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 27, 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 The Linux trademark issue. This week saw what was probably the first enforcement action regarding the Linux trademark. We have tried to piece together a summary of what happened with this action. Unfortunately, the folks at Linux International never answered a short list of questions we sent them last week, so this summary is being written in the absence of input from them. Remember that "Linux" is not a free term; it is a trademark owned by Linus Torvalds. A substantial effort was required to secure that ownership -- a certain unpleasant person had tried to claim it for his own. (See this note if you're unfamiliar with the resolution of this issue). Now that this trademark is in its rightful owner's hands, it is important that it be protected. Thus, when Mike McLagan challenged the validity of the Linux trademark (see his bullet #7), a response had to be made. Trademark challenges can not be left unanswered. So Linux International sent a note to Mr. McLagan stating the validity of the trademark, and politely asking him to cease saying otherwise. There was also allegedly a conversation between Mike and Linus on the subject. The end result was that Mike stopped disputing the validity of the Linux Trademark. He even updated the LSA website with ® symbols and the "Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds" footnote. That last bit actually makes the LSA site unique among Linux web sites. Some searching through the Red Hat, Caldera and S.u.S.E. web sites turns up no trademark acknowledgement (though Red Hat, at least, does print it on their CD box). In fact, even the Linux International site (including their new in development site) lacks any sort of trademark acknowledgement. The Linux Weekly News did not have one either; we have since added it to the bottom of the page. Thus, ironically, Mike McLagan may have been partially right: is it possible that not enough attention is being paid to the preservation of the Linux trademark? Putting ® symbols and footnotes on our pages doesn't come easily to many of us, but maybe we need to do so anyway. Sooner or later, given the nature of this world, some bozo is guaranteed to put out something under the Linux name that is in no way Linux. If that bozo can not be shut down, the image of Linux as a whole could suffer badly. We will want that trademark; let's be sure it will still be there for us when we do. (For those of you who haven't had enough of the whole "Linux Standards Association" affair...here is a site at MIT with a comprehensive collection of information about the whole thing. Thanks to Piotr Mitros for putting this page together.) The Linux Standard Base (LSB) and Linux Compatibility Standards (LCS) projects have merged back together. The combined and revitalized group will push forward with a three-pronged project: (1) a written standard, (2) a test suite, and (3) a sample implementation. The new leader of the whole thing will be Daniel Quinlan. See their announcement for the whole story. They have their web site at their new domain: linuxbase.org. One sentence in their announcement says it all: "Now that the LSB Project combines the original focus of the LSB with the goals of the LCS, the LCS founders see no need for any separate standardization effort." The January 1999 issue of IEEE Software will be a special issue about Linux. They have issued a call for papers. A followup note covers required file formats (I personally don't much care if it's written on a napkin with a felt-tip marker.), goals, an encouragement to contact him to start a dialog if you're interested, but don't know where to begin. Let's take advantage of this opportunity to show other professionals what makes us so excited about Linux!	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.
	Linux in the news The FUD we have been expecting arrived this week. (FUD = "fear, uncertainty, and doubt"). There were two varieties, one old and tiresome, the other new and worrisome. Starting with the old stuff... This classic anti-Linux article in ZDNet UK is entitled Why only the brave will bet on Linux for a business role. They drag out the same old disproven support issues, then add a new twist by claiming that the database vendors (Oracle, Informix, Computer Associates) aren't serious. "...another interpretation of events is that Linux is simply the latest pawn in the never-ending posturing competition between database vendors." Thanks to Dave Killick for pointing out this one. This column in Sm@rt Reseller is one of those "myth vs. reality" numbers. Myth #5 is "Linux Will Rule The World." Quoting a Gartner group person: "Linux is more of a religion than a technical tool." The winner, though, for strident anti-Linux silliness is this column from the "Compunotes" email newsletter, which was forwarded to us by Edmund Lau. "Why oh why do people always think that something free can overtake something that costs money? If that were the case we'd all use freeware and a company named Microsoft wouldn't exist." Just give it a little time... Actually, if you go into letters to the editor, it gets even funnier, as seen in TechWeek. "All I can say is that your writer must be smoking pot or on some kind of major drug. NT 5.0 will be the platform of choice. It is unfortunate that writers such as yours do not do their homework." The newer type of FUD is that which seeks to portray the free software community as a screaming, fighting group of children. The hidden message is "you don't want to trust your computers to a system made by these immature people." Much of this sort of press had to do with the whole LSA fiasco, of course. It is instructive to see how an event like this can be twisted to make us look bad. Almost all of the LSA-related press tries to portray the Linux community as opposed to standards. In fact, the LSB enjoys wide support; it is other aspects of the LSA that people object to. But these aspects (out-of-the-blue appearance, veto power for founding members, challenges to the Linux trademark, proprietary ownership of all standards produced, etc.) do not appear in the press coverage, with the result that the LSA looks like the mature presence among savages. This hurts us more than the classic FUD ever can. Examples: perhaps the best of the bunch is this Netly News article. It, at least, does not entirely ignore the LSB/LCS efforts, but it skips over the real problems with the LSA entirely. And from the southern hemisphere we have This short article in The Press (Christchurch, New Zealand) does not mention LSB at all. Moving away from the LSA, we have this Netly News article about the Open Source Developer Day last week concentrates on sniping between Richard Stallman and other folks there. Despite the unanimity of purpose that brought the people there, the Netly News has to feature the disagreements. This TechWeb article is more balanced, but also gives in to the sound bites. "Richard Stallman, creator of the GNU project, referred to Ousterhout's company as a 'parasite.'" Even Nicolas Petreley at InfoWorld, generally one of our best friends, couldn't stay out of this entirely. The second half of this two-part column goes into his dislike of "open source politics." "Personally, I think open-source software needs a grown-up to step in and lead it without all this petty bickering." Fortunately, the first half is more fun: he talks about how happy he is now that he can run Linux almost full time ("Apart from games and voice dictation sessions, I have few reasons left to boot Windows. I'm millimeters away from making blue screens nothing but a distant memory. "). Enough FUD, time for the good stuff. And there is plenty of it... Rob Clark pointed us to this Forbes article wherein their readers had been asked to name their top "Internet heroes." Linus is number 1, far ahead of other such "heroes" as Bill Gates and Matt Drudge. "He has made computing fun again. A Microsoft operating system can be learned in its entirety in a week, and then one has nowhere to go, except for crashes and instability. With Linux, a week gets you basic proficiency, then the only limit you have is set by your ambition and creativity." They hit an important aspect of this whole phenomenon: "He has made computing fun again." Our German-capable readers may appreciate this article in the Rheinische Post. It seems to talk about how nicely Linux is coming along, as personified by the S.u.S.E. 5.3 release. Unfortunately Babelfish chokes on this one, so we can't provide a translation link. The only way that works is to feed it the article a paragraph or two at a time... Linux was on the front page of the L.A. Times business section early this week. This lengthy article has some accuracy problems ("KDE costs money") and some minor FUD difficulties ("free software people don't want to write documentation"), but it is positive overall anyway. Thanks to Eric Potter and "Phyx" for pointing this one out to us. Associated with this article is a brief "early history of Linux" piece entitled It Started With One Man and the Internet. "Could Linux Be The Next Desktop OS?" asks this Internet World article. They talk mostly about the Corel Netwinder product. "Oracle, Informix, and Netscape are among the firms that have also recently announced commercial support for Linux, so maybe Corel isn't so crazy." A couple more InfoWorld pieces: Jeff Symoens has a favorable column about how Linux is becoming a stronger contender "for the desktop," but that it has some more ground to cover. Finally, they also have an article mentioning that SCO is adding support for Linux binaries to their OS. This is actually interesting: an OS vendor now thinks that interesting applications may come from the Linux world. Robin Miller has an editorial in TechSightings challenging the notion of a "free software community." Instead, we're told that free software is the norm, and we should be talking about the "closed software community" as the minority. PC Week has a column entitled Linux: Where everyone is considered a beta user. They try to cover the bazaar development model, not necessarily with a whole lot of success. The article gives the impression that all Linux users have to deal with two-week upgrade cycles and beta software. ZDNet UK ponders on whether IBM might adopt Linux. (Found in Linux Reviews). This Cringely column on pbs.org is another of the "NT 5.0 is doomed" variety. It's worth a read, and it even mentions Linux in the last paragraph. "Finally step three -- the desperation step -- is to say that switching to a competitive technology isn't cost-effective. It's cheaper to stay with our mediocre stuff than to switch to the better stuff coming from somewhere else.... in recent discussions with Microsoft salespeople, some of my corporate contacts now report a shift in the anti-Linux strategy from 'NT is better' to 'its going to cost a lot of money to move away from NT.'" Thanks to Bob Grabau for letting us know about this one. Thanks to Lenz Grimmer at S.u.S.E. for alerting us to this Motley Fool investment column, which talks about Linux. The focus is on whether Linux is a threat to those who hold Microsoft stock; the answer seems to be a tentative "yes." "With thousands of programmers testing, fixing, and improving the code, 'open-source' software advances far more rapidly than traditional software. Flaws are found and fixed quickly, bad ideas get weeded out, good ideas gain support and are extended. This peer review benefits the development of programs the same way that it benefits the development of scientific theories" There is a brief InfoWorld article about Open Source Developer Day, with nary a word about disagreements among the participants. The folks at ISD Magazine are continuing their campaign to get vendors to offer EDA tools for Linux. "No one doubts the technical excellence of the Linux operating system. Few doubt that if such big EDA players as Cadence Design Systems and Synopsys ported their Unix-based tools to it, as they are now doing for Windows NT, Linux would instantly emerge as a strong EDA platform." Dan Gillmor covers Larry Wall's "State of the Onion" speech in the San Jose Mercury News. There is some coverage of the LSA furor in Tasty Bits from the Technology Front. The perspective there is somewhat different: "Let's agree to ignore the LSA and perhaps they'll sink into the obscurity they so richly deserve while the actual Linux community continues to go about the business of building great software." ZDNet quotes both Eric Raymond and Jeremy Allison in this Open Source Developer Day brief, which shouts Linux fans want more free source code. They are right, we do! Mention in passing: Red Herring names Transmeta as one of their top 100 technology companies, even though, as they admit, they don't know what Transmeta does. They mention Linus's presence there. Finally, many people sent us pointers to this CNN column ("How Linux got so dang hot"). This one is, of course, a rerun of the column by the same name that was in Network World Fusion, and which was mentioned here last week.
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	Gary Stanley has contributed unofficial rpms for the screen package, built on Red Hat 5.1. These rpms fix the reported /tmp race problem in screen recently reported on bugtraq. A security hole has been reported in ssltelnet. It is recommended that all users of ssltelnet upgrade to the latest version, 0.11.2. A new Debian Linux version should be available now or soon at ftp://nonus.debian.org/pub/debian-non-US. A new version of linuxconf has been released, to resolve a security problem. Red Hat has also released updated RPMs for linuxconf. A new database of vulnerabilities has been created. The Vulnerability Engine is supported by Infilsec, though anyone can submit or modify a vulnerability (submissions and changes are moderated). Only thirteen vulnerabilities are listed for Linux so far, so if you try the page out and like it, you may want to submit your favorite Linux security hole ... The Systems Administration and Network Security (SANS) organization publishes a monthly digest that summarizes security information by operating system and provides pointers to upcoming events. The August issue of the SANS digest is now available. Anyone using the ZPOP server daemon from NetManage should take a look at this security alert and either remove ZPOP or contact NetManage to get a fix.
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	The current development kernel release is 2.1.118. The feature freeze continues, bugs keep getting fixed. 2.2 still looks somewhat distant, though. 2.1.118 includes a source-incompatible change that breaks some device drivers (such as PCMCIA). If you get compile warnings while building an externally-supplied module, do take them seriously. The battle against NFS problems continues. Linus, Alan Cox, H.J. Lu, and Bill Hawes are all pounding away on the various problems that still come up in 2.1's NFS implementation. There has been some strong disagreement about the source of some of the difficulties with no definitive answer immediately apparent. For those who have been seeing NFS difficulties in recent kernels, Alan Cox has a "-ac" patch available for 2.1.117 in his FTP directory. He is asking that people test it out and report on the results. Meanwhile H.J. has been ironing out glitches in the kernel NFS daemon and in the kernel RPC code (here's how to get his fixes), and Bill has been tracking down locking and other troubles. Will DHCP work with Linux 2.2? The question unearthed some concern this week. DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) is a nifty protocol which allows a computer to request an IP address at boot time, instead of having one statically assigned. Very useful for transient machines, large university environments, and other situations where computers tend to move around. With 2.1 kernels, the DHCP server from ISC works OK, but their client does not. This message contains an analysis of the problems by one of the DHCP developers; it makes the situation sound fairly grim. However, making a DHCP client work with 2.1 is not as hard as the ISC folks apparently believe. Version 1.3.6 and above of the dhcpcd package, available here, is said to work well. There is also a patched version of the ISC dhcp-client package available in Red Hat's contrib area which apparently works with 2.1. Rik van Riel has a new version of the "out of memory killer" patch, which attempts to help the system recover from a complete exhaustion of virtual memory by carefully choosing processes to kill. This version actually implements the intended killing scheme, and adds documentation as well. See his note for more. The devfs patch is up to version 54. If Linus has made a final decision on the inclusion of devfs into 2.2, he has not yet made it public. Meanwhile, Richard Gooch's announcement has information for those who are interested. Version 4.0 of the floppy tape (FTape) driver is available; it was followed shortly thereafter by 4.01 after a problem turned up. It appears that a 4.02 is in the works now, hopefully it will stabilize at that point. See the announcement for more on the 4.01 release. The author is hoping to get this version into the 2.1 kernel, but it seems a bit late for that. Debugging with Electric Fence under 2.1 is currently painfully slow, a full 22 times slower than under 2.0, according to this note. This slowdown results from the removal of the old AVL tree mechanism for finding the virtual memory area (vma) associated with a page fault. Removing the AVL trees improved things for most cases, but it made cases like Electric Fence, which creates lots of vma's, bog down completely. The skeleton of a solution was posted by David Miller. The scheme, known as "fuzzy hashing," is said to be faster even in the normal simple case. Folks who like looking through tricky code are encouraged to check it out. A working version has not yet been produced. With luck one will come out soon and be accepted into 2.1. Here is a patch for one of the nastiest 2.1 (and earlier) problems: the uptime counter wraps back to zero after 497 days. The heartbreak of seeing that carefully-nurtured uptime go to zero is not something that should be inflicted on anybody. Of course, this is going to be a hard patch to test in the 2.2 time frame...	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.
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	Caldera Although many users of Caldera have been very happy with Caldera's decision to move slowly from libc5 to glibc, finally the first requests for a time-table for the move are starting to show up. In response, the unofficial info indicates that Caldera 1.3, still libc5, will be showing up in September and Caldera 2.0, presumably glibc, won't be out until early next year. For those concerned about upgrading to Caldera 1.3 from 1.2 or earlier versions, we hear the upgrade script for 1.3 should be able to handle upgrades from 1.0 forwards. Debian Check out Australian Personal Computing's review of Debian 2.0 beta. The recently-published book "Databases with Linux" come complete with a copy of the Debian distribution. This book, written in German by Dr. Bernhard Roehrig, shows how free systems can be used to create effective information systems. Red Hat Although the development lists for Red Hat are not bursting, recent activity definitely indicates that people are looking at and working with Rawhide, Red Hat's development version. Bugs are being found, reported and fixes are trickling in. That hopefully signals that the next release of Red Hat will be in better shape as a result.	Please note that not every distribution will show up every week. Only distributions with recent news to report will be listed.
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	Alpha Here's another report indicating that Compaq intends to continue to develop the Alpha processor: Compaq kicks Intel's Merced butt while it's down in The Register. m68k The latest version of the Linux/m68k MiniFAQ is out. Sparc The folks at Applix are thinking about porting Applixware to S/Linux. They want to hear from S/Linux to gauge the level of interest in this product. If you think you might buy such a product, please see their note and send a reply back. Henry Pierce has made a Sparc Linux 2.1.115 kernel, built from the vger source tree, available for FTP. He reports some performance improvements with this version. Check out his note for more info. It was asked whether PGP is available for S/Linux. The answer, of course, is "yes." You simply have to look in a non-US ftp site. Those looking for encryption on the sparc can find PGP in the UltraPenguin contrib area. In general, if you are looking for S/Linux RPM's, there is a good directory on Justin Cormack's web site.
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	Perl Didier Legein pointed out that some nice reports on the Perl Conference, which finished today, are available on the Perl.com website. Another excellent report from the Perl conference was posted by Jon Udell. The report talks about how Perl is no longer just being used for simple scripts, but instead are using it for large, mission-critical applications. Perl-LZO, LZO bindings for Perl Python An alternative to lambda has been the title of a very long-running thread on comp.lang.python. Many ideas have been suggested and discarded. This week though, Guido van Rossum brought back up a previous suggestion from someone else and a query as to how well received it would be, if implemented. The response was positive, followed by a "Will it be implemented?" The response from Guido was "maybe", which Tim Peters loosely translated. The first python-based version of SGMLtools is now available. Version 1.1.11 has been ported from perl to python and Cees de Groot reports that he is pleased with the results. Volume 2 of the Japanese translation of "Programming Python" is now available. Oliver Andrich has updated some packages in his Linux Python distribution. See his announcement for more. There is an article by Guido van Rossum on JPython in developer.com. You can check it out here. Here's a truly slick piece of work: Pydb is a combination of the Python debugger "pdb" and the impressive DDD graphical debugger interface. Python-LZO, LZO bindings for Python 1.5 mySQLmodule, a module for working with mySQL databases. zephyr, interface to the zephyr messaging system Concorde, an email client mxTextTools, routines for fast text processing Smalltalk Travis Griggs sent us a pointer to a free-to-download , fully featured version of VisualWorks Smalltalk for non-commercial or educational use on Intel Linux. This Smalltalk IDE, from ObjectShare, has apparently been made available in order to gauge the interest in the community in a Commercial version of such an IDE. A couple of other Smalltalk options for Linux do exist, notably Smalltalk/X and the free software Squeak. However, for those who wish to develop commercial applications for Smalltalk under Linux, the VisualWorks availability is definitely good news. Here is some information and background on the product from Travis. Tcl/tk tcLex 1.0, a lexical analyzer generator for Tcl TclExpat 1.0, a Tcl interface to James Clark's expat XML parser Tuba 2.3, a full-featured Tcl debugger
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	Free/Open-Source Software News For those of you interested in Steve Carpenter's The Poor Man's X-terminal document that we mentioned last week, he wrote to us to give us the permanent site for the page. It has been updated since we last mentioned it, but is still not at the final release state. Mozilla/Netscape Terry Weissman wrote in to report that Mozilla's bugsystem, Bugzilla has been completely written. The source is now available under the MPL and the system is working much better now. Pat Gunn posted a list of suggested guidelines and process for Participation in the Mozilla Community. This draft was mostly aimed to stir up debate, though reaction has been minimal. Of course, leaving Linux off the list of required testing platforms was sure to draw some notice ... Here is the latest Mozilla FAQ.
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	Linux and the Commercial World Informix on Linux is ready to use! Check out this site for information on downloading Informix, free development licenses and more. For more assistance in getting up and running quickly, there is an additional site you may want to check out: Technical Information about Deploying Informix's Products on Linux . O'Reilly has put out this this report on the Open Source Developer Day. There is an article in InfoWorld (brief) about Software AG's port of the DCOM distributed object code to Linux. SciTech is going to release its "Display Doctor" graphics driver system for Linux. They are looking for beta testers. If you are interested, have a look at their announcement and drop them a note. Didier Legein pointed out that Faximum has a trial version of their fax software available for download. It works, of course, on Linux. Head over to their download page for a copy. It seems that Netscape is releasing a set of open source perl LDAP utilities, according to this TechWeb Story. "PerLDAP is for quickly creating directory capabilities for extranet applications, and integrates LDAP, a set of protocols used to exchange information between computers, including mainframes with large databases." Press Releases: Fortress Technologies "Secure Packet Shield." Appears to be a virtual private network system built on Linux boxes. The Active Scripting Project, an attempt to bring the "active server page" model to Apache. Intraware Inc. announces a deal where they bring Caldera's OpenLinux into their distribution scheme. Cyclades has announced that their PR3000 Router now has data compression available for Frame Relay links
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	Software Package Version Description 3dom De Panne A general purpose 3d object modeler. AbiWord 0.1 Fully featured word processor aKtion! 0.2.0 KDE video player based on xanim asWedit 4.0 HTML editor with colors for html tags aumix 1.12 Color text mode sound mixer with GPM support Backup Copy 1.08b Copy program designed to quickly and efficiently store data. Balsa 0.4.5 The official GNOME mail client, supports local mailboxes, POP3and IMAP Batalla Naval 0.71.0 Networked BattleShip game BeroFTPD 1.1.4 FTP server program based on WU-FTPD Bugzilla 1.0 mozilla.org's bugtracking system Burt 2.4 Burt - Backup and Recovery Tool cccd 0.3alpha2 A CDDB capable CD player using GTK+ CCFaudio 980820 A multi-user Internet conferencing phone CCFlauncher 980820 Enables remote uses to initiate and join ongoing collaborative sessions CDDA Paranoia alpha 8 CD ripping application curl 4.7 Tiny command line client for getting data from a URL Dancer 4.12 IRC defense bot, protects your channel and your users DECnet for Linux 0.10.0 DECnet socket layer and applications DNi 0.1 DNi: IP Filtering Firewall script for RedHat Linux dial-up users egcs snapshot 19980824 Experimental set of enhancements for the GNU tools ElectricEyes 0.2 Lightweight GTK+/GNOME-based image viewer Emacs 20.3 The extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time displayeditor Eterm DR0.8-PL4 An X11 VT102 emulator with Enlightenment features Ethereal 0.3.9 GUI network analyzer Fetchmail 4.5.6 Free, full-featured, robust, well-documented remote-mailretrieval utility fltk beta-19980825 C++ user interface toolkit for X and OpenGL Fortify 1.2.6 Provides full strength, 128-bit encryption facilities to Netscape browsers ftape-tools 1.06 Utilities for floppy tapes under Linux G-Sox 0.7 A Gnome front-end for the sox sound processing program GHX 98/08/20 GTK clone of the Hotline software GNOME 0.28 GNU Network Object Model Environment GNotes 0.90 Allows you to place cool little yellow sticky notes all over your desktop GNU Plotutils 2.1.5 Utilities for plotting scientific data GNUS 5.6.39 Emacs news/mail reader GNUTat DR0.1 A language for the creation of text adevnture games, loosely based on C++ Goose 0.0.1 Statistical library. gpppkill 0.9.0 Ends idle ppp connections GQmpeg 0.3 A front end to the mpg123 mpeg audio player GRUB 0.5 GRand Unified Bootloader Gtk-- 0.9.14 C++ interface for the popular GUI library gtk. Gtk--Draw 0.0.5 Gtk-- add-on library for drawing and plotting gtkfind 0.5 GTK+ version of find(1) Guppi 0.0.1 GNOME application for plotting and analyzing data Gwydion Dylan 2.1-19980816 Compiler for Dylan, an dynamic, efficient, object-oriented language GXedit 1.12 Simple GPL'ed graphical editor using GTK HNDG 0.3 Generates a daily digest from the popular Heise Web Newsticker Hypermail 2.0beta3 Mail(box) to HTML converter with threads and MIME support. IMP 1998-08-26 IMAP and PHP3 based webmail system imwheel 0.3 Support for wheel and 4+ button mice in X11 k3de 0.0.6 3Deditor for the KDE which generates sources for POVray karpski 0.99 Network sniffer/scanner with a GTK interface kcdwrite 0.0.1 KDE frontend for cd-writing tools kcrontab 0.2.1 Crontab editor for KDE Keystone 0.30.01 Web-based problem tracking system, rewrite of an older system called PTS kISDN 0.6.0 ISDN configuration and monitoring GUI knetmon 0.90beta KDE-aware X frontend for many network tools, especially samba KOrganizer 0.9.10 Personal Information Manager for the KDE Desktop Environment ktalk 0.2.6 intuitive talk client, including addressbook, word wrap etc. ktalkd 0.8.7 KDE-aware talk daemon kwintv 0.4.11 Watch TV in a window on your PC screen LAIM 0822 An AOL Instant Messenger(tm) client Licq 0.40 ICQ clone for linux with most of the functionality of the official Java version Linbot 0.7 Professional Site Management Tool for webmasters Linux joystick driver 1.2.9 Provides Linux support for joysticks Linuxconf 1.11r19 Sophisticated administrative tool lsof 4.36 List open files Lynx 2.8 fully-featured, text-based World Wide Web browser Mailcrypt 3.5b5 Provides a simple interface to public key cryptography with PGP MindsEye 0.5.27 3D modelling program for Linux mod_ssl 2.0.5-1.3.1 Apache Interface to SSLeay MySQL 3.22.5 SQL (Structured Query Language) database server Ncurses Hexedit 0.8.5 Ncurses file hex editor - edit/insert/delete/search NetStreamer 0.17 free, streaming internet/network radio (server+client) nmh 0.28-pre4 Enhanced version of the MH electronic mail system. NOCOL 4.2 System and network monitoring software OSS 3.9.1c Provides sound card drivers for most popular sound cards under Linux pcmcia-cs 3.0.5 Card Services for Linux is a complete PCMCIA or ``PC Card'' support package. Perl 5.005_02 High-level, general-purpose programming language Perl-LZO 1.00 Provides LZO bindings for Perl5 Petidomo 2.2 Easy to use mailing list processor and manager pgp4pine 0.9 Interactive program for using PGP with email programs, specifically Pine pioct 0.1 Controls Pioneer HiFi equipment from the commandline Prometheus Truecolour (PTC) 2.0.4a A portable, lowlevel framebuffer access library with fast on the fly conversion PyGNOME 0.2.1 A set of bindings for the GNOME libraries for use with python PyGTK 0.5.1 A set of bindings for the GTK widget set PyroTechnics 1.1 OpenGL firework simulator Python-LZO 1.00 Python bindings for the LZO real-time data compression library Python/XML 0.4 Python modules for XML processing. qps 1.4.4 Displays processes in an X11 window Qt Masqdialer 0.0.10 Qt based client for Jeff Meininger's Masqdialer server QtEZ 0.76d Qt based rapid application development environment Queue 0.22b Innovative load-balancing/batch-processing system and rsh replacement rblcheck 1.4 A lightweight anti-spam program RenderPark 980821 Physics-Based Photorealistic Rendering Tool Replay 0.43 GTK-based MP3 player for X11 Ricochet 0.0.5pre10 Automated Agent for Tracing and Reporting Internet Junk eMail. ripperX 0.8a A graphical interface to cdparanoia and 8hz-mp3 Samba 1.9.18p10 Allows clients to access to a server's filespace and printers via SMB Siag Office 3.0.2 Free office package for Unix SNMP Sniffer 0.9b SNMP promiscuous packet sniffer/decoder. Squid 1.2 beta 24 High performance Web proxy cache ssh 2.0.8 Remote Login Program Sulawesi 0.2.2 Multimodal wearable/ubiquitous agent development environment Time Sheets for Networks 1.0.2 A web based system to record and keep track of jobs in a project TkRat 1.2 A graphical Mail User Agent (MUA) which handles MIME TkReq v8.0 19980822 X Windows interface to the req system, written in Tcl/Tk 8.0 vcron 1.2 Graphical interface to cron and at Vim 5.2 Popular vi clone that features syntax highlighting and an X11 interface VisualWorks 3.0a3 A rich interactive programming environment for the Smalltalk-80 language VMD 1.2 Visual Molecular Dynamics WebShop 3.40 Full-featured on-line shopping cart software suite Wine 980822 Emulator of the Windows 3.x and Win32 APIs. wmakerconf 0.99.0 GTK based configuration tool for WindowMaker window manager wmlm78 0.12.0 WindowMaker utility to display system monitor information from a lm78 chip WMLmMon 1.2 Lm78/75 monitor applet for WindowMaker WN 2.0.1 A simple, robust Webserver whose design emphasizes security WN/SSL 2.0 SSL add-on for WN 2.0.x Webserver WWWOFFLE 2.3a Simple proxy server with special features for use with dial-up internet links wxWindows/GTK 1.92 GTK port of the cross-platform wxWindows C++application framework class library X Northern Captain 4.0.7 Filemanager for X Window X-Mame 0.34b1.1 The Un*x version of the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator XawTV 2.21 TV application and a few utilities Xclasses 0.40.1 C++ layout library for the X Window System XFCE 2.0.4 Easy-to-use and easy-to-configure environment for X11 XFCom_3DLabs 4.12 XSuSE X Server for 3DLabs Chipsets Xlogmaster 1.4.3 Tool to monitor logfiles and hardware status Xwhois 0.1.9 Small and fast GTK+ X11 client for the whois network services. Xxl 2.0.4 Simple, easy to use and user friendly graphical spreadsheet yagIRC 0.65 Yet Another GTK+ IRC Client ypserv 1.3.5 Simple network lookupservice consisting of databases and processes yudit 1.1 Unicode text editor for the X Window System zJSP 0.2 JavaServer Pages translator which produces Java servlets. Projects The Linux Usability Testing and Evaluation project was announced in this Slashdot article. They seek to improve the interface to the system as a whole through systematic testing and reworking. Resources The official Linux FAQs were updated August 16th. They've been posted to comp.os.linux.announce and should be showing up at your favorite Linux documentaton site soon. Linux Central has a new book out, The Linux Network, which is intended to help you get your Linux network up and running "in no time". Events The 1998 Atlanta Linux Showcase, coming up in October, has announced the opening of attendee registration. The updated speaker schedule is available as well. Web sites Slidedraw, a drawing program in Tcl/tk for presentation slides, has a new homepage, with snapshots, slide collections, etc. New user groups For those of you in India who are looking for a Local User's Group, check out Linux-India, which is trying to become a national LUG and currently has over a hundred users, according to the mail we received from Udhay Shankar N. A Local User's Group for Northwest Ohio is in the planning stages. Contact them if you are interested. And interest is developing in the south suburbs of Chicago as well, so we may see a group forming there.	Our software announcements are provided courtesy of Freshmeat.
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	Linux links of the week If you're after a particular package, and you know what you want, the Linux Archive Search site can help you find it in a hurry. Given the name of a package, it will tell which sites have it, what version, and give a nice, clickable pointer to download the files. Bolverk's Lair is a simple page describing one person's 100% Linux setup. It's a listing of the software he found to carry out a long list of tasks, and why he chose what he did. The page suffers from some horrific human factors (dark blue links on black background), but the information is good. The IP Masquerade Resource is a definitive collection of everything you need to know to play with masquerading on your system.
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	Feedback and Corrections Alan Cox took exception to being named singly regarding his work on NFS last week; there are, of course, a number of other people working in that area as well. We have tried to be more inclusive this time around.

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