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Caldera

According to this PC Week article, Novell is investing in Caldera. In addition, they have plan to open up "portions of" the source for their NDS (Novell Directory Services) system. Details on what would be opened, and under what license, are lacking.

For those of you trying to get KDM working on a Caldera 1.3 system, you will want to check out this HOWTO on the subject. KDM is a KDE replacement for XDM.

Debian

On November 23rd, Ian Jackson posteda draft new Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) due to "loose wording" in the original that has led to many lengthy debates on whether or not a package met the guidelines. A change to the DFSG is very critical for Debian, since the document is used to determine what can be part of the core Debian installation and what must go into non-free. In particular, the exception allowing modifications to software to be required to be distributed in patch format is gone, which would make many popular programs no longer compliant with the DFSG. Dale Scheetz posted a note with some arguments against the modifications.

In turn, Ian provided his rationale for why the existing patch clause in the DFSG is harmful. The latest version of his suggested new guidelines is also available. He plans to propose a resolution on this issue before the end of the year, so it is important to review the possible modifications and voice your opinion soon.

Oliver Elphick followed up the new version with his own proposal which takes the current DFSG and adds a preamble and some exceptions. It met with a favorable response from the first several people posting followups.

The Alpha version of slink was frozen on November 29th. The port has come along so well that it is now slated to be a full, official release, rather than just a developer's snapshot. Note that it will take a while for the mirrors to catch up.

The Sparc32 version is just behind the Alpha version. It has been agreed that it will be frozen and tremendous effort is now going into fixing the last few release critical bugs and compiling all the required software to "catch up" to the i386 port. No official report of the actual freeze has been seen as of yet.

Mandrake

The December 1st edition of the Linux Mandrake News is out. The biggest news, of course, is that Linux-Mandrake 5.2 (Leeloo) is available for FTP Download. It contains the final 2.0.36 kernel, an enhanced version of KDE 1.0, and many Mandrake-specific enhancements, including an international installation procedure.

We talked with Gael Duval of Mandrake shortly after the announcement of the license change for Qt. The license change was seen as a dramatic win for Mandrake, since their distribution will be completely open source once Qt 2.0 comes out. Gael commented, "It will lead to a larger acceptance of Mandrake in the Linux community."

Red Hat

The shape of Red Hat's "enterprise support" program is beginning to emerge; see their Enterprise Computing Division page to see what they're up to. Included are a number of support programs (up to a $60,000/year "platinum" 24x7 program), training, and certification.

S.u.S.E.

Bodo Bauer has posted a preliminary list of new features currently expected to be in the 6.0 release, which is still over two months away. glibc is the most obvious and well known feature, egcs 1.1 will be included and XFree86 3.3.3 is planned for inclusion as well. A large amount of new hardware is listed and the manual is apparently undergoing some major rewriting. He also mentioned the possibility that Extreme Linux will be included as well.

The list should be fairly accurate since the German version of S.u.S.E. appears to have already been announced. German-capable readers can see the 6.0 release page; the rest of us can read it via Babelfish.

December 3, 1998

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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