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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:
Here is the permanent site for this page.
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Leading itemsLinuxWorld. Here, for what it's worth, is our attempt at an issue of LWN from the LinuxWorld Exhibit floor. Many thanks are due to the folks at LinuxCare and Debian who made it possible for us to be here, connected, and working. The LinuxCare folks showed great faith in making it possible for us to be on the Exhibit floor off hours. Maybe we didn't deserve it, seeing as we couldn't resist the urge to rip off a couple of candies from the Slashdot booth... Trying to produce a coherent summary of this conference at this point is almost pointless. First of all because it's not over. But there has simply been a tremendous amount going on here. A year ago, announcements of the type that came from IBM, HP, Corel, SGI, etc. would have been inconceivable. This week, they just get lost in the flood. We've amassed quite a few of them on the Commerce page, but it's just a subset. Not everybody has been happy with the overtly commercial nature of this conference. But, in the end, that's exactly what it was supposed to be. Here is where we are seeing the future of the corporate side of Linux. It's big, loud, and glitzy. These companies are serious. The Exhibit floor is dominated by the huge booths of Caldera, Red Hat, LinuxCare, VA Research, IBM, Compaq, and Corel. Sendmail, Inc. bought itself a sizeable piece of prime real estate by the doors as well. Way back, in the opposite corner, was "the ghetto," where the likes of the Free Software Foundation, Debian, Slashdot, and others hung out. Fortunately, lots of people found their way back there; the Debian booth, for example, has been generally unapproachable. Only a few times has the commercial nature of the show become a bit overwhelming. The keynote speeches by Corel's Cowpland and Oracle's Jarvis count high on that list. They both used the attention of the Linux community to demo and pitch their (proprietary) software products. Corel's interesting announcement - their new Linux distribution - was relegated to a seeming afterthought at the end of the talk. Little was to be seen in the way of vision, or understanding of what makes Linux special. Linus's keynote, instead, was classic Linus. It must be said that IDG has, for the most part, run a good conference. Things have worked pretty well here. There's always room for improvements (i.e. why have all the BOF sessions at the same time, and in the same room?), but they did well. Here's the other information we have from the show. Our notes:
The Japanese translation of LWN is up (for real this time). They have a new URL; the site is at changelog.net. |
March 4, 1999
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Security page. |
SecuritySecurity coverage for this week is not comprehensive. We'll go back next week and catch up with anything we missed. See you then! Security ReportsThe Mandrake folks have announced updates to KDE to fix the recently-found security problem there.Caldera has put out a security advisory for problems with KDE and DOSEMU. If you're running either of those packages, you probably want to get and apply the updates. Those of you running Cobalt systems may want to have a look at this Wired News article describing how it may be possible to obtain the root password via the system's web server. The problem seems to be that home directories are served to the web; in this particular case the exploit seems to be to fetch root's shell history file and look for interesting stuff. Perhaps the most discouraging part: "Vivek Mehra, vice president of product development at Cobalt, said the hole, which could give a hacker access to a history file documenting a user's activities, wasn't specific to their appliance, but to the Linux operating system." |
March 4, 1999 |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Kernel page. |
Kernel developmentThe kernel section is on vacation this week due to LinuxWorld. We can say that 2.2.2 is still the current kernel. Folks seeking the bleeding edge can choose between 2.0.37ac8 or 2.2.2ac7. |
March 4, 1999
For other kernel news, see: |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Distributions page. |
DistributionsPCQuest Magazine, a leading computer magazine based in India has released their Linux issue for the fourth year in a row. This year's issue includes a cover CD with Red Hat 5.2, all updates up to early February, an up-to-date version of KDE (again, to early-February), and a comprehensive post-installation script that handles getting KDE setup, DNS setup and more. It sounds great and should do a lot to improving the considerable presence of Linux in India. Here is a comprehensive description of the product, along with its new focus on reaching the corporate world. CalderaCaldera has reaffirmed their support for the LSB. This editorial, a position paper really, is worth a look.DebianSo the big news for the week, unfortunately, is that Debian 2.1 did not make the March 2nd release, in spite of the banners displayed on our site. A security hole in procmail, an upgrade problem for laptops and some other minor issues required another, hopefully brief, postponement. The schedule is back on for March 9th.The announcement of Linux Hardware Solutions support for the Debian Project, which covered the donation of a fabulous server for Debian use, mentioned co-location services provided at the Mindspring Enterprises' data center in Atlanta, Georgia. We hear that this connection "totally rocks", providing 100mbit bandwidth with a connection to 5 T3s. This isn't official information from Mindspring, but they've got a lot of people out there that strongly appreciate what they are doing. Perhaps a more official press release will be seen in the future. As we mentioned on the front page, the Debian folks at LinuxWorld have been great, providing a nice place for Liz to stash and recharge her laptop. It's been fun getting to meet so many of you! SuSEOver 100,000 copies of SuSE Linux 6.0 were sold in Germany in the first eight weeks after delivery began. Alexander Stohr forwarded his translation of the German announcement, which also apologized for the delays in delivery that resulted from the unexpected popularity. |
March 4, 1999
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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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Development page. |
Development toolsSmalltalkSmalltalk news this week is courtesy of Travis Griggs. His note informed us that GemStone will be releasing a GemStone NC for Linux for VisualWorks. He tells us that it is totally cool news, but we haven't had time to check it out personally ... Enjoy! |
March 4, 1999 |
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Development projectsGNOMECheck out Liz's report on Miguel de Icaza's talk for your GNOME news fix of the week (though it is short). The primary news, of course, is the announcement of GNOME 1.0, the first stable version.Linux Accounting ProjectSteveOC sent us a status report for the project. His report is fairly comprehensive and indicates they are on schedule. Material is now up on the website for public review. If you are interested, check it out. He mentions that the design calls for some "rather radical" extensions to the standard internet HTTP protocols, which is bound to be a topic of debate.SambaSamba 2.0.3 has been released. Here is the official announcement, courtesy of Jeremy Allison. It contains a couple of new parameters and updated documentation. A long list of bug fixes are included, and some of them look like the problems they fix have likely been really annoying to those affected ...ZopeGood coverage of Zope news this week comes courtesy of Amos Latteier at Digital Creations. His Zope News covers all the latest tidbits for the week, including Steve Spicklemire's contributed Zope product, Emarket and a new Zope Documentation project being started by Martijn Faasen. | |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Commerce page. |
Linux and businessFor folks interested in the OpenMail product that HP is demoing for Linux here at LinuxWorld, they sent us a list of questions and answers about the product. Applix has announced "its first open source initiative." It's yet another programming language. This one, called SHELF, seems to be aimed at the development of graphical user interfaces. See the announcement for more. WebCMO has put out another survey, this one relates to adoption of, and satisfaction with, the various Linux distributions. Interestinly, they bunched all of the satisfaction numbers together - no information on individual distributions. Troll Tech has jumped into the void and will be working on a port of the Opera web browser to Linux. They have a tremendously brief note available; more info is said to be forthcoming shortly. They will be demoing it at LinuxWorld; we'll try to have a look and report on what we see. Press Releases:
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March 4, 1999 |
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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 newsFew will be surprised, presumably, to hear that LinuxWorld has generated a tremendous amount of press this week. Here's what we were able to dig up; apologies for the lack of organization here...
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March 4, 1999 |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Announcements page. |
AnnouncementsResourcesThe Linux Application Development book that we've mentioned in previous editions is officially out, with a focus primarily on GTK+ and GDK. We hear that it is selling well [thanks for the note, Eric!] and is also on the cover of the mcp.com site. |
March 4, 1999
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Software Announcements
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Our software announcements are provided courtesy of FreshMeat
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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 weekLinuxWorld Expo, of course. And, looking to the future, Linux Expo '99. |
March 4, 1999 |
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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. | |
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 1999 11:51:43 -0500
From: Carl Thompson <cet@elinux.net>
To: editor@lwn.net
Subject: Virus scanning for Linux
Hello,
In your February 25th issue, you mentioned Sophos Inc.'s "Anti-Virus"
product for Linux servers. The Sophos press release (and LWN) imply that
this is the first product of this kind available for Linux. However,
CyberSoft Inc. (http://www.cyber.com) has had this type of product available
for Linux (and all Unices) for years. Their product will even automatically
handle email attachments and recursively uncompress compressed files to look
for virii.
I don't work for CyberSoft nor do I have any interest in their company,
but I did use their products at a previous job and do believe them to be an
excellent choice for any system administrator running Unix servers in a
heterogeneous environment.
Thank you,
Carl Thompson
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Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 12:33:50 -0500 (EST) From: Conrad Sanderson <conrad@hive.me.gu.edu.au> To: lwn@lwn.net, editor@lwn.net, kimg@cnet.com, paulf@cnet.com, Subject: new FUDs against Linux ok, we have the making of new FUD - that Linux versions from different distributions are incompatible. While this was party true when Red Hat realeased the new glibc based distribution, other distributions have caught up since. But nobody in the "mainstream" world seems to understand that the old libc5-based stuff runs quite fine on the glibc systems because the old libraries are still there ! They are also crying about "standards" etc. For all practical purposes, all the Linux distributions are so close, that this entire "standards" thing is yet another FUD. These new FUDs hve to be attacked and taken to task before it starts getting ridiculous. It would be a good idea to devote a front page of LWN to this, not just the coverage of the "coming out" party. cc: kimg@cnet.com, paulf@cnet.com, stephens@cnet.com, erichl@cnet.com Conrad Sanderson - Microelectronic Signal Processing Laboratory Griffith University, Queensland, Australia http://hive.me.gu.edu.au/~cam/ | ||
Date: Thu, 25 Feb 1999 22:21:39 -0500 From: Ian Peters <ipeters@acm.org> To: editor@lwn.net Subject: libgtop In the latest edition of Linux Weekly News, you mistakenly conclude that libgtop will remain under the LGPL. If you reread the announcement, I think you will find that the license is changing to the GPL, even though he mentions this may upset some people. -- Ian Peters ``Never attribute to malice what can be explained ipeters@acm.org by stupidity'' -- Hanlon's Razor | ||
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1999 00:15:41 -0500 From: Eric Kidd <eric.kidd@pobox.com> To: lwn@eklektix.com Subject: Changing the world Last year, you posted a note about the changing Linux community and the increasing commercial influence. I responded with a bittersweet message: http://lwn.net/980730/ http://lwn.net/980806/a/e-kidd.html It looks like the Unix revolution is happening all over again. Everybody's jumping on the bandwagon: IBM, Computer Associates, Compaq, Oracle, Informix, Netscape, HP, SGI, Sun, Dell and who knows how many others. Even SCO praises Linux to skies, albeit in a self-serving fashion. Anybody who ever worked with Unix is brushing off their skills and porting software back from NT. What does this mean? Well, these companies all intend to make money. That's fine with me; the more Linux-related jobs, the merrier. Some of companies will be good citizens and write libre software; others will exploit anything they can. We'll see salespeople in suits with slick proposals, and upper management will start leaning in favor of Linux. What a strange new world. It looks so much like the old world, doesn't it? But there's one tiny difference. All those folks in suits are pushing free software now, and they can't make it proprietary. Stallman saw to that fifteen years ago when he founded the GNU project, and the results have already been explained in Newsweek and Fortune magazine. When the dust settles, the world will have a free operating system. Oh, sure, Microsoft won't go away. But for those who want to hack and share and be free, Linux will be a viable option. You can change the world. But to do so, you must let the world change you. Linux will loose some of its charming innocence, but in return, it will help shape the future for the better. The battle is only half over, of course--we've still got a desktop market to liberate. ;-) Wooo-hooo! Cheers, Eric | ||
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Eklektix, Inc., all rights reserved