See also: last week's Back page page.

Linux Links of the Week

The eXtensible Name Service (XNS) is an ambitious project which is trying to put together a specification and open source implementation of a scheme for personal information exchange. They seem to be saying all the right things about privacy, you can check their white paper on spam filtering for an example of what XNS can do, and they hope to provide a lot of conveniences. See the XNS in a nutshell page for an overview of the project.

Section Editor: Jon Corbet

This week in history

Two years ago (October 22, 1998 LWN): Jonathan Postel, one of the founding fathers of the Internet, died from complications from heart surgery.

LinuxWorld went online.

Microsoft went on the offensive with an open letter in France:

Linus Torvald [sic] left the university last year to join a Californian company. The development of Linux since slowed down considerably. In the same way, the maintenance of each functionality of Linux depends on the mobilization of the teams. Thus, certain functionalities have not known updating for two years.

In other words, delays in the delivery of new stable kernels are not particularly new... (LWN ran a full English translation of the letter).

Gaël Duval announced plans to form a corporation around Linux-Mandrake. Two years later, MandrakeSoft is doing well.

One year ago (October 21, 1999 LWN): The first signs came out of the U.S. administration that crypto export laws would be relaxed somewhat. Only now, a year later, are we beginning to see distributions shipping (in the U.S.) with crucial software like ssh.

LinuxToday was acquired by Internet.com. Co-founder Dave Whitinger then left, later to turn up at Atipa.

Letters to the editor

From: Peter Samuelson <peter@cadcamlab.org>
Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2000 05:24:17 -0500 (CDT)
To: letters@lwn.net
Subject: Stop the colors already!


In the beginning there was Red Hat Linux.  OK, not quite in the
beginning, but dial back to 1995 or so when Red Hat emerged as a market
leader in the then-uncrowded field of Linux distributions.  I heard of
Red Hat and thought, "Cool name."

Then Terra Soft came on the scene with Yellow Dog Linux.  Cute, I
thought -- obviously a play on Red Hat's name, but different.

I didn't start getting suspicious until a few more entries trickled in.
Black Lab Linux.  Red Flag Linux.  Blue Cat Linux.  Then I began to
wonder: is this an LSB recommendation I missed?  "A compliant Linux
distribution SHOULD be named ``{color name} {noun} {Linux}''.  Vendors
MAY, if desired, combine the color name and the noun into one word."

So now, according to the LWN sidebars, we have the five mentioned above
plus Black Cat Linux, BluePoint Linux, White Dwarf Linux and Green Frog
Linux, not to mention the variations Darkstar Linux, Red Linux, Redmond
Linux, Think Blue Linux and the Red Escolar Project.  Oh, and don't
forget the ones that incorporate the Red Hat name directly, like VA/Red
Hat and KRUD.

The whole thing actually reminds me of open-air markets in the third
world where one can buy a cheap watch made by "Ceiko".

People!  Give us a break here!  I am no Red Hat fan, but this is
ridiculous.  Please tell me we don't yet live in a world where one must
"sound sort of like Red Hat" to be seen as legitimate.  I know the
distro market is getting crowded, but surely there are still some good
non-color-related brand names out there.  I happen to think the names
"Slackware" and "tomsrtbt" are absolutely inspired -- why can't a more
recent distribution come up with a clever name like those?

(The rant about almost everyone using the same old Ewing penguin mascot
has been saved for another day....)

Peter

Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2000 13:25:34 -0400
From: "Jay R. Ashworth" <jra@baylink.com>
To: jon@lwn.net
Subject: "What would conference organizers think..."

Based on that list of names, the answer is obvious: they'd think it
sucked.  They're not in it to help the developing nations, they're in
it to make money.

It's not *their* fault; if they *don't* act like money grubbing assholes
interested only in raw profit, their stockholders will sue them out of
their jobs; we asked for it, we got it, Toyota.

Cheers,
-- jra

-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra@baylink.com
Member of the Technical Staff     Baylink
The Suncoast Freenet         The Things I Think
Tampa Bay, Florida     http://baylink.pitas.com                +1 727 804 5015

Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2000 10:14:37 -0700
From: Dan Stromberg <strombrg@nis.acs.uci.edu>
To: lwn@lwn.net
Subject: kde and gnome and pr and licensing

I don't think it was Gnome's good PR, so much as KDE's bad licensing,
that led to KDE's lack of popularity with people who have what's best
for linux at heart.

KDE has fixed their license problem finally, but it's probably
(hopefully) too late for KDE to recover from Gnome getting the
critical mass of developers.

I'm not asking you to sell out your preference for KDE to proselytize
for Gnome alone, but I do hope that your reporting on KDE vs Gnome
will be a little more even handed in the future.

-- 
Dan Stromberg                                               UCI/NACS/DCS

From: "Nicholas Lee" <nj.lee@plumtree.co.nz>
To: <letters@lwn.net>
Subject: Debian back ports are often easy
Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2000 22:57:34 +1300

It should be noted that because of Debian's well integrated developer
enviroment that often 'back porting' or simply recompiling of recent
packages is easy.  It is possible to hand rebuild unstable pacakges in
stable.

For instance just this week I wanted the latest version of gnupg for my
potatoe system.

As you can see from http://packages.debian.org/gnupg there is 2 point
releases between the stable  (1.0.1-2)and unstable (1.0.3-2) versions of
gnupg in Debian at present. [*]

Although I downloaded the dsc, orig.tar.gz and diff files directly from the
web page I could have easily said (after adding the unstable src location
lines to the apt/sources.list conf file) :

  $ apt-get source gnupg

From that point its as simple as:

  $ dpkg-source -x gnupg_1.0.3-2.dsc   #  If you've downloaded these files
directly, rather than by apt
  $ (cd gnupg-1.0.3 ; fakeroot debian/rules build)
  $ sudo dpkg -i gnupg_1.0.3-2.deb

This process does require the Debian developer tool set to be installed, but
with apt-get this is again a reasonible simple operation.  These are at the
least the debmake, debhelper and fakeroot packages.


[*] Note the fact that 1.0.3-2 depends on the latest unstable libc6 package
meant I wasn't about to install the straight unstable gnupg package.
Having been through the last update from glibc 2.0 to 2.1 with unstable
potatoe while in the middle of an important development effort with
Blackdown jdk, I've learnt my lesson.


Nicholas