See also: last week's Linux in the news page.

Linux in the news

KDE 2.0

KDE 2.0 released. The much-awaited KDE 2.0 Kopernicus release is now available. According to KDE founder Matthias Ettrich: "We think that current KDE users will be pleasantly surprised with the remarkable improvements we have achieved. KDE 2 offers the desktop user the benefit of standards compliance and an array of new technologies, from Konqueror, a full featured web browser and file manager, to KOffice, an integrated office suite, as well as a slew of usability enhancements, such as KDE's expanded themeability and configurability and a new KDE Help Center". Happy downloading!

Linux planet takes a look at KDE2 in a feature article by Dennis E. Powell.

Looking at KDE, Waiting for the Other Guy (Andover News). Jack Bryar looks at what the Linux desktop, in particular the new KDE 2.0 Linux desktop, means to business. "Which would you rather do, wait for a Gee-whiz desktop interface and office suite that can do everything you want (and more) -- or would you rather get something that actually works? Or would you still do nothing?" (Thanks to César A. K. Grossmann).

Norwegian language movement says: `Boycott Microsoft - use KDE instead' (KDE Dot News). KDE Dot News is running an english translation of a Norwegian newspaper article about an organization asking Norwegian schools to swtich to KDE from Microsoft tools. "Since KDE now provides both Bokmål and Nynorsk, Norsk Målungdom wants schools to use KDE instead of MS Windows."

Companies

Bigger, not necesarily better (ZDNet). ZDNet looks at the StarOffice release. "Mind you, just because you can get the source code to OpenOffice, doesn't necessarily mean you're going to want it. The sheer volume of the code requires more than three gigabytes of hard disk space in which to build, and compiles have been reported to take more than 20 hours to complete."

Sun dances the dance, pours the source (LinuxToday). The Australian LinuxToday has put up this look at the StarOffice release. "The GNOME project have plans to take the StarOffice release and run with it, abandoning their current office projects, Abiword and Gnumeric, for their big brother OpenOffice. I would say that in about 2 years time we'll start seeing a decent, workable GNOME Office on people's desktops. The GNOME team wants to take OpenOffice and rip it apart, applying their BONOBO architecture and making it integrate well with their object model. All I can say is, well they'd better know German."

Get your Red-hot Linux apps (ZDNet). Chiliware is set to release 4 new applications for the Linux Desktop, says this ZDNet News article. "'Open source is a great service, but if you just do open source, it's hard to make enough money to pay everybody', said company CEO Kenneth Eppers".

Covalent mixes proprietary and open source software (Upside). Upside looks at Covalent's apache-oriented business model. "For a company that has long been trying to emulate the branding success of Red Hat for the Apache market, this willingness to stick with the traditional, proprietary approach is an interesting point of contrast."

Welcoming back an old Amiga (News.com). The Amiga is set to make a comeback, according to C|Net's News.com. "Amiga's future, however, lies chiefly in its software, in particular its new Amiga Digital Environment software, which can run as an operating system of its own or atop other operating systems, including Linux and Windows CE, [Amiga President Bill] McEwan said."

Back to the future: Novell's new vision for success (NetworkWorld Fusion). Novell has staked its future on Netware - or has it? In this article from NetworkWorld, Jeff Shapiro thinks Linux may be the heart of Novell's new soul. "In speculating, I wouldn't be surprised to see NetWare operating in a Linux microkernel environment, with support for NetWare storage systems, Novell Distributed Print Services and legacy NetWare Loadable Modules running as daemons."

Details of Linuxcare complaint come to light (Upside). It looks like Linuxcare's troubles are not over yet. This article in Upside covers a sexual harassment suit against the company and its former CEO Fernand Sarrat. "After dinner with Sarrat and another Linuxcare executive, Bowen was offered a job as Sarrat's personal assistant. The post paid $110,000 a year and carried options to purchase 115,000 shares of Linuxcare stock, according to the documents on file with the court." The article goes into some unpleasant detail from there.

Business

Linux taking hold in India. LinuxNews.com looks at Linux in India. Quoting Atul Chitnis: "Not sure about the rest of the country, but in the state of Karnataka (whose capital is Bangalore), the study of Linux is compulsory in technical education."

Bidding on Linux (Inc.com). It's an older article (June 2000), but Inc.com did a nice article investigating just how well you can run your company using Linux. "Linux can also save small companies money because it runs well on older, less powerful machines. When Campbell installed E-mail and a firewall -- a security gateway between the company's computers and the Internet -- at James G. Murphy Co., two years ago, he used an old 486 computer that Murphy was preparing to jettison. `I could have sold them a new computer,' Campbell says. `But Linux runs just fine on that computer, so why sell them hardware they don't really need?'"

World Bank Launches `Development' Portal (Interactive Week). The World Bank Group is setting up a separate company to run the Global Development Gateway, a portal where it hopes residents, businesspeople and officials from emerging countries can collaborate on economic and social development projects with their peers around the world.

Testing the Enterprise Linux Load (LinuxWorld Austrlia). In this article from LinuxWorld Australia, Caldera, Red Hat Software, Stormix Technologies, SuSE and TurboLinux are evaluated to assess whether these companies are coupling their distributions with the tools and services necessary for enterprise server use. "The best installation process was offered by Caldera eServer, which appeared to have total command of each platform we installed it on, followed very closely by Red Hat 6.2 and TurboLinux Server 6.0. The other distributions seemed to be less capable of sensing the platform environment in one way or another."

.comment: TechnoPolitics (LinuxPlanet). LinuxPlanet has noticed that Linux companies do not show up in the list of U.S. presidential campaign donors. "The philosophical argument is that Linux really has nothing to do with government. It's free, knows no borders, and the community is highly apolitical... But there's another argument, a practical one. There are some things at stake that matter, or ought to matter, to Linux users and to those to whom Free or Open Source software is important. In fact, like it or not, the community has been shot through with political issues all year."

Linux has already won (LinuxToday Australia). LinuxToday Australia ponders the question: Has Linux already achieved world domination? "I have a theorem that Linux has perhaps the largest number of free development tools for any platform available ... Take into consideration its "ability to talk to any medium except smoke signals" ... and you have a combination which, given time, cannot be anything but successful."

What Makes a Virtual Organization Work? (Sloan Management Review). The MIT Sloan Management Review Fall 2000 issue contains a brief look at the open source workplace. "What motivates people to participate in open-source projects? And how is participation governed in the absence of employment or fee-for-service contracts? The answers revealed some important lessons for traditional organizations about the challenges of keeping and motivating knowledge workers and the process of managing in the new arena of networked or virtual organizations."

Lights, camera and net interaction (London Evening Standard). Can open source style collaboration migrate to other realms? In this article from the London Evening Standard, script writers get a chance to collaborate on a potential movie script in an open source fashion. "Of course, guidance is required and the project will be overseen by professional writers, known as Navigators, including Joe Minion, the wordsmith behind Martin Scorsese's After Hours, who will set tasks for the community. In the first instance, members will create, in 2,250 words or less, the central character for a detective thriller. When the deadline closes a "peer review" will invite members to evaluate one anothers' work."

Open Sources: Running afoul of the AMA (ZDNet). An extension of the open sources philosophies to the medical world seems appropriate in this article on one mans run-in with the American Medical Association and their Medicare code numbers used for setting prices for services.

Fragmentation fears within Linux (ComputerWeekly). Perhaps too much effort is expended worrying about Linux fragmentation. This ComputerWeekly article looks at fragmentation as method of differentiation amongst distributors, primarly from the point of view of Caldera.

Linux Boosts Unix (ZDNet). Unix vendors feel they have little to worry about with Linux in this article from ZDNet. In fact, they seem to be happy with the upstart OS. "The comment is a reflection of what the Unix vendors feel is a remarkable turnaround in their fortunes over the last 18 months. Having lived for years in fear of the growing power and scalability of Microsoft Windows, they now sense that they have in Linux a little champion on their side, one with charisma and a popular following. Unix vendors aren't used to feeling that way."

Resources

Embedded Linux Newsletter - October 19th, 2000. The latest issue of the LinuxDevices.com Embedded Linux Newsletter is now available.

A look at embedded devices running Linux. This LinuxDevices.com reference guide looks at the myriad of embedded devices currently in development that use Linux as the heart of their hardware.

Programming GNOME Applications with Perl, Part One (Perl.com). This article on Perl.com discusses one man's journey to learn the Perl interface into GNOME. "I recently needed to write a GNOME application and hit this barrier [no documentation for Perl/GNOME], and I had to figure the whole thing out pretty much for myself. So, I decided to write these tutorials so that you, dear reader, don't have to. In this first episode, we'll create an extremely simple application, but one with a full, standard GNOME interface."

It's time to kiss your BIOS goodbye! (LinuxDevices). Linux Devices summarizes the goal of Red Hat's new Red Boot project - to provide an open source bootstrap process for embedded PCs - and points readers to the associated whitepaper.

Python Roadmap (O'Reilly Net). The O'Reilly Network looks at whether Stackless Python will make it into the mainstream. "It seems reasonable to expect Stackless will make it into Python 2.1. This is likely to unleash a burst of activity, as higher-level interfaces -- microthreads and coroutines, among others -- are shaken down for 2.2. Stackless is a sufficiently interesting change that it might take many months to grasp all its consequences."

How prone is Linux to forking?. Does forking in Linux happen more than in BSD? Does it matter? Newsforge looks at forking in both Linux and BSD, with comments from Bruce Perens, Chairman of Progeny Linux Systems and well known Linux advocate.

Wine: It Gets Better With Age (LinuxToday). The Australian LinuxToday looks at the Wine project. "After seven years as alpha code, Wine's developers expect to have a 1.0 release of the software ready some time in the next six to twelve months - though it's not clear how events at Corel might change that timetable."

Reviews

Linux Gets Smaller (ZDNet). ZDNet Reviews is carrying an introductory article on embedded Linux and some of the companies working in this arena. "Embedded Linux will lead to a wide range of diminutive products running the open-source operating system. In fact, many believe embedded-Linux devices will outnumber Palm devices in two years."

Device profile: FrontPath portable info appliance (LinuxDevices). LinuxDevices.com takes a look at the FrontPath ProGear, a Transmeta-powered tablet device. "The device is intended to provide an easy-to-use information appliance for a wide range of specialty applications, in markets such as health care, real estate, restaurants, hotels, and cruise ships."

Sendmail Multi Switch 2.1 Gives Powerful Features a Simple Face (Network Computing). This article in Network Computing reviews Sendmail Multi Switch 2.1, a commercial version of the open source Sendmail. "Multi Switch lets you set up and maintain multiple mail-stream queues. This allows for parallelism, especially on SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) servers and clusters. Individual queues can have their own rule sets and configuration peculiarities, and you can make some queues faster or slower than others. The standard open-source version of Sendmail doesn't let you do this. "

Device profile: Nokia Media Terminal (LinuxDevices. Rick Lehrbaum takes a look at the Nokia Media Terminal in this LinuxDevices.com article. "The Media Terminal's software architecture consists primarily of Linux, the Xfree86 windowing system, and the Mozilla web browser (enhanced for PAL and NTSC display)."

Penguins in South America? (DukeOfUrl). The DukeOfUrl reviews Conectiva Linux 5.0. "One area you may look to Conectiva is if you're sick of distributions biased towards the English language. This would be a fine choice for users seeking good Portuguese support. Additionally, if you want the easiest installation in the business, look no further."

Device profile: Ericsson Cordless Screen Phone (LinuxDevices). Another embedded Linux device profile from LinuxDevices.com - this one on the Ericsson Cordless Screen Phone, which runs an embedded version of Red Hat Linux and the embedded version of Qt.

Device profile: empeg car audio player (LinuxDevices). Yet another embedded Linux device profile from LinuxDevices.com - this time Rick looks at the empeg car audio player, a StrongArm based embedded Linux computer that fits into your car radio slot. Unlike other embedded Linux products this one is actually available for sale and its parent company - empeg - encourages hacking of the device!

Interviews

Interview with Linus Torvalds (c't). C't has posted this interview (in German) with Linus Torvalds. If past experience holds, they will likely post the English version eventually; until then, a partial translation is available via Babelfish. (Thanks to Albrecht Fritzsche).

A Good-Looking Geek Magnet (Fox News). Fox News.com is running a fluff piece on the beauty of the Linux Desktop, based on a short interview with themes.org Site Manager Greg Sanders and a high level overview of our beloved X Window System.

Miscellaneous

Highlights of Atlanta (Annual) Linux Showcase (Linux Journal). From last week, but worth a look anyway: Don Marti's ALS summary on the Linux Journal site. "Red Hat's rush to ship C++ fixes at the cost of confusing, ok, enraging, old-school Red Hat users is good news. It shows that Red Hat is getting service and support contracts from corporate customers who are porting C++ programs that depend on features that have been weak historically in GCC. Face it, nobody needs a bleeding-edge compiler to rebuild the old reliable tools written in C."

Section Editor: Rebecca Sobol

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