![[LWN Logo]](http://old.lwn.net/images/lcorner.png)
![[LWN.net]](http://old.lwn.net/images/bigpage.png)
|
|
|
Bringing you the latest news from the Linux World.
Dedicated to keeping Linux users up-to-date, with concise
news for all interests
 Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page
Other stuff:
Recent features: Here is the permanent site for this page.
|
Leading itemsMinutes after last week's LWN went to press, IBM announced support for Red Hat Linux on their systems. See the press release for the description of the deal in their own words. Needless to say, this announcement created a flurry of articles in the press; these articles have been collected on our Linux in the News page. Perhaps most amusing were the claims that IBM's announcement was responsible for a decline in Microsoft's stock price. On a first reading, there's less to the announcement than one would expect after all the hype. What they have announced is the following:
This is clearly an important announcement, but it isn't quite the full dive into Linux that has been expected of IBM. They are still expecting others to put Linux onto their systems, for now. Thus, if you buy a Thinkpad, you still have to do the Windows refund routine. The alliance, however, puts IBM's name onto the list of support providers for Linux. That, at least, should address the complaints of those who have criticised Linux and the support available for it. The "Linux has no support" attack has become even harder to defend. It's about time. What else is missing at this point is any sort of arrangement with any other distribution; rumors in the trade press for a while have been saying that IBM would take a multi-distribution approach. One can still hope that these rumors turn out to be true. The diversity of distributions is not a weakness of Linux - it's one of Linux's greatest strengths. It would be a very positive thing if a company like IBM would understand and promote that strength. HP, too, will be making announcements shortly. They are expected to announce greatly expanded support for Linux, including the long-awaited PA-RISC port. The LinuxWorld Expo is next week. This is likely to be an interesting event for a number of reasons. It may well turn out to be significant turning point in the evolution of Linux. This conference is the first Linux event put together by a large publisher. IDG has managed to annoy some people on the way, and it has not always been clear that they have the best interests of the Linux community at heart. (Their registration of linuxexpo.com, for example, seems intended to create confusion with the long standing Linux Expo event). But the numbers speak for themselves: this should be the largest Linux gathering yet held. IDG has announced a set of awards that will be passed out at the conference, including a $25,000 prize ("the IDG/Linus Torvalds Community Award") "...to be shared equally between two recipients that have established themselves as Linux developers and visionaries in the community." Quite a few companies are putting together big announcements for this conference. The character of the business side of Linux may well look somewhat different afterwards. Expect it to be better funded, and more competitive. Linux is exploding, and an awful lot of people are beginning to smell money. We will see how many of them intend to get their piece of this pie at next week's conference. And for the folks who are thinking ahead, IDG has issued a call for papers for the next LinuxWorld Expo in August; the deadline is March 15. LWN will be at LinuxWorld in force. We will be producing next week's LWN entirely in San Jose (anybody want to let us borrow a net connection?). So while parts of next week's LWN may be a little thin, our conference coverage should be complete. Keep an eye out for us! Software patents in Europe? This publication has spoken out about the problems with software patents in the U.S. before. These patents, which are often handed out for seemingly trivial and widespread practices, pose a real threat to free software in the future. So it is with some consternation that we see indications that the European Union is considering American-style software patents of its own. This would not be a step forward for Europe. People who are interested in this issue may want to have a look at freepatents.orgsite, which is currently featuring an interview with Michael Widenius, of MySQL fame. (Thanks to Stéfane Fermigier). LWN will be available in Japanese starting with a translation of this issue. It will show up on this sitesometime on February 27. Thanks to Maya Tamiya and associates who will be doing this work; we wish them the best of luck. And now, a word from our sponsor. Eklektix, Inc., the producer of the Linux Weekly News, has expanded its Linux training program to include open registration classes. The first such class - a week-long hands-on Linux system administration course - will be held in Boulder, Colorado on April 26-30, 1999. Please have a look at our Linux learning for Real Life pages for details, and we hope to see you there! |
February 25, 1999
|
|
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Security page. |
SecurityNewsAs predicted, hacks for Intel's Pentium III serial number are already available, at least according to claims in this Wired News article. "...contrary to Intel's claims, the identifying Processor serial number in the Pentium III can be secretly turned on and off without the user's knowledge by a small software program."Beginning March 2nd, Tripwire Security will be releasing its Linux version of Tripwire 2.0 for free. They will have CD's of their 2.0 version available for a limited number of people at next week's LinuxWorld conference. For more information, check out their press release or visit their booth at LinuxWorld. Denial of Service Reports reclaim the spotlight. This comp.risks report on how to create denial of services attacks specifically aimed at filling the system process table came out Friday, February 19th. Finger is the primary service targeted by the report, but the authors state their belief that the UW imap and sendmail daemons could be used in a similar manner. Several people brought up the use of alternatives to inetd, such as xinetd or tcpserver to prevent such problems. Kevin Lyda responded to initial reports of the problem with finger with patches and rpms for finger. The problem is also recorded as bug 1271 with Red Hat's Bugzilla. New versions of the finger rpms are available from contrib.redhat.com. Red Hat has not made an official report or new rpms. Security ReportsBrian Jones has found and reported an overflow in autofs. His posting indicates that the problem impacts both the Linux kernel versions 2.0.36 and the later 2.2.1 series. He does not mention 2.2.2, but it seems unlikely that a fix for this problem has made it into the series as of yet. He provides a patch for the problem, but mentions that the autofs author has been notified and plans on fixing the problem in a different manner.Chris Evans reported yet more problems with zgv. In his Bugtraq posting, he details why he thinks anyone with security concerns should just remove zgv from their system, along with any other SVGAlib programs. It seems that the current problem stems from the fact that zgv holds a vital resource, a writeable file descriptor to /dev/mem, even after it properly drops root privileges. Steven Hodges reported a vulnerability in the TetriNet daemon (Tetrix) and provided a patch for the problem. Note that a follow-up message indicated that the patchh, as written, did not work. xtvscreen under SuSE 6.0 can be used to overwrite any file on the system, according to this note from Andre Cruz. Shane Wegner reported problems with the ".nu" domain registration system. It appears from his note that anyone willing to pay a $25 fee can knock out or redirect a host belonging to someone else. Pavel Machek reported several Thinkpad gotchas with security implications. If you own a Thinkpad, you might want to check out his list. Julien Nadeau reported a buffer overflow in NcFTPd, a commercial ftp server. It initially does not appear to be exploitable, according to his posting, though since it does not come with source code, this is difficult to verify. Mike Gleason from NcFTP software confirmed that there is a one-byte overflow and NcFTPd 2.4.1 is available to fix the problem. UpdatesAs a result of the recently reported bugs in super, the program has gone through two quick updates. A description of some of the problems in older versions of super is available in this note from William Deich. It also includes pointers to the source code and notes that it is available under either the GNU or the Artistic License.ISS has responded to recent discussions about the ISS Internet Scanner. Their response mentions a new version of the scanner to be released in March and mailing/discussion lists for their customers. Red Hat has released an update for the lsof vulnerability. This appears to be a relatively minor hole on Red Hat systems, but it's probably a good idea to drop in the update anyway. ResourcesVersion 0.06 of the Net:RawIP perl module for manipulating ra ip packets has been announced.A review of "Top Secret Intranet" by Fredrick Thomas Martin from Robert Slade reports some "mildly interesting" information about some of the US Governments "secret" practices, but not much of anything useful to someone interested in building their own secure Intranet. EventsSANS will be sponsoring the web-briefing "What the Hackers Know About Your Site, III". In this briefing, Rob Kolstad and Steven Northcutt will interview nlog-developer H. D. Moore and John Green. For more information, check out the description of the briefing from the ISN list. The briefing is free and will be held Tuesday, March 2nd and is free, though registration is required. For those unable to make the first briefing (maybe because of the LinuxWorld conference next week ...), re-runs of the briefing will be scheduled.Computers, Freedom, and Privacy: The Global Internet is the title of an upcoming conference in Washington, D.C., scheduled to be held April 6th through the 8th. Check out the conference web-site for more details. |
February 25, 1999 |
|
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Kernel page. |
Kernel developmentThe current kernel release is 2.2.2; this release was announced (sort of) on Monday, rather later than originally intended. This was intended to be the last stable release for a while, but some problems have cropped up (it does not compile on Alpha systems, for example) that may force a 2.2.3 release relatively soon. A preview of that release can be seen in Alan Cox's 2.2.2ac3 patch, which contains quite a few fixes, but does not yet fix the Alpha problems. BitKeeper is nearing release. BitKeeper is Larry McVoy's source management system that will, it is hoped, help to organize the kernel development process and take some of the pressure off of Linus. BitKeeper was covered in the October 15, 1998 issue of LWN; interested people can also have a look at the slides for Larry's LinuxWorld Expo talk. Larry has created a mailing list to help with the resolution of some final isues before BitKeeper is put out there. See his announcement if you think you may wish to participate. Speaking of mailing lists, Rik van Riel has announced the linux-testers mailing list in his continuing attempt to divert traffic away from linux-kernel. This list is intended "to discuss and speed up the development of new and exiting kernel features by bringing the testing and evaluation of the patches out in the open." See his announcement for subscription information. Reiserfs is nearing readiness. Reiserfs is a new file system developed by Hans Reiser and others which attempts to achieve greater performance and space efficiency through the use of balanced tree algorithms. See the reiserfs web pagefor no end of details on how it works. The reiserfs team has been claiming substantially greater performance than ext2fs in recent times. They are at the "benchmarking and tuning" stage; expect to see more high profile releases before too long. Various patches and releases out there: Richard Gooch is up to devfs version 92. Ulrich Windl has put out a second nanosecond time patch and is looking for testers. Jeffrey Jones has put out a new AMI megaraid driver (version 0.96) which has been folded into the 2.2.2ac* patch series. Jakup Jelinek has an updated RAID patch for 2.2.2. Alexander Viro has released a new rename patch which fixes some unpleasant race conditions; if all goes well he's getting ready to submit it for inclusion in 2.2.3. 2.2 hint: automatic power off on halt does not work as it once did. Under older kernels, selecting the "power off on halt" configuration option would cause the computer to do exactly that - assuming the hardware had that capability. With 2.2.2, it is necessary to halt the system explicitly with "halt -p" to bring about a power off. And, unfortunately, that is often not enough. In most run levels, "halt" simply calls 'shutdown -h'. Things eventually work their way around to the system halt script (/etc/rc.d/init.d/halt on Red Hat, take out the "rc.d" component on some other systems). There "halt" gets run again at run level 0 and really brings things down. For power off to work, halt must be called with "-p" in that script. For the short term, until all the distributions have their act together, it may be necessary to edit this script to get "power off on halt" behavior. Changes in the CDROM application interface. We got this note from Jens Axboe, the developer of the ATAPI driver about a small change that needed to be made in the meaning of the O_NONBLOCK flag when opening CDROM devices. This change creates a problem for applications which have not been updated. He gives instructions on how to make the fix. A new version of autofs is in the works, and H. Peter Anvin is looking for suggestions on what should be in it. Before sending mail, please review his note to see which features will not be included, and refrain from asking for them. Kernel information from Ziff-Davis. ZDNet has put out a 2.2 kernel compilation HOWTO article spanning eight pages. The information seems reasonable, though basic and written in an overly casual style. "This article has been scientifically optimized to be read in the same amount of time it will take you to download the Linux 2.2 kernel, so start your download here and then come on back!" Yes, they even offer the kernel source for download. (Found in LinuxToday).
|
February 25, 1999
For other kernel news, see: |
|
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Distributions page. |
DistributionsCalderaWe have gotten a note from Caldera regarding updates for the wu-ftpd hole. An update is now in place, and their security updates page has been updated to reflect all of the patches they have made available recently. Erik also noted that Caldera users have never been vulnerable to the reported problems with pine/metamail, explaining why no update for that problem was released. It is good to see their commitment to improving their security-related communications.Here is their official advisory as well. Andrew McRory's HakPack has been updated to include 2.2.2 Linux kernel binary and source RPM packages. HakPack is a set of RPMs that bring an OpenLinux 1.3 system up to the point where it can run a 2.2.X Linux kernel. HakPack is available on the Caldera ftp site. DebianDebian has an official release candidate for Debian 2.1. Brian White officially announced restrictions in uploading changing to the i386 version to allow the other ports to catch up by the planned March 2nd release date. Debian will have a booth at LinuxWorld next week, so here is your chance to stop by and meet some of the Debian developers. A new version of mutt with a fix for the the metamail vulnerability was uploaded to Debian last week. A final test build of XFree86 for the slink release has been done. Branden Robinson sent out this note and Steve Dunham followed upwith links to sparc binaries. A Debian distribution based on FreeBSD was suggested this week, generating a long discussion. The Debian Weekly News reports that "Most of the favorable opinions expressed were based on the argument that there should be a Debian distribution for as many open source UNIX variants as possible. This was countered with the argument that this would drastically increase the workload of the package maintainers. " This week's Debian Weekly News was published on February 22nd. A new mailing list for debian-gtk-gnome has been created and imlib/gtk/gnome package maintainers should probably get signed up for it. Along similar lines, Jim Pick has put together a proposal for creating Staging Areas for project like gtk-gnome that are changing too rapidly to integrate well even into the unstable tree. Definite LinuxRpms for the latest lsof hole are available from the Definite Linux website.PROSA Debian GNU/LinuxPROSA is a Linux distribution for Italian speakers. It is based on Debian GNU/Linux 2.1. Check out their announcement for more details. Prosa is also offering commercial support for this distribution.Red HatRed Hat has made detailed instructions available on how to upgrade your Red Hat 5.2 system to use the new Linux 2.2 kernel. Michael O' Shaughnessy was kind enough to send us a pointer to the instructions.Red Hat has released an update for the lsof vulnerability. This appears to be a relatively minor hole on Red Hat systems, but it's probably a good idea to drop in the update anyway. Frank Heldt sent in a report on RawHide 1.2.9 which was extremely favorable and he felt boded well for the quality of the eventual Red Hat 6.0 (or however it is named) release. SlackwareSlackware will have a booth at the LinuxWorld Expo. The Slackware site promises installs, information, demos, and not-to-be-missed t-shirts./usr/bin/filesize has been patched to fix a bug dealing with filenames containing white space, which was reported by Rene Seindal. Slackware wu-ftpd was upgraded to 2.4.2-beta-18-vr14 on February 22nd to fix problems that caused the previous version of wu-ftpd to hang. Enscript-1.6.1 was added to slackware on February 24th. SuSESuSE's official advisory on the ftp security problems was published Thursday, February 18th. It provides pointers to updated packages for ProFTPD and wu-ftpd.Lenz Grimmer of SuSE sent us this note correcting some of his instructions (quoted in the February 18 LWN) on how to use GNOME with SuSE 6.0. He claims to be looking for a brown paper bag... TrinuxInfoWorld wrote an article on Trinux entitled "Trinux introduces the Linux-shy to the world of security tools with compassion and ease". What can we say? They like it a lot. "This miniature version of Linux is the Swiss army knife of network and system security." |
February 25, 1999
Please note that not every distribution will show up every week. Only distributions with recent news to report will be listed. |
|
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Development page. |
Development toolsJavaAs promised, Steve Byrne's has created a new web-page just for status information on the JDK 1.2 as it makes its way through the JCK process. Last updated Saturday, the page currently only has information for the x86 ports. The page is nicely color-coded, so when a line in the table goes green, we'll know all the JCK tests are being passed for that specific platform. For now, nothing is green.Does this really help you know when the JDK 1.2 will be released? No, no one knows when all the tests will run successfully. However, it sure is a lot more fun to check the status on this page and wait for changes than to just be told to check back in about a month. Thanks, Steve! JavaWorld published a review of JVMs. The results is very interesting. Surprisingly, IBM's JDK 1.1.7 on OS/2 actually had the best performance with the Tower TowerJ 2.2.7 on Linux coming second. The Blackdown Linux port is definitely lower in performance than these front-runners, but garnered some good comments, particularly for the performance improvements from tya. It is unfortunate that they were unable to get good results from their efforts to test Kaffe. The latest JDC newsletter is available. PerlThe latest development version of perl, 5.005_55, was made available on February 18th. The Second German Perl Workshop is scheduled for March 8-10, 2000. More details are promised for the near future, along with a wrap-up of the first Workshop. Keep an eye on the Perl Institute's News page for new information. yapc: yet another perl conference, organized by Kevin Lenzo, is a low-cost conference scheduled for June 24 and 25, 1999 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This is a grass-roots conference, with beginnings in various Perl mongers groups. O'Reilly will be hosting Perl tutorial programs in Boston, Massachusetts on April 27th and 28th, and Santa Clara, California, May 4th and 5th. Check on the O'Reilly site for more details. A discount awaits you if you are a Perl Monger planning on attending the Internet '99 Conference in Lisbon, Portugal ( on March 15th and 16th. Contact Brent Michalski for more details. Perl Training is available in Melbourne, Australia. Check this website for details. PythonPython 1.5.2 beta 2 has been released. The actual 1.5.2 release is still scheduled for mid-march. Information on downloading this version is available.There is also a a new version of Fnorb - the Python CORBA ORB - out there. The latest Python-URL! was released on February 23rd. This week's edition was moderated by Mike Orr. Tcl/tkThis week's TCL-URL!, moderated by Mark Roseman, is now available. |
February 25, 1999 |
|
|
Development projectsGDBHP is releasing a version of GDB customized for HP-UX. Their website indicates that the WDB, as they call it, is supported on HP-UX Releases 10.20 and 11.00, and debugs HP C, HP aC++, and Fortran programs. They also list an impressive number of HP-specific enhancements, including support for HP-Fortran, for a curses-based terminal user interface (in addition to gdb's line-mode) and a subset of XDB commands. Put together with their plans to provide broad support to the open development community and the results are bound to be beneficial.GnomeThe Gnome port of NetHack has been officially released. GnomeHack 1.0.0 is the popular role-playing game based loosely on Advanced Dungeons and Dragons(tm). A screenshot is available, along with a home page. The Gnome cross-referencing tool, LXR, is back. Martin Baulig was finally able to determine the cause of the problems that had broken it. Gnumeric went through two releases this week. The latest is gnumeric 0.14, dubbed "Simplified Bonobo" by Miguel. Martin Baulig has released LibGTop 0.100.0. Here is his announcement, which also contains some comments on the license for LibGtop, which will remain LGPL, but not necessarily because that is what Martin would like to see ... Midnight Commander 4.5.18 is out. This latest version contains mostly bug fixes but has new device support and a cool hack. icecastWith the release of version 1.1 of icecast, the icecast team are excited to announce that they have pulled ahead of shoutcast in available features and performance.A great article on icecast is available on the mp3.com site. It talks about the reasons for developing icecast even though a Linux port of shoutcast was available and details a lot of what they've accomplished so far. KDELinux-Magazin will be regularly producing Korner, a feature on KDE. For more details, see this note. Updates to kweather, kspline0 and kmandel have been announced by Juergen Hochwald. Version 0.6 of Phil Thompson's Python Bindings, pyKDE, has been announced. They include support for KDE 1.1 as well as many new Qt and KDE classes. As mentioned last week, KDE 1.1 rpms for SuSE are now available. Some people's favorite text editor, KFTE now has a new version out. The primary features of the new release seem to be bug fixes that actually allow it to compile out of the box and work as installed. That's always a good place from which to start! LIMPThe Linux Image Montage Project (LIMP) is a community-building exercise that is "attempting to distill Linux community, company, and orginizations spirit into one very cool looking poster". The poster will be a montage of smaller images built up into a version of Larry Ewing's Tux. The result will be available for free on the web-site, or in 4-color print from the LinuxMall.Linux Standard BaseA new beta version of the LSB-FHS test suite has been released. The Linux Standard Base folks are hoping that they will get testers on as many different distributions and platforms as possible in order to weed out any remaining dependencies there. Head on over to the download directory to find README files and the release itself.LinuXMLThe LinuXML project is attempting to change the way many users experience Linux by modifying commands to produce output in XML. Said output can then be more easily parsed and displayed by higher-level tools. They are looking for "feedback and helpers," see their announcement for more.Mozilla/NetscapeNetscape has released an updated version of their license. The new license and generated quite a bit of comment on Slashdot. Overall, after a bit of sifting, response to the license changes appears to be mostly favorable, which is clearly the hoped-for result, based on comments in the FAQ.Doczilla, a full-fledged SGML and XML browser based on Mozilla code, is scheduled for release next quarter. Doczilla's home page and the official press release are available. Apprunner, dubbed "the future of Navigator", is now being included in the nightly Mozilla builds with a new UI in place. For more details, check out MozillaZine. WineThe Wine FAQ has been updated. As of February 24th, the Wine FAQ has returned, after an extensive delay.The Case for Wine (2) is a summary by Francois Gouget on reasons for working with Wine. ZopeZope 1.10.2 has been released. This release contains a lot of bug fixes, and adds a management interface for the importing and exporting of objects. The folks at Digital Creations hope that this is will be the last release for their non-developer version for a while.Also released: the confera threaded discussion system under an open source license. See their announcement for more. | |
|
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Commerce page. |
Linux and businessPerhaps the most-hyped rollout at LinuxWorld next week will be that of LinuxCare, a new Linux support operation. LinuxCare is not the first company to make a go at providing support to Linux users, but it seems to be the best financed, and with the best PR. They have taken a chunk of venture capital and set up an extensive call center and database in anticipation of the support calls to come. Happily, they claim that their support database will be made freely available; this should be a major donation to the Linux community. With any luck, LinuxCare will drive another nail into the coffin of the old "Linux has no support" line that we have been hearing for too many years. (See: their latest press release, and pointers to articles on the press page). As if the attention they are getting were insufficient, the folks at LinuxCare evidently think that Linux folks don't deal with enough bugs, so they're throwing one into the mix. This one, however, is a 1999 model made by VW, so you may not want to squash it. See their announcement for full hype and details. Cool toys department: the folks at LinuxPPC Inc. will be demonstrating a quad-CPU PowerPC system at LinuxWorld Expo. See their announcement for more. Caldera and Helius Systems have announced a Satellite-based Internet Router running Caldera OpenLinux. Their joint announcement promises easy installation anywhere in the world. This is a satellite downfeed only, one of the reasons why approval for the system can be gotten in just about any country. An uplink is also needed to get a fully-functional Internet link, though the uplink can be as small as a 33.3Kb modem on a phone-line. Performance on the system is rated at an average of 326.4 Kbytes per second (test in question used 10 workstations doing simultaneous ftp downloads). The upfront cost is under $3000, with a monthly access fee of $109, making this a good solution for small businesses, schools or communities, but not for a typical end-user. The real strength of the system comes in its ability to provide Internet access to remote locations. Helius already has customers in Japan and Taiwan and has tested the system in a remote village in Alaska. They will be sponsoring the 10th annual Distance Learning from Telecoop, a Telecommunications Coop for Colorado, in Breckenridge, CO, in April and will be demonstrating the satellite router by providing Internet access for the conference. Caldera also announced a RAID "enterprise storage" product built with MTI's "Gladiator" RAID system. Details in their press release. Sun has a deal whereby they will provide board-level UltraSparc systems to a number of system integrators to be built into Linux boxes. Sun seems to be increasingly seeing an interest in supporting Linux on their hardware. See their press release for details. Version 0.90 of the Uniform Driver Interface (UDI) specification has been announced. Also announced (again) were the future availability of reference implementations, including one for Linux done by Intel. See the press release for more. Virus protection for Linux? Saphos came out with a press release this week announcing the availability of their "Anti-Virus" product for Linux ("Unix finally receives professional virus protection"). This announcement brought out a bit of curiosity in some, since Linux is not known for having serious virus problems. What reason would there be to buy this product? LWN gave the folks at Saphos a call and got some answers. This product is intended for server systems which have clients running certain other operating systems which do have occasional virus problems. It will scan files on the server looking for viruses that can infect those other systems, and scream when it finds something. The product is also evidently capable of looking for Linux viruses, but they currently have none in their database. So, as Saphos put it, if you are running a pure Linux environment there is "not much reason" to run this product. If you have more susceptible systems around, however, it may be worth a look. A new Linux consulting and support company, Blackspring Communications, has announcedits existence to the world. Linux training in England. The folks at GB Direct in London have announceda set of Linux courses starting in April. Titles include Linux - the commercial reality and Care and Feeding of a Linux system. Press Releases:
|
February 25, 1999 |
|
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Linux in the news page. |
Linux in the newsAnother busy week in the Linux press. Companies are gearing up for their LinuxWorld announcements. The biggest item of interest this week, of course, was IBM's announcement. But first, here's this week's recommended reading:
OK, brace yourselves, here's the flood of IBM stories:
And to finish out the business-related articles:
A few more Windows refund articles trickled in...
And to finish things out, here's a batch of miscellaneous pieces and introductory articles.
|
February 25, 1999 |
|
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Announcements page. |
AnnouncementsResourcesThe Internet Operating Systems Counter is back in action at a new site, and is now up to more than 1.1 million hosts. By this count, Linux has just over 30% of the web servers out there, retaining its position at the very top of the list.ZDNet has set up a Linux forum moderated by Evan Liebovitch. Yes, it has been there for most of the month, we're a little slow on the uptake... The good folks at Linux Center have added an international news section to their pages (both in English and in French). So...if you didn't get your refund from Microsoft, here's another windmill to tilt at: LinuxResources has put up a petition to Microsoft asking them to release the Windows '98 source code under the GPL A new site, OpenResources.com has been announced. It appears to be another shot at a "portal" site oriented around free software news, articles, documentation, forums, etc. William Henning of CPU Review has updated his kernel compilation benchmarks to include some K6 results. He's up to 49 different test results now. There is an article in VAR Business about the new linuxvar.org site put up by SSC. This site is, of course, intended to be a resource center for Linux VARs. "The Web site now consists of only a few pages of rough guidelines, but it will grow according to the interest shown by Linux VARs..."
EventsLinux at Comdex/Spring '99. As already reported in these pages, Comdex/Spring will feature a higher profile for Linux, including a keynote by Linus Torvalds. Now the Chicago LUG and the Argonne National Laboratory and Western Suburban Chicago LUG have put together a Linux at Comdex/Spring page. Anybody contemplating attendance at this event should keep an eye on this site to keep up on all of the Linux-related happenings.A Free Software Carnival will be held at Reed College in Portland, Oregon on Saturday, February 27th. Check out their web page for more details. Here's a brief note in Israel's Business Arena about the Linux seminar that will be held during the Internet World Exhibition this week. Web sitesSearchLinux.com is a new site providing a help desk for Linux users. They have "aggregated newsgroups, mailing lists and Linux-focused sites into a useful resource for both the expert and newbie Linux user" and, from first glance, look to be on their way to providing a very nicely organized service. Check them out at www.searchlinux.com.Mailing ListsA list for people running Linux on Toshiba Portege notebooks has been announced.User Group NewsThe Skane Sjelland Linux User Group (SSLUG) has now passed the 2500 member mark. This note from Claus Sorensen provides pointers to more information.Help wantedAttention Beowulf programmers: there are a couple of positions open in the Denver, CO area for people with MPI or PVM programming experience. This looks like a fun... |
February 25, 1999
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
Software Announcements
|
Our software announcements are provided courtesy of FreshMeat
 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Back page page. |
Linux links of the weekOSOpinion is a site dedicated to, well, opinions on operating systems. They run a regular series of user-submitted editorials on OS issues. They use a lot of exclamation points, but some of the opinions are interesting. LinuxWare seems to be a strange combination of Linux news and personal ads. "The ultimate chat and Linux resource for geeks and nerds looking for chat, internet relationships, love and of course Linux. The only place on the Web that may change your life forever." Hmm... (Thanks to Cheah Ling). |
February 25, 1999 |
|
|
Letters to the editorLetters to the editor should be sent to editor@lwn.net. Preference will be given to letters which are short, to the point, and well written. If you want your email address "anti-spammed" in some way please be sure to let us know. We do not have a policy against anonymous letters, but we will be reluctant to include them. | |
To: editor@lwn.net Subject: Who cares whether Pascal has a goto? Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 13:28:53 +0000 From: Paul Dunne <paul@dunne.ie.eu.org> I have just read the long, boring and irrelevant exchange in your letters column about whether Pascal has or has not a goto statement, and if so, what it's good for. Oh, boy, what tedium! Please, can Linux Weekly News stick to what it's good at -- being a weekly report on *Linux* news? The most recent letters column was just like Usenet in all the bad senses of that comparison. Better to have no letters at all than irrelevant ones. -- Paul Dunne <paul@dunne.ie.eu.org> http://www.cix.co.uk/~dunnp | ||
Date: Sat, 20 Feb 1999 03:50:14 -0500 From: "Joel D. Elkins" <jde@binarts.com> To: editor@lwn.net Subject: . and .. I think that Linus advocates removal of "." and ".." processing from ext2fs, leaving handling for these cases in the VFS code. In any case, userland semantics will not change. Your 2/18/1999 "Kernel" article was misleading in that regard. Yours, Joel Elkins | ||
Date: Wed, 24 Feb 1999 13:23:27 +0100 (MET) From: James Ewing <jamewi@rsv.se> To: lwn@lwn.net Subject: Swedish Linux paper - bad press for Linux Hi LWN, You guys posted a link to a paper in Swedish comparing Linux 2.2 and NT 4.0. Just to let you know, the end conclusion wasn't at all favorable for Linux. The link was in the paragraph - "The Swedish paper Datateknik has put out a lengthy "white paper" on Linux that is said to be an interesting read. It's available in PDF format (in Swedish, of course) from this directory. (Thanks to Mattias Sandström). " And linked to http://www.datateknik.se/WhitePaper/WP_linux.pdf. In the paper the evaluation result was (in Swedish) - "Allvariga fel i drivrutinera för maskinvaran samt brister i RADI-installationen gör det testade Linux distributionen olämplig att använda på Compaq maskiner. NT är ett avsevärt säkrare val och är dessutom mycket lättare att konfigurera. System: 512 Mbytes interminne, 4x4 Gbyte skivminne. Intel Pentium II 400 MHz. Mandrake Linux 5.2. Microsoft NT Enterprise server 4SP3. Betyg Linux: 1 Betyg NT: 5" Translsted to English is - "Serious errors in the hardware drivers and shortcomings in the RAID installation make the Linux distribution tested unsuitable for use on Compaq machines. NT is an incomparably more secure choice and is moreover much easier to configure. System: 512 Mbytes internal memory, 4x4 Gbyte disk memory. Intel Pentium II 400 MHz. Mandrake Linux 5.2. Microsoft NT Enterprise server 4SP3. Linux rating: 1 NT rating: 3" -- Note: the rating system is five point scale where 1 is the lowest and 5 the highest. This is hardly a favorable review of Linux and could just as easily been written by Microsoft. Sincerely, Jim Ewing Ewing Data AB Stockholm, Sweden jim@ewingdata.com | ||
|
Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1999 01:58:12 -0600 (EST)
From: Dave Finton <surazal@nerp.net>
To: editor@lwn.net
Subject: You asked for it ;^)
I am only doing this because if I read one more letter to the editor
concerning goto's and pascal, I just might run away screaming. ;^)
Ah, Microsoft's stock slumped about 10% this month. This was
attributed to two causes. One, the antitrust trial (which I enjoy
reading about over a few beers). Two, IBM's endorsement of Linux by
announcing it will preload it on some of its servers.
The funny thing was that soon after I read a couple of articles about
MS stock and the IBM announcement, I ran across a recent article from
some editor or another in one of the mainstream rags saying that he
doubted Linux would make a dent in Microsoft's armor. Whoops. It
already did earlier this week. It reminded me of an article I read in
Segfault.org titled "Linux gains enterprise-level support, but what
about support?" Now that is FUD gone horribly wrong (or right,
depending on which side of the fence you're sitting on).
I'd also like to comment on the so-called rift open source is facing
in light of Bruce Perens' leaving of the OSI. All I can say is, What
Rift? Neither Bruce, RMS, nor ESR have any bearing whatsoever on the
work I do (which includes support for client-based Linux machines). I
respect Bruce's opinions, but he can join the Preservation Society for
Pink Fluffy Rabbits for all I care. I respect the free software/Open
Source leaders' opinions, and more importantly I respect their
*differences*. I think that our favorite ideological movement would
be a lot weaker if they all agreed with each other. Their
disagreements take us into new and exciting directions.
There, that should be enough to keep the "goto" letters at bay.
- Dave Finton
---------------------------------------------------------
| If an infinite number of monkeys typed randomly at |
| an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite |
| amount of time, they would eventually type out |
| this sentencdfjg sd84wUUlksaWQE~kd ::. |
| ----------------------------------------------------- |
| Name: Dave Finton |
| E-mail: surazal@nerp.net |
| Web Page: http://surazal.nerp.net/ |
---------------------------------------------------------
| ||
Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1999 09:33:13 +0100 (MET) From: Maurizio de Cecco <Maurizio.de.Cecco@ircam.fr> To: editor@lwn.net Subject: Beware of the Desktop trap ... I am alone in the world, or there are others that think that User Interface enginering stop in 84 when the first Mac came out ? OK, menus, button, scrollbars, all the goodies, all the bell and whistles; but, while my GNU-emacs have all of this, i never use any of them ... Why ? Everybody know why: if you use a program for 14 years, you don't need menus anymore; you have the key bindings in your blood; and in general, while the Mouse/Menu/Icon stuff is very good for learning to use a program, it is not what you really want to use your everyday professional tool for years and years. Not that GUI are not good, expecially when the thing you are doing are intrinsecally graphic or visual; but their developement stopped the developement of alternative, efficent, text based UI. Anybody remember the symbolics command language ? Shells are not necessarly for experts, after all ... Maurizio PS: ops, i forgot: all this to say: there is more than KDE and Gnome to make Linux final-user-friendly ... | ||
Copyright © 1999
Eklektix, Inc., all rights reserved![[LWN Logo]](/images/lwn.banner.gif)
