Version Description
Acidblood 1.2.6 Full-featured IRC Bot
AfterStep 1.5pre7 Window manager for the X/Windows environment with NeXT look and feel
Anti-Filtering-Proxy-Proxy 1.17 HTTP Proxy Software Helps Circumvent Censorware and Filtering Proxies
asapm 1.5 X11 application with AfterStep look for monitoring APM on laptops
aumix 1.11 Color text mode sound mixer with GPM support
BashPrompt 0.4.5b6 Configures the prompt in a bash shell
binutils 2.9.1.0.9 Provides programs to assemble and manipulate binary andobject files.
Blackbox 0.40.3 WindowManager for X11 written in C++
BMRT 2.3.6b RenderMan compliant renderer
bmud 0.1 GNOME mud client
The Linux Console Tools 1998.08.11 Allows you to set-up and manipulate the Linux console
Corel WordPerfect 8.0 pre-release Commerical word processor for Linux (and many other platforms)
cRadio 0.9 QT/X11 interface that can control a radio card connected to your PC.
CVS 1.9.30 Concurrent Versions System
DDD snapshot 19980807 Common graphical user interface for GDB, DBX and XDB
DECnet for Linux 0.0.9 DECnet socket layer and applications
Drall 0.6.2 Allows users to access their directories and files remotely via a web browser
elvis 2.1i A clone of vi/ex, the standard UNIX editor.
Eterm DR0.8 An X11 VT102 emulator with Enlightenment features
Ethereal 0.3.3 GUI network analyzer
fltk beta-19980811 C++ user interface toolkit for X and OpenGL
Ftape 4.x Beta 11 A driver for tape drives that connect to the floppy controller
geg 0.02 Simple GTK+ 2D-function plotting program
GGlyph 0.1.3 Font previewer and installer for X11
GHX 98/08/11 GTK clone of the Hotline software
GLOBAL 3.1 A common source code tag system for C and Yacc.
gltt 2.3 Allows you to read and draw TrueType fonts in any OpenGL application
Gmp32cinta 05081998 Adjusts the times of MP3's to make them fit perfectly onto an audio tape
GNOME 0.26 GNU Network Object Model Environment
GNU Privacy Guard 0.3.4 GPLed PGP replacement tool
GNUS 5.6.33 Emacs news/mail reader
GXedit 1.11 Simple GPL'ed graphical editor using GTK
GYVE 0.1.2.4 A vector-based drawing program in the spirit of Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw
hexedit 0.9.4 View and edit files in hexadecimal or in ASCII
IceConf 0.1 A graphical configuration program for IceWM
icewm 0.9.12 Window Manager designed for speed, usability and consistency
IconMaker 1.4 A utility to create app-icons for the WindowMaker window manager
icoutil 0.1.0 win32 icon (.ico) file converter and listing tool
ident2 0.995 An auth/ident server.
ImageMagick 4.0.8 Package for display and interactive manipulation of images for X11
IMapTool 0.6 Tool for creating clientside imagemaps
IMP 1.1.1 IMAP and PHP3 based webmail system
ImPress .03alpha WYWIWYG publishing and presentation tool
JCam 0.4 Java application for downloading images from many popular digital cameras
KBiff 1.0.1 New mail notification utility for KDE
kdcpi 0.0.2 Program to download pictures from a Kodak DC200/DC210 Digital Camera
keirc 0.3.5 A powerful Internet Relay Chat client program written for KDE.
Kmp3te 0.4 MP3 tag editor
ktuner 0.5 KDE program to control a radio card connected to your pc
KVIrc 0.6.0 snapshot 1 Enhanced visual IRC client for X11/KDE
Lesstif 0.86 LGPL'd re-implementation of Motif
Licq 0.40pr3 ICQ clone for linux with most of the functionality of the official Java version
Linux joystick driver 1.2.8 Provides Linux support for joysticks
Linux Router Project (LRP) 2.9.3 A networking centric mini-distribution of Linux
Lynx 2.8 fully-featured, text-based World Wide Web browser
MailMan 1.0b5 Mailing list manager with built in web access
Masqdialer 0.0.3 Makes IP Masquerade dialout access easier for people on your LAN.
mgetty 1.1.17 Intelligent getty and fax support
minicom 1.82b5 Serial communication program
mod_ssl 2.0.1-1.3.1 Apache Interface to SSLeay
MpegTV Player 1.0.6.9 A realtime MPEG Video+Audio player
News Peruser 3.17 An offline newsreader for Linuxand X11
OSS 3.91a Provides sound card drivers for most popular sound cards under Linux
pavuk 0.9pl1 Webgrabber with an optional Xt or GTK GUI
PhotoPC 2.6a Utility to control digital cameras based on Sierra Imaging firmware
PortScanner 1.0 Simple and easy to use TCP port scanner
ProFTPD 1.1.6 Advanced, incrediblyconfigurable and secure FTP daemon
Prometheus Truecolour (PTC) 2.0.3 A lowlevel framebuffer access library with fast on the fly conversion
PyGTK 0.4.5 A set of bindings for the GTK widget set
qclock 1.0 Clock with an attitude
Qt Masqdialer 0.0.8 Qt based client for Jeff Meininger's Masqdialer server
RabbIT 1.0 Mutating, caching webproxy to speed up surfing over slow links
radiusContext 1.51 A RADIUS accounting log analysis package
Replay 0.2 GTK-based MP3 player for X11
rpm2html/rpmfind 0.98 Utilities to create HTML pages and solve dependancy problems of RPM packages
Runlevel.app 0.92 Allows system administrators to add, delete, edit and execute services
Siag Office 3.0 Free office package for Unix
Stamp 0.610 Adds a graphical timestamp to a greyscale jpeg images
STV500 0.70 SVGALib app for watching TV with Accuview TV/Video Capture cards and its clones
Sulawesi 0.2 multimodal wearable/ubiquitous agent development environment
Superficie 0.3 A program for basic 3D surfaces viewing and manipulation.
svgalib 1.3.1.19980728 Low-level graphics library that provides VGA and SVGA modes in a console
tcp_server 0.9.5 Simple tcp based multi-server
think 0.0.3 Outliner and project organizer
THUD 0.9 Cycle-based Scheme-HDL register-transfer level simulator
TimeMan 0.2 Time manager, calendar, alarm
Twisted Reality 0.99.0 A fully buzzword-compliant roleplaying system.
Vim 5.2j Popular vi clone that features syntax highlighting and an X11 interface
WIDD 1.0 Front-end application to manage databases through an X11 interface
Wine 980809 Emulator of the Windows 3.x and Win32 APIs.
wmlm78 0.9.0 WindowMaker utility to display system monitor information from a lm78 chip
wmss 0.6d WindowMaker Sound Server Configurator
WMTimeBomb 0.1.6 Mine sweeper type game for WindowMaker
WXftp 0.4.0 FTP client for X with nice and intuitive GTK+ and Motif GUI
xdiskusage 1.1 Graphical display of disk usage
xgate 0.0.0 Client-initiated X11 relay, for displaying X11 through firewalls.
XQF 0.8.4 QuakeWorld/Quake2 server browser and launcher for Linux/X11
XqMixer 1.7 X11 sound mixer that uses Qt.
Xrpm 2.2 A simple X interface to the RedHat Package Manager

Projects

The web site for Project Independence ("Linux for the masses") has moved to a new location.

Events

Don't forget to check out the LWN Events Calendar.

Web sites

The "LinuxB" Linux Business site (with both English and French language content) has moved to a new site under its own "linuxbusiness.com" domain.

User Group News

Please feel free to send us ongoing information about offerings, reports, etc., from your local user group. We are happy to keep the community up-to-date and reward hard-working people with a little recognition. Just send us a note at lwn@lwn.net.

The Irish Linux Users Group is currently compiling a list of people in Ireland that would be interested in getting the Linux Journal on a regular basis. Details are available on their website.

Jesus Eugenio Sanchez is working at reviving the Monterrey (Mexico) Linux user group.

 
Our software announcements are provided courtesy of Freshmeat.
    
  Top / News / Security / Kernel / Dists / Ports / Devel / Free / Commercial / Announce / Links / Feedback  
    
[Links]

Linux links of the week

The Linux Applications page has been thoroughly redone and is worth another look. They seem to be positioning themselves as a direct competition to Freshmeat...

LinuxAce is a general-purpose Linux site with some potential. It features news, documentation, software downloads and a discussion area.

Dave Finton has scripted another Linux commercial.

 
    
  Top / News / Security / Kernel / Dists / Ports / Devel / Free / Commercial / Announce / Links / Feedback  
    
[Feedback]

Feedback and Corrections

Numerous Kiwis wrote in to complain about our reference to the "New Zealand Press" last week. The proper name for the paper is simply "The Press." We had found that a little vague, and thus added "New Zealand", but we changed the apparent name in the process. "The Press" is published in Christchurch, on the South Island of New Zealand, one of the most amazing places your editor has ever been.
 
  
 
Eklektix, Inc. Linux powered! This page is produced by Eklektix, Inc.