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Leading itemsRed Hat stock for Linux hackers. Red Hat has sent around a mailing to a selected list of Linux contributors offering them the ability to buy Red Hat stock at the IPO price. The value of this offering is clear - if Red Hat's IPO follows the pattern of many others, the price of the stock will rise greatly immediately once public trading begins. Somebody who is able to buy at the IPO price (normally a very difficult thing to do) can often sell for a tidy profit on the same day. Those who want in for the long term get a nice starting point as well. Some have complained that Red Hat's mailing constitutes spam, or that it is an attempt to drive up demand for their stock. Neither of these criticisms seems valid. If Red Hat really wants to build demand for their offering, they are much better going after large institutional investors. It seems instead that Red Hat is really trying to do the right thing here - giving Linux hackers a chance to own a piece of the success that they have helped to create. It has often been asked whether people working on free software will be willing to continue doing so when they see corporations profiting from their work. It thus makes a lot of sense for companies in that position to try to keep the developers happy. Compensating such a large, distributed, and dynamic group is a very hard thing to do. Letting them in at the beginning of an IPO is one relatively easy way to spread a little bit of success around. It also can not hurt Red Hat if developers have a personal stake in the success of the company. They thus become motivated to help the company continue to prosper. Red Hat may well find that these developers are more responsive to the needs of the company. Some folks who, like this author, have not received one of these offers are likely to be feeling a little left out. There is probably no way to avoid that problem. The Linux community is too large for anybody to be able to find - much less offer stock purchases to. The only way to avoid this sort of hurt feelings would be to not make the offer to anybody. There are, of course, no guarantees here. Red Hat's stock could fall through the floor on the IPO day, leaving its developers (and founders) rather poorer. But the odds seem to be against that outcome. Red Hat is doing the right thing by letting some developers in early; we hope it proves lucrative for all who choose to participate. Dan York from LinuxCare was kind enough to serve as our ad-hoc reporter for Linux at Comdex Canada. Here are his excellent and amusing reports from the events, complete with pictures from Day 2 and Day 3. Christmas in July. We recently picked up a new Linux-installed system from Penguin Computing and put it through a few paces. Check out our review of the system for our take on Penguin's product. The executive summary: it is a very nice box, but we have some reservations about how they handle the software side of things. This Week's LWN was brought to you by:
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July 22, 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. |
SecurityNewsA long thread on Bugtraq this week concentrated on the potential Denial-of-Service vulnerabilities associated with shared memory. Under Linux and a variety of BSD-based systems, the operating system does not check to make sure you don't try to share more memory than actually exists. In some circumstances, it also does not clean up allocated shared memory after a process is killed.The consequences of this behavior varies widely depending on the operating system and even on the distribution of Linux. All Linux distributions that support PAM can use resource limitations to control the potential impact of this problem, as Mike Perry, the gentleman who started the discussion, pointed out. Additional discussion focused on recent versions of the Linux shadow suite, which also provide support for resource limitations. It was interesting that the focus moved to resource limits without examining the issue of whether or not this behavior, under Linux, is acceptable. SGI Irix, for example, also uses shared memory but is not vulnerable in this way. The fact that allocated shared memory is not physically in memory until a page fault is triggered is intended to be a feature, not a bug. The question is, can this be controlled in such a way as to protect the system, not only from malicious actions, but as well from programmers who fail to build safe practices into their code, without disabling this feature? This question was not asked or answered in this thread. An in-depth review of the nmap port scanner is available from SecurityPortal.com. "Nmap is the premier open source port scanning tool, and provides several powerful methods to analyze weaknesses in a TCP/IP network. As its history shows, it might be too powerful for some people to use, and should be used only after educating yourself with its usage and the many subtleties of IP scanning." Denial of Service attacks can show up anywhere, as demonstrated by this report of a Denial-of-Service vulnerability with AT&T PCS phones. Yet another industry to educate to the need for swift response to security issues ... For those following the politics of encryption in the United States, news.com provided an update. It appears the House Armed Services Committee has gutted the export relief in the bill, in response to Janet Reno's appeal, but that does not mean their version of the bill is the one that the House will vote on. Security ReportsFrom Security Focus's new incidents mailing list, comes a report of security problems with the default mail setup provided with Red Hat 5.0, 5.1 and 5.2. People using Red Hat 6.0, or sendmail 8.9.x on any distribution, should not experience any problem. The default configuration may allow a spammer to use your system as a relay. An unofficial patch to fix the problem is available. Bryan Andregg at Red Hat confirmed the problem and is working on an official solution.We have received confirmed reports of this vulnerability being exploited. Neither qmail or postfix are impacted. A security problem with the AMaViS incoming-mail virus scanning utility for Linux can be exploited to allow a non-privileged user to execute an arbitrary command with root privileges, according to this report on Bugtraq. Christian Bricart responded by releasing AMaViS 0.2.0-pre5, with a fix for the problem. If you are using AMaViS, you should upgrade immediately. Another IRC bug has been reported, this time in ircu based servers, such as lulea-r, ann-arbor, plano, Gothenburq, and toronto, which can allow a user to trigger a segmentation violation on the server. A fix is already available. UpdatesNo security-related updates for Caldera, Debian, Red Hat or SuSE in the past week.Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
July 22, 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 current development kernel release is 2.3.11, which came out just before LWN went to "press." There is no announcement for this release yet. It contains a number of architecture-specific changes, the new resource manager, a bunch of USB tweaks, and lots of little fixes. The current stable kernel is still 2.2.10. There are tremendous numbers of patches stacked up for the stable series at this point; see the 2.2.10ac12 announcement for the rather impressive list. A subset of those have been packaged together into 2.2.11-pre2 - there was simply too much to try to put into one release and hope that it would all work well. Linus is said to have already agreed to the 2.2.11 prepatch, so, barring major problems, this one may go out sometime soon. The new resource management code generated some discussion this week. This code handles allocation of hardware resources (such as I/O ports); it was completely rewritten by Linus last week. There is general satisfaction with the new scheme, which cleans up handling of resources considerably. Not everybody is entirely happy, however. David Hinds, creator of the PCMCIA subsystem, has been working on better support for dynamic hardware - such as PCMCIA cards. This support is intended to extend to other, newer "hot-plug" architectures, such as the upcoming "hot plug PCI" and USB. David's work had involved making changes to the older resource manager to facilitate the tracking of hardware separately from the resources used by that hardware. Things were beginning to come together on that front. Linus's new resource manager then appeared out of the blue, without any (public, at least) advance discussion. Changes from Linus tend to show up in this sort of fait accompli mode. David's changes are gone, and his hardware tracking no longer works. David has asked for some small changes so that he can make things work again; Linus, so far, has been reluctant to go along. There appears to be a fairly strong disagreement on how things should be done, and it could well end up retarding the development of some needed capabilities. One can only hope that some sort of solution gets worked out shortly. The Linux Storage Management Workshop will be held in Darmstadt, Germany, on September 6 and 7, 1999. It thus adjoins the sixth Linux-Kongress, being held in Augsburg on the 8th through the 10th. The workshop will look at the current status of Linux development in journaled file systems, logical volume managers, RAID, backup and restore, etc. Their hope is to attract many of the hackers working in that area, along with companies which are interested in storage management. It looks most interesting. See the announcement for more information. Various patches and updates released this week:
Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
July 22, 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. |
DistributionsWhen is a distribution a distribution? This question came up recently, when MacMillan repackaged Mandrake under the title The Complete Linux Operating System. This week, the announcement of Eridani Star System, which is not just based on Red Hat but is actually the Red Hat 6.0 GPL version with all updates applied, reopened the question. Can a new distribution be said to have been created if its creators/maintainers have added no new material to the distribution? We would be hard put to say yes to this. Following up on that theme, Nicholas Petreley asked the question, "If Mandrake qualifies for an award, shouldn't Red Hat share some of the credit?" in his article on the LinuxWorld Penguin's Choice Awards. Now Mandrake does modify and add to its Red Hat base, so it is considered a separate distribution, but the question is a good one to ask. How many hours of work did Red Hat put into the base distribution upon which Mandrake is based? Compared to how many hours from the Mandrake team? How much are the differences between Mandrake and Red Hat responsible for the award? After all, Red Hat is an older, better known distribution, so presumably there must be something strikingly different about Mandrake if it manages to win in a competition of which Red Hat is a part. Well, Mandrake hasn't won any competition yet, so the issue might be considered moot. Of course, the Linux Mall Top 40 list places Mandrake just below Red Hat for total number of CDs shipped. The question in this case would then be, does the credit for Mandrake's sales go to the work they've done to differentiate their distribution from Red Hat's? Or does it reflect that Red Hat is so popular that Mandrake's compatibility with Red Hat is responsible for the number of people who are willing to give it a try as opposed to trying out Caldera, SuSE and Slackware, which come in only a bit further down the list? We don't currently have a way to answer this question as of yet. Historically, Caldera was originally based on Red Hat. All of these questions probably outline most boldly why they chose to break away from Red Hat. They wanted to differentiate what they offered as much as possible to guarantee that they would receive credit for it. DebianLinuxWorld featured an interview with Bruce Perens, who mentioned Debian a bit and seems to be planning to resume his place among the Debian developers. "After getting frustrated with the other distribution I tried, I've switched my main server to Debian's 2.2 prerelease, and it's really solid. Some of my old Debian packages need a maintainer, and I'll probably take them up again."The design specification for version 2 of dpkg is out for review and apparently will include support for multiple package formats. " Since the free software community is at a crossroads at this point, this project will also aim to tackle the diverse package formats that have been developed over time. This is not to say that there will ever be only one format, but there should be a central way to access all the formats available as well as allow new ones to be incorporated easily, irregardless of the underlying system (or distribution)." The Debian Weekly News for July 20th is available, with more Debian news. In addition, Joey Hess' latest summary from the debian-policy list is also worth a peek. Linux-KheopsAnother distribution passed on to us a few weeks ago, the link we were given for Linux-Kheops dates back to September of 1997. It indicates that Linux-Kheops, a French distribution, was based on Slackware 3.3. There are no links that we could find to a permanent, maintenance location. If anyone has up-to-date information on the maintainers of Kheops, please let us know. Otherwise, we'll plan on moving our link to this distribution to an inactive state.MandrakeA set of cryptographic packages has been released by MandrakeSoft. These are packages that cannot be distributed or redistributed from the US and several other countries. The Mandrake packages are all housed on unrestricted servers and include packages for lynx_ssl, mod_ssl for Apache, openssl, ssh and pgp.Also check out our development summary for information on a new project sponsored by Mandrake, the DiskDrake disk partitioning tool. SlackwareAfter a hiatus since May, the ChangeLogs for the current, stable version of Slackware (4.0) again show activity. Some minor changes related to updatedb and kde were made.Storm LinuxThe test release of Storm Linux has been officially announced. As we've mentioned in the past, it is based on Debian GNU/Linux and aimed at both the server and desktop markets. They are actively looking for testers, investors and strategic alliances.If you want to take a closer look at the Storm Administrative System (SAS), you can start with the SAS Development pages. Sparse, but information on downloading and building SAS apps is included. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
July 22, 1999
Please note that not every distribution will show up every week. Only distributions with recent news to report will be listed.
Lists of Distributions |
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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 toolsGuileGuile-hobbit, the Scheme to C compiler, has a new release, version 1.3.3.JavaNo updates on the JDK 1.2 development have been posted in the past week.PerlSlashDot linked to the Perl.com interview with Gurusamy Sarathy, discussing upcoming features for perl 5.6. Because Gurugamy works for ActiveState Tools Corp. which has accepted a large sum of money from Microsoft to "improve" Perl under Windows, the concern that Perl would become bloated or otherwise "Microsoft-ized" resurfaced.Tom Christiansen was one of the responders, pointing people to the FAQ from ActiveState, addressing explicitly what they will do for Microsoft and how it will be handled. "The interfaces and implementation of all parts of the work that have a chance of being generally useful will be discussed amidst the Perl development community (perl5-porters@perl.org, archived at www.deja.com) for inclusion in Perl. " Meaning, presumably, that the work they do for Microsoft will be included in the base perl distribution only if the perl development community agrees. PythonA Mailing list for Australian Python Users has been created. It will be a forum for "Python issues uniquely of interest to Aussie Python users". For subscription information, go to http://starship.python.net/mailman/listinfo/python-au.A Call for Panelists for moderated panels coming up at the O'Reilly Python Conference has gone out. Panels will include "Python Success Stories" and "Joys and Pains of Building an Open-Source Community". Tcl/tkTcl/Tk 8.2b1 was announced last week, yet managed to miss our development summary. The number of bug reports on the list for this release seemed to be rather high. You may want to review the comp.lang.tcl archives before deciding whether or not to upgrade.README: Tcl-URL! for July 19th has been released. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
July 22, 1999 |
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Development projectsMandrakeSoft has released a new disk partitioning program called DiskDrake. It provides a graphical interface, and is able to resize FAT partitions without losing data. Diskdrake has been released under the GPL. Open Source Media Art gained a new project. esc to begin is "an experimental research group developing applications and hardware for interactive media art" which plans to place all of its work under the GPL. They will be presenting their project status in September at the second Wizards of OS conference. The Linux Memory Management Page is looking for people interested in becoming part of a team responsible for maintaining it. Rik van Riel sent in this note explaining why he is no longer able to serve as maintainer and why he feels a team of maintainers is the best way to resolve the problem. If you've been looking for a place to help out, this should be a good opportunity. IRCAM has released its jMax system under the GPL. jMax is an environment for music performance and real time digital audio processing; it has been available (under a different license) since late last year. GnomeHavoc Pennington's Gnome Summary for July 11th through the 18th mentioned that an archive of the Gnome Summaries is now available at http://developer.gnome.org/news/summary/index.html.News for this week mentions that a Bonobo interface has been added to the Gimp, so that editable Gimp images can now be embedded in other applications. An API FAQ is now available. LinuxWorld reported back on Gnome at the Open Source Forum, which indicates that the author was very favorably impressed with Miguel's talk at that event. "Bill Gates used to work his troops up into a frenzy by talking about the kid who was "out there coding in his garage," writing a Windows-killer. Mister Gates, meet Miguel de Icaza. He may be the bogeyman who's been giving you those nightmares." KDEThe KDE Development News for July 7th through July 13th has been released. It seems that KOffice has picked up an OLE-stream decoder, which is good news for people working on MSOffice import filters. The document format for KOffice seems to be standardizing on a tar-gzip type file, with XML for the readable text and embedded binaries in their native format. They are looking for someone to help update and maintain the KOffice website. Additional development news is also included.MidgardThe Midgard Weekly Summary for July 21streports the release of Midgard 1.1.1. In addition, Midgard will be using the iODBC library from OpenLink Software for their database connectivity. This library has recently been released to the public under the GPL. This will allow them to expand their database support from MySQL, which has some licensing problems, to the full range of databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase, etc.Additional news included the upcoming availability of RPM packages for Midgard, thanks to Emile Heyns, and a mailing list archive, thanks to Progressive Computing Concepts, Inc. SambaA new release of Samba, version 2.0.5, has been released. This is a bug-fix release, but it is highly recommended for production servers. Fixes for three security-related problems are included.ZopeThe Zope Weekly News for July 21st is available. Zope 2.0 beta is very close, but not quite out and a new alpha-version XML Zope product will be announced in the next couple of days.Zope-announce is a new mailing list for those of you wishing to follow Zope more closely without subscribing to any of their high-volume lists. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh | |
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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 businessRed Hat has revealed more IPO information; see this NewsTraders story for details. The offering is typical for "Internet" companies in that a very small piece of the company - 9% - is being sold. Selling a thin slice in this manner minimizes the loss of control and helps to increase the price by keeping shares scarce. Six million shares will be offered, with a planned offering price of $10-12 per share. It is also becoming increasingly clear that Red Hat is taking its web portal plans seriously. They have hired some 20 people from Atomic Vision - the company that did their current site. Their plans seemingly include setting up their own Linux news service - along with tutorials and other Linux information. Their ambitions seem to go far beyond what is available on the site currently. Oracle has released Oracle8i for Linux, and is proclaiming the success of their Linux strategy in general. From their press release: "Outside the development community, Oracle has also seen overwhelming customer adoption with an excess of 800 paying customers today-over half of these orders from enterprise accounts and the remainder from small to mid-sized businesses and organizations." All of the database vendors seem to be reporting the same thing: they are getting surprising amounts of interest from large corporate accounts. TurboLinux announced the promotion of John Terpstra, formerly managing director for Australia and New Zealand operations at the company, to vice president-development and has named SGI veteran Dave McAllister director of strategic technologies. These changes are part of TurboLinux' aggressive plans for ramping up U.S. based operations. Sair Inc., provider of Linux and GNU Certification, hosted a week-long "train-the-trainer" session to assist in the international launch of its Sair Linux and GNU Certification program. The Sair Linux and GNU Certification tests have been available through Sylvan Prometric testing facilities since June. This ZD Net story provides a few extra details on Red Hat's IPO filing. "Many Linux users are raring to buy stock. Some are voicing concern as they discover how unlikely it is that small investors will be able to get onboard at the IPO price. Regular market players have yet to venture much in the way of an opinion." Red Hat plans to create a full-fledged Linux news service as part of its effort to increase market appeal and potential profitability. Red Hat unveiled Red Hat Europe. Two new offices in the United Kingdom (UK) and Germany will deliver the company's Red Hat Linux software and support to enterprise users in Europe and the surrounding regions. Austin's BridgePoint Technical Manufacturing Inc. was launched into the unexpected realm of e-commerce using Red Hat Linux on the older computers stored in warehouse. Ziatech joins the free software community with this announcement that they will be releasing its multiprocessing CompactPCI source code drivers for the Linux operating system under the GPL. "Our customers have asked us to provide open-source code and we are doing so. We anticipate this trend toward open source software to swell, and we want to be on the forefront". They are especially to be congratulated for choosing to use the GPL, rather than building yet another open source license. Caldera Thin Clients will become Lineo. Lineo is working on an embedded version of Linux called Embedix, based on OpenLinux, a version of the software sold by Lineo's independent sister company, Caldera Systems. Giganet will offer a standards-based, commercial-strength clustering technology for Linux with a new version of its cLAN clustering software. The Software Group Limited announced two Linux Wide-Area Network connectivity products. Based on the Wanware line of Unix products, Wanware/Linux connects computers directly to wide-area networks using the X.25, Frame Relay, ISDN Basic Rate (BRI) or PPP protocols. Linux Games on the PowerPC will be here faster and more frequently as a result of this alliance between Loki Entertainment Software and Terra Soft Solutions. Loki is probably best known for Civilization: A Call to Power for Linux, while Terra Soft is also the producer of the Yellow Dog Linux distribution for the PowerPC platform. Linux Mall's Top 40 list is out, so you can now check out what Linux products are selling the best. For volume by number of units, Red Hat made number one with Mandrake as a surprise number 2. This overview of SuSE showcases their recent partnerships and some of their plans for the future.
Computer Associates and Caldera have
teamed up to promote Linux within corporations. "The CA move
is the latest by a large IT vendor to offer Linux based products as
the open source code operating system continues to gain users among
normally conservative corporations." Linuxcare, Inc. announced that it had formed a strategic partnership with Densa Techno Tokyo K.K., a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi Electronics Services Co., Ltd., to provide Linux service and support in the Japanese market. Dataquest did a study and predicts that Linux will account for about a quarter of worldwide server appliance sales by 2003. See also this press release. Press Releases:
Section Editor: Jon Corbet. |
July 22, 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 newsLead stories: Jon Hall's August "Penguin's Brew" column in Performance Computing is about the D.H. Brown and Mindcraft reports. "I thought of the D.H. Brown report as a suggested project list for Linux. Let's take a look at what the commercial community needs, and then provide them with it at Linux speed." PBS's Robert Cringely describes Apple's open source releases as a cleverly veiled attack on Microsoft. "By embracing open source and throwing Darwin to all-comers, Apple will effectively defeat Microsoft's investment plan. In the media space Jobs covets (he is, after all, a movie mogul), he will even steal support from Linux. But the main target is clearly Microsoft..." (Found in OS News). More comments back from Comdex Canada, this time in the Andover News Network. [Thanks to Cesar A. K. Grossmann] Red Hat: ECommerce Times ran an article about Red Hat's new European offices. "The new European organization, functioning as a wholly owned Red Hat subsidiary, will expand upon the company's current distribution, engineering and service partnerships in Europe." Wired News covers Red Hat's IPO and the set-aside of stock for Linux developers. "Longtime open source contributor Kirk McKusick said Red Hat's move is political, and in keeping with the community's tradition." The (Canadian) Globe & Mail reports on Red Hat's IPO. "The high-tech community will be watching Red Hat's IPO with great interest because it will be one of the first Linux sellers to go public and will likely set the stage for other firms to follow." From Salon Magazine is this story about Red Hat and a web design firm called Atomic Vision. "... Red Hat's mass employment of Atomic Vision designers suggests the company is quite serious about expanding its portal possibilities." This Salon Magazine article asks, "Is Red Hat becoming Linux's Microsoft?" A close look is taken at the growth of Linux, and a few of the different companies offering variants of Linux. "Many Linux experts argue that Linux is in no danger of fragmenting, and suggest that the recurrent surfacing of the issue is just more FUD -- "fear, uncertainty and doubt" -- spread by Linux's competitors." Robert Young of Red Hat Software talks about a variety of topics, including the LinuxCare poster and the Linux Standards Base in this interview from the Linux Journal. On pursuing venture captital he says, "... even if Red Hat doubled in size or even became ten times bigger, we would still be way too small for an MIS director at Ford Motor Company to trust our technology. So we realized the only way around that problem was to get the endorsement of the industry leading players." Business News: Forbes has run an article on "The E-Gang" - a group of people who are "reinventing the rules of business." One of those people is Linus Torvalds. "Open-source isn't a solution for everything; it didn't turn around the flagging fortunes of Netscape's Web browser. 'If you want the benefits of open-source, you've got to be willing to let go, to give up the code,' [Linus] says. 'Otherwise people don't feel like they're in a position to make big decisions and have fun.'" (Thanks to Larry Mills-Gahl and Didier Legein). "Linux is doing well in the Internet Service Provider (ISP) market.", begins this article. "Hurdles aside, Linux has given the computing industry a viable choice in operating systems. It doesn't have to be an all or nothing proposition. Most enterprises already have a heterogeneous environment and they will likely find a place for Linux too." (Thanks to Cesar A. K. Grossmann) Mark Hall at Performance Computing talks about why the big Unix gang isn't heavily promoting Linux yet. "Sure, they'll take the service revenue from IT companies that are installing Linux, but you won't see any 2-for-1 sales on Linux servers anytime soon. Part of the problem is that the Linux advocates inside systems companies (who are as dedicated as any open-source people in the business) are way down the corporate food chain for scarce marketing and development resources." Conversely, he goes on to why this attitude will have to change, and the Chief Financial Officers, with an eye on bottom-line revenue, will be the ones to do it. "They'll have to, just to keep market share, especially if the members of the UNIX Systems Gang intend to grow their businesses outside the United States, Europe, and Japan, which is where most of the serious growth in the computer industry will take place in the coming years." IT-Director looks at Microsoft's latest profit figures. "...we believe that time is now running short for Microsoft as the price it now charges for the Windows license is excessive compared to all the other components of a PC. The immediate effect is that it profits substantially and accidentally from the dramatic growth of the Internet. In the medium term PC and internet device vendors are going to Linux for their next generation products, because the price that Microsoft charges is prohibitive." Computer Reseller News reports on Windows 2000. "[Microsoft's] Windows 2000 server lineup ... will be met with new competition both from Unix vendors out to protect their transactional turf and from Linux vendors out to exploit the emergence of E-commerce applications and Web hosting..." MicroSoft uses Apache? Yes they do, at least for some functions. This CNET story gives more details. "The use of non-Microsoft software is interesting in light of the issues that high-tech companies face as they try to persuade others to buy their products. Some customers, for instance, may be left scratching their heads if a software behemoth with many products begins using outside methods to get the job done." (Thanks to Damon Poole) This story begins with detailed background about the modern printing industry, then gives even more detail about merging Linux servers into a multi-OS environment. "When I reveal that SuSE Linux 6.0 with kernel 2.2.5 and Helios EtherShare was the top performer, I hope the readers of this article will realize the significance of this announcement. Eric Morris, one of the network engineers in my Linux Users Group (http://www.lugoj.org/), and I expected Solaris 7 to beat Linux--but it did not." [Linux Journal] Here's a TechWeb article on Linux-based routers. "If the question is, 'How can I compete against a Cisco or a Lucent?,' one way is to take advantage of all the brains out there developing applications for Linux so that we can be more competitive with special features." and another TechWeb article about how Computer Associates is making their Unicenter TNG product available to Linux users for free (though the purchase of a service contract appears to be necessary). "CA has been particularly surprised by the adoption rate of Linux in large accounts, [CA VP] Gupta said. The open source operating system also is making significant inroads in the small- and medium-business market, he said." This ECommerce Times story predits that Linux use will rise in developing countries. "Nick Thompson, Penguin's director of marketing and the author of a book comparing development in Ghana and Thailand, said Linux makes economic sense in countries where the per-capita income is less than $5,000 a year." There are a number of editorials from OS Opinion: First come a series of editorials by author Scott Billings:
And by various other authors:
Finally: Salon Magazine has a listing of all the Linux related stories they have run recently. It's called 'The Free Software Story'. Open Source IT has a new weekly email newsletter, free for subscribers. If you are interested, sign up here. This review of the Unix/Linux Printing HOWTO Support Database website praises the efforts of the site's maintainer. "What that site provides is an easy way to quickly figure out how to install a color or black and white inkjet, LED or laser printer on a Unix, Linux or FreeBSD machine." A wildly enthusiastic (and extremely long) article introducing Linux to current Windows users comes from Al Fasoldt, a long-time computer columnist who recently discovered Linux. "Linux is outstanding in dozens of ways that Windows is not. Linux is powerful and stable and forgiving. Linux can't possibly run low on "resources" -- the single biggest Dumb Thing in Windows -- and it doesn't use DOS in any way at all." [Thanks to kosmo] The San Francisco Chronicle has a paragraph about Linux in this column. "LINUX UPDATE: Judging from the e-mail I've gotten this week, it's clear that fans of Linux are every bit as rabid as Apple fanatics. They love their technology, hate Microsoft and have skin about as thin as the underbelly of an armadillo." Section Editor: Rebecca Sobol |
July 22, 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. |
AnnouncementsResourcesJoffer's old Linux RIVA128 Xconfigurator Guide has been updated and is back on-line, with a new name: the Linux SVGA Guide.EventsZiff-Davis events announced LINUX Business Expo, the company's first Linux-dedicated conference and exposition set to run November 15-19, 1999, in the Las Vegas Hilton, Las Vegas, and co-located with COMDEX/Fall '99.The Call-For-Papers for the Freenix Track at the Usenix 2000 conference (June 2000) has been released. Submissions are due by November 29th. "FREENIX is the showcase for the latest developments and interesting applications in freely redistributable software. The FREENIX forum includes Apache, FreeBSD, GNOME, GNU, Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Samba, and more. " Web sitesDeployLinux.Net is a Linux OS site dedicated to practical application of open-source technology in the enterprise. Here's an announcement.User Group NewsThe Central Ohio Linux Users Group (COLUG) July meeting is scheduled be held SATURDAY, 31 July 1999 13:00-15:00 -- It will be an INSTALLFEST, at the LanShark facility -- see: linux.lanshark.com/. For more details see this announcement.Folks interested in the Linux Standard Base may wish to mark their calanders. The July 24 meeting of the Suncoast Linux Users Group will feature Stuart Anderson of MetroLink. Stuart Anderson is the Technical Subcommittee Lead of the Linux Standard Base project and will talk about the LSB and other assorted goodies. [Thanks to Paul Braman] |
July 22, 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 Back page page. |
Linux links of the weekLinuxBridge is a project which aims to "work to identify and eliminate the technical and educational barriers that prevent mainstream computer users from using Linux." They intend to work mostly with developers in the hope of creating a friendlier, more desktop-suitable system. They are taking an interesting approach; we wish them success. (Thanks to Ariel Faigon). Even hard-core Linux users often end up booting up that other operating system when it comes time to manage their finances. The GnuCash project is working on changing that. They recently put out a new release, and the feature set appears to be getting to the point where it is a truly useable system. Yet another longstanding Linux software gap is closing. Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
July 22, 1999 |
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Letters to the editorLetters to the editor should be sent to letters@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: Tue, 20 Jul 1999 15:22:29 -0700 From: Anand Srivastava <anand@nmi.stpn.soft.net> To: aerogems@netins.net, letters@lwn.net Subject: Re: Where's The Creativity? Hi, I don't get it why does everybody think that point and click or rather storm in a room and open a drawer and search into files for a particular program is faster than just typing the name of the program to run, and let the system find the file for you. I don't say roaming into a room won't be cool. It will be but it will be only that, cool. It won't be efficient. Everything is good in moderation, over do it and you loose the benefits. Similarly. GUIs are cool, immersive VR is great, but the command line is necessary. Enlightenment is cool, but it doesn't take away your freedom to use the command line. If you want immersive VR, you will have to wait, till the time developers have machines that can do those things and there are 3D libraries that are comprehensive enough to do these development fast enough and they are free. I guess that will take anywhere from 2 to 5 years. Incidently I don't even know a use for this kind of a UI. Care to enlighten me on some probable uses where the other ones won't be faster. In the meantime you can just use E. You have some problems thinking of finding new ideas in Linux Community. If you say linux community, you have already put yourself into a small spectrum which tries to be compatible with POSIX. Why not ask for the Open Source community, you will find many new ideas. Why, the internet was an open source idea. Unix was also an open source idea, in that it wasn't sponsored by any company, and was developed by the developers for their personal itch. Heard of HURD that is also an open source idea. There are many more, ever used Emacs. You know what I think is the perfect UI. It will be one when the computer would know what I am talking about. It will listen to my spoken words, and do things accordingly. If I say, "I want to buy a PC.", It will know that I mean a personal computer. And then it will ask me what brand, it will already know my priorities. But it will ask me if I want anything special. It will not assume what is good for me but allow me to give it directions and also cross check if necessary. It won't do everything itself, it will connect to the net and go to a site that contains information about all kinds of computers, or it may do a search on one of the search engines. Then using these information it will find the best PC for me and tell me about it. It will do all this within seconds. Then I can approve of it. If I don't like its idea of what is good it will allow me to take the matters into my own hands, and it will provide me a browser, with which I can go to the sites and do the search myself. I will use the intelligent interface if it is correct most of the time, otherwise there is no use. I want efficiency, not cool UIs. I would much prefer my voice operated computer which will be also my watch which, but that will only be useful if it is correct most of the time. I don't want an MS OS which gets broken and then you have to reboot and hope that it executes the correctly the next time and you need to lug the whole crate of RAM with it. This thing will take time but it will be the ultimate. -anand | ||
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 18:33:16 -0600 From: Jeffery Cann <jccann@home.com> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: All is well in Linux Land... I remember a month or two ago when Metrowerks announce a partnership with Red Hat (NASDAQ:RHAT). There was significant outcry from the Community. It was great to see the following announcement on this week's LWN: Metrowerks, Inc. and SuSE, Inc. announced their partnership to provide CodeWarrior software development tools for the SuSE Linux operating system. I guess RHAT really won't take over the world quite yet! (BTW - I am a Slackware user). Food for thought... Jeffery Cann jccann@home.com | ||
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 18:03:48 -0400 From: Derek Glidden <dglidden@illusionary.com> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: Re: Lotus Notes on Linux In the 7/15 edition of LWN, there's a letter from Tom Adeltstein about Notes client on Linux in which he mentions regarding the Notes client running on Linux, "... One of our consultants has a Lotus Notes client running on Linux and we'll post the how-to very soon. ... Also, several references within IBM internal forums exist discussing Lotus Notes running on Linux desktops ..." Well, that's all very well and good for the people with the know-how to Do It Yourself, but unless Lotus changes their stance, they are not going to be _offering for sale_, nor are they going to be _officially supporting_ Lotus Notes running as a client on Linux platforms and there is an important distinction between "being able to" and "supported" in the world that Lotus Notes lives in. Lotus Notes is not GNOME. (No offense to the GNOME guys...) Big companies run Lotus Notes; big multinational companies with big IT departments filled with corporately-trained MIS people who don't want to have to dig around on the 'net to find HOWTOs and install new versions of system libraries and modify startup scripts. Even if installation of Notes-client-on-Linux is no more difficult than downloading a file and clicking an icon, the first time the IT department gets an "I'm sorry, we don't support that" response, guess what's going to happen? That Notes-client-on-Linux install is going to get wiped out and replaced with Notes-client-on-Windows because that's a supported platform that won't get an "I'm sorry, we don't support that" from the Lotus call center. In the Big Giant Corporate World, "Corporate Standard" is the only way to go, and unless you can show official support so the IT department has someone to call when your workstation craps out, your platform has a Snowball's Chance in Hell of getting into the list of "Corporate Standard" platforms. Sure, you'll find a few smart cookies who have their own little Linux desktop going and have bothered to read the HOWTOs off the 'Net and get Notes installed in client-mode on their desktop and if it breaks, they'll fix it themselves, but that's a very far cry from Lotus selling it as a shrinkwrap package and offering official support for it. Take as a case study Oracle's support for Linux. For years before Oracle announced official support for their database server running natively on Linux, it was possible (although quite a chore) to get the SCO UNIX version of Oracle to run on Linux through the iBCS emulation layer, but you just really didn't hear of too many people doing it and you certainly didn't hear of Big Business doing it. When Oracle announced the availability of Oracle 8 natively built for Linux, the 10,000 Beta CDs they offered were claimed in a matter of hours and, while it didn't exactly take the corporate world by storm, you did hear a lot of press about larger companies willing to try it out. It's not that it couldn't be made to work before the official offering, but if you're running an "Enterprise" class application like Oracle or Notes, the money guys want to be able to buy a support contract and the money guys usually have the final word in the sorts of environments that run Oracle or Notes. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- With Microsoft products, failure is not Derek Glidden an option - it's a standard component. http://3dlinux.org/ Choose your life. Choose your http://www.tbcpc.org/ future. Choose Linux. http://www.illusionary.com/ | ||
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