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UltraPenguin

UltraPenguin 1.1.9 (Linux for Sparc with Ultra support) has been announced. See the announcementfor more information and download instructions. This is a final beta test release prior to the 1.2 release, which will be a stable release. (Folks who grabbed this release before the 16th may want to check out Jakub's update and upgrade some packages - an "in place" upgrade has been done on the 1.1.9 release).

S.u.S.E.

In last week's LWN, we stated that the English version of S.u.S.E. Linux 6.0 was available for ftp download. This was misleading. *Both* the German and the International (English) versions of S.u.S.E. are available for download. The German version will be officially released on December 21st. The beta test period for the International release will be longer, to hopefully find and fix any language-dependent bugs.

For those of you that missed it, you can get more information on the S.u.S.E. 6.0 release in the LinuxToday interview with Bodo Bauer.

The question was asked on the list whether or not S.u.S.E. 6.0 rpms can be used with earlier versions of S.u.S.E. Linux. The answer is yes for S.u.S.E. 5.3, if you have the glibc support installed. However, the 6.0 rpms have not been tested with earlier versions, so be careful.

Caldera

Tim Bird posted some KDE tips to the caldera-users list, as part of what may become a tip of the week series.

Debian

A couple of official announcements came out from Debian this week, including this note regarding the use of Debian to power a 512 Node Cluster and the official announcement of the new Debian Constitution.

Now that the Constitution has been formally accepted, the annual election of the Debian Project Leader is now underway. There are three people who have currently nominated themselves (the Constitution requires that a candidate nominate themselves rather than be nominated by someone else). They are Joseph Carter, Ben Collins and Wichert Akkerman. All current nominations, plus deadlines for nominations, campaigning, etc., are available here. Ian Jackson has reviewed the nominations and is not currently planning on running, though he may retain his role as President of SPI.

The nominations have resulted in a lively, but so far civilized, discussion of the available candidates and their backgrounds. If you plan on voting, you will want to catch up on the postings on debian-devel.

Rainer Dorsch started a discussion of whether or not it would be possible to create an in-depth summary of the debian lists, to allow people without the time to follow all the groups closely to keep more up-to-date. It appears that Joseph Rodin has volunteered for the job.

Jim Pick has announced a web page for the Debian Snapshots Project, a project to create a snapshot system for automatically compiling packages from CVS repositories and snapshot releases. The project was first envisioned to deal with the approaching Gnome beta release. However, the Snapshots Project plans to take a generic approach that can be used with other popular packages to create .deb files for development releases.

A new mailing list has been created for Debian Ham Radio fans. For more information, check out the list announcement.

You can read about using Debian GNU/Linux to build a Scientific Workstation in this 32bitsonline article.

Steve Dunham posted a report on his experience loading Debian sparc32 onto an Ultra. Most importantly, out of his work he expects to see an unofficial add-on to "make everything work" when running Debian on an Ultra by the time that Debian's slink, with alpha support, is released.

LinuxPPC

A draft version of the LinuxPPC on the iMac HOWTOhas been posted. If you get one in your Christmas stocking, you'll know what to do (even if your editors do think it looks too much like those old ADM-3 terminals they banged on for too many years) ...

Binaries of the 68K and PPC versions of XFree86 3.3.3 are available. (Thanks to Mark Wielaard for pointing these out).

Mandrake

Gael Duval dropped us a note with some short news items. There have been user-reported problems with ftp downloads of Mandrake 5.2. These should now be resolved, but they have also made available an iso9660 image, to make it easy for people to burn their own CDs. Inexpensive Linux-Mandrake CDs are now available in Europe and the U.S., but they are still looking for additional distributors. Last, the PowerPack Edition of Linux-Mandrake has been delayed for 15 days, but when it comes out, it will contain Corel WordPerfect 8.0 Personal Edition.

Red Hat

The long-awaited Red Hat Training and Certification Program appears to finally be available. Training courses start in February.

December 17, 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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