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Linux in the news

Recommended Reading

Virus patches aren't being applied (ZDNet). An interesting piece on why applying security patches is something everyone has to worry about in the Internet age comes from ZDNet today. "Failing to responsibly patch computers led to 99 percent of the 5,823 Web site defacements last year, up 56 percent from the 3,746 Web sites defaced in 1999, according to security group Attrition.org."

IBM

'Linux Lou' and IBM (TechWeb). TechWeb looks at the growing alliance between the Big Blue Behemoth and the upstart Linux community. " Of course, Linux is getting something from its relationship with IBM. Many doors to the largest corporate data centers were locked to Linux, but now IBM is opening those doors. The value to the Linux community is a wider array of software and even more smart minds contributing to the greater good."

IBM is taking Linux -- and running (Upside). Gartner Group analyst George Weiss thinks IBM's push into Linux may give the impression IBM is pushing for control of the community. "Large competitors such as Hewlett-Packard (HWP) are still a few months behind IBM in demonstrating full commitment to the Linux market. As for smaller competitors such as VA Linux and Red Hat, these companies have their own obstacles. Given the investment community's continued displeasure with Linux-related companies, neither can rely on surging market capitalization."

Sun

Sun shines on Linux too! (FreeOS.com). Herb Hinstorff, heads of Sun's program office for Linux and Open Source, discusses Sun's position on Linux and why they feel Linux takes them back to their roots. "We are working with the Internationalization part of the Linux and organizations like the University of Michigan. We are contributing code back to Linux. We have contributed code to NFS (Network File System) version 4.0. We have also opened up the Internationalization framework in Solaris and are contributing to the X consortium." (Thanks to Trevor Warren)

Sun to lose key player in Web software push (News.com). Ex-StarDivision head and current open source ambassador for Sun Microsystems Marco Boerries is leaving that company effective January 26th. No word on the reason for his resignation or his plans for the future.

Are Boerries and Sun parting ways? (Upside). Upside examines the history of the relationship between StarDivision founder Marco Boerries and that companies eventual buyout parent, Sun Microsystems. " Boerries rejected early buyout offers from Sun, until the company's heated rivalry with Microsoft -- not to mention the growing industry interest in free software and software-compatible applications led Sun CEO McNealy to tender a rumored half-billion-dollar offer."

Sun invests $5 million in Tripwire (News.com). Sun's investment came with a host of other investors. "The new funding round was announced Tuesday. New investors besides Sun were Deutsche Banc Alex. Brown, ClearLight Partners and Riverside Management. Earlier investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Advanced Technology Ventures and Garage.com also contributed to the funding round, Tripwire said."

Corel

Corel paints rosier future (News.com). C|Net's News.com looks at Corel's change in direction. "Corel is close to finishing a deal with Linux Global Partners, a New York holding company that is expected to buy 80 percent of Corel's Linux business for $5 million and allow Corel to hold the remaining 20 percent, according to sources. Details of that deal are not expected to be announced for another month or so, sources said."

Corel to spin off part of its Linux business (ZDNet). Here's ZDNet's take on Corel's plan to sell its Linux division. "Linux suffered a blow today as Corel Corp. announced it plans to spin off part of its Linux division, effectively taking the company out of the market as a developer of Linux desktop operating system software." The article, however, is not clear on just how Corel's withdrawal has hurt Linux...

Companies

Linuxcare follows Red Hat with online support service (News.com). C|Net's News.com reports on the opening of Linuxcare's managed services, providing customers with remote administration. "Linuxcare itself won't sell the services to prospective customers but instead will rely on the sales forces of business partners Digital Island, Consonus and others to come."

VA Linux -- Easy Come, Easy Go (San Francisco Chronicle). The San Francisco Chronicle talks of VA's cope with reality, and how at least inside the company, reality has been in plain sight all along. "Vice President John Hall, whose net worth at the age of 27 has gone from nearly a billion dollars to tens of millions, still lives in the same apartment he and two college buddies have rented since graduating from Stanford in 1994."

Start-up to sell open-source Web software (News.com). C|Net's News.com reports on Zend's push into the commercial PHP market. "Zend isn't starting from scratch, though, a major advantage over some open-source companies. Zend can take advantage of the popularity of Apache, the No. 1 software package used to send Web pages out to Internet surfers, according to Netcraft."

MP3.com Open to Friends (Wired). Wired covers MP3.com's announcement to open its API to other sites. "[MP3.com CEO Michael] Robertson hopes that websites looking to drive traffic to their sites will incorporate the technology into their systems, which would radically drive up subscription sales for the company. MP3 would therefore get additional revenue from fees charged when users store more than 25 CDs."

Business

Open Source Lab to open this week (ZDNet). An announcement on the opening of the Open Source Lab is expected this week, according to this ZDnet story. "Ross Mauri, vice president of Unix software at IBM, has been appointed president of the lab's governing board, while Brian Behlendorf, chief technical officer of CollabNet and co-founder of Apache, is among the board appointees, the source said. IBM was not immediately available for comment."

Banrisul to replace DOS with Linux in Brazilian ATM's. Linux.org interviews two key members of the Banrisul Bank in Brazil about that bank's move from DOS to Linux in all of their 2000 ATM's. "We were using MS-DOS, an operating system which could no longer fulfill our needs. An option was MS-Windows, but this would have forced us to re-write a good part of our existing programs - not to mention the cost of licenses for MS-Windows in each of the two thousand ATMs. MS-Windows requires more frequent CPU upgrades than Linux does. This is due to Linux's greater efficiency compared with other 32 bit operating systems." (Thanks to Jay R. Ashworth)

Open minds on open source (Federal Computer Week). NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center has switched to the open sourced MySQL database server from Oracle for their NAIS system. NAIS sends e-mail notifications to users based on specified interests and enables users to query the Web site. (Thanks to Ronald van der Lee)

Linux Lovers Launch Large Lab (Wired). Wired covers the opening of the OSDL in Oregon and tells us what the first two projects will entail. "The second project is being conducted by Jabber an open-source instant-messaging company, and is focused on increasing Linux TCP/IP concurrent connection support from the current 20,000 to greater than 64,000." (Thanks to Jay Ashworth)

Agere to roll Linux chip set (TechWeb). Agere Systems, the former Lucent Technologies Microelectronics Group, has selected Linux as the operating system to be used with a new asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) chip set for residential gateway, home networking and personal computer equipment.

AMD chips power new supercomputer (News.com). AMD Athlon's are being used in a new supercomputer for the University of Delaware. "The 128-processor computer is constructed from a series of nodes. Each node is like a standalone PC in that it has its own processor, memory and a high-end networking card. Communication between nodes is accomplished via a network and is directed by a host node."

Linux rides out the bears (HeraldSun.com). Despite the outflow of investors, Linux companies are sticking to their plans for growth and income, according to this HeraldSun article. "Red Hat continues to move toward the goal it set in June to become profitable in 2001. The company posted a net loss from its ongoing business of $900,000 or 1 cent per share for the quarter that ended Nov. 30. Revenue grew 21 percent over the previous quarter to $22.4 million."

Reviews

An In-Depth Look at Reiserfs (Linux Planet). Linux Planet has put up, well, an in-depth look at ReiserFS, which will appear in the 2.4.1 kernel release. "Performance gains under Reiserfs can be substantial, or can be miniscule, depending on what you are doing. I have found that Reiserfs is extremely responsive for most of my work, and I wouldn't want to live without it. Compiling source code, something that typically opens hundreds or thousands of files in rapid succession, really zooms."

Making Linux Work In The Workplace: KWord (LinuxOrbit). KWord lacks some stability according to this review in LinuxOrbit. "One of the biggest selling points in any Linux pitch is the rock-solid uptime and performance, which is why I found KWord's stability (or lack thereof) surprising. While trying out the various features of KWord (which there are plenty), I experienced no less than a dozen crashes. KWord seemed to be rock solid as a regular word processor, but when working with frames it became as tipsy as a drunken toddler."

Matrox G400/G450 Review (LinuxLookup). The Matrox G400/G500 series of video cards can provide multiple monitor support for Linux systems using drivers from Matrox, according to this article at LinuxLookup.

Review: Zend Cache (ReviewBoard.com). Zend Cache, the caching plug-in to Zend's ZendEngine PHP core system, is reviewed in this article from ReviewBoard.com. "It saves this compiled and optimized code in shared memory, which is shared and used by every web request. When the web process gets a request, it checks the ZendCache registry to see if the file has been loaded into the cache and if it has uses the compiled version of the script. This has huge performance benefits for high traffic sites"

Miscellaneous

Embedded, storage and 2.4 developments to rule LinuxWorld (searchEnterpriseLinux). In the first of what is likely to be a large number of stories to come from New York next week, searchEnterpriseLinux looks at what we might expect from the exhibit floor. "BigStorage is one of many vendors announcing new storage and server products at the show. Rounding out the storage field will be new product announcements from Enhanced Software Technologies Overland Data,and API NetWorks. Phoenix, Ariz.-based EST will spotlight its new BRU-Pro, an enterprise Linux backup product, while San Diego's Overland will showcase its line of automated storage backup solutions."

Libraries are dead, long live meta-libraries! (ZDNet). ZDNet's Michael C. Daconta says meta-libraries are the "think globally, act locally" solution to the world's cross platform language woes. "A meta-library is a library stretches globally to span diverse systems (thinks globally) and repackages them to appear the same as local libraries and objects (acts locally). If implemented in the Java Virtual Machine, meta-libraries would allow you to instantiate Python objects or invoke .Net services in a way comfortable (and transparent) to Java programmers."

Section Editor: Rebecca Sobol

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