Bringing you the latest news from the Linux World.
Dedicated to keeping Linux users up-to-date, with concise news for all interests
Published June 18, 1998

Sections: Linux articles Security Kernel news Distributions Ports Software Development Free/Open-Source Software Commercial/Press Releases Announcements Links of the week Feedback and corrections Other stuff: LWN Archives Linux Links Linux Events Calendar Daily Updates	Leading items Reminder! This is the week that we announced in advance we would not be publishing! We have put out a small amount of material, including the next editorial from Ian Nandhra, but the majority of our sections are empty. Fear not! We will return to full content next week. We received some feedback on last week's editorial by Ian Nandhra. Apparently Ian received much more feedback directly. He reported that the exchanges were excellent and he received input that definitely affected his editorial this week, entitled What Should Linux Do With Standards? One response that came directly to us, which stated clearly a few points that many in the Linux community would agree with, was from Robert Levin, who expressed his opinion that UNIX98 Branding for Linux would be more helpful to the Open Group than it would be to Linux. Keep an eye out for news on the LSB (Linux Standards Base) over the next week or two! Bruce Perens should be returning from Europe soon and we may start hearing from other people who have gathered to start work in this area. Evan Leibovich has published an excellent paper on the The four phases of Linux acceptance. Hans Zoebelein sent us a link, and a brief translation, on the German Society for Informatic in Medicine, Biometrics and Epidemilogy's (GMDS) recommendation that Unix, preferably Linux, be used instead of NT in hospitals due to NT security problems. What about the Usenix conference? Sean Reifschneider (tummy.com) posted a report on the conference to the local Boulder, Colorado user group mailing list. And a very last minute report came in from Phil Tomson on the Linux vs. NT shootout at DAC. A very detailed, good report. Hopefully the support for Linux among the EDA developers will in turn generate Linux applications from the EDA vendors.	Got some feedback, some news to publish, or something else you would like to tell us? lwn@lwn.net is our address. Or would you like to be notified when new editions of the Linux Weekly News are published? Click here and send a blank message. Please see our contact page for other contact information. Here is the permanent site for this page. Need top-quality commercial Linux support? Please see our Linux support page.
	Linux in the news Garth Gillespie pointed us to a new review published June 17th of Red Hat's new Secure Web Server plus a peek at Linux 5.1, entitled "How Secure is Your E-commerce?". An enjoyable read with some good information and opinion. Prasanth Kumar sent us a pointer to this Microtime article on the Linux and the PalmPilot. We recently posted a mention of an article on The Boston Globe's Hiawatha Bray experiment with living without Microsoft for a month. The article contains a pointer to Hiawatha's home page. Christopher Cashell wrote in to suggest people check it out. It includes more information on Hiawatha's experience with Linux. This is turning out to be a fascinating adventure. themes.org posted an interview with Jamie Zawinski, of Netscape fame. Computer Reseller posted two articles about Linux this week: Linux: The Open Operating System That Could and the Faithful Converge To See Linux Creator Linus Torvalds. Both are good articles. Techserver has a copy of the Associated Press article on Nader and the Justice Department. MSNBC's article for the week was entitled Free OS Ready for Prime-Time. Performance Computing rewviewed Caldera OpenLinux. Linux might be the hottest freeware on the planet, which is why this Caldera eruption is so cool. Sounds like love to me ...
	Top / News / Security / Kernel / Dists / Ports / Devel / Free / Announce / Feedback
	A vulnerability present in the SSH software package can allow an attacker to execute arbitrary commands on the SSH server. To protect against this, immediately upgrade to ssh 1.2.25. Red Hat ssh-1.2.25 RPMs are available, as is the Debian ssh-1.1.25 package for hamm (Debian 2.0-to-be). /tmp races have been found in the mailx packages. Updated RPMs are available for Red Hat 4.2 and 5.1. Debian has released a new cxhextrix package, revamped to address a buffer overflow problem.
	Top / News / Security / Kernel / Dists / Ports / Devel / Free / Announce / Feedback
	Alan Cox released a 2.1.106ac3 patch set Wednesday, June 17th. Theoretically, this should fix the PAS16 sound driver bug. The ac2 patch addressed the soundblaster bug and the ac1 patch fixed the problem with 106 dying with a CRC error, as well as merging in Alan's other patches. One big flame war this week erupted over efs2prog and partitions greater than 2GB in size. You see, llseek became a standard call in libc, but in glibc, the standard called for lseek64. This was made murkier when llseek was left in glibc, but the prototype was removed, causing a lot of tests for that function to fail... Meanwhile, version 1.12 of efs2prog was put into beta-test a month or so ago and the final should be out in the near future. Of course, like all good flame wars, that was only the beginning! Discussion went on to general libc5 to glibc issues, the GPL, portable software and lots of other goodies ... even a post or two from Linus on the need to sever the connection between user applications and kernel source code.	Since we're a weekly publication, chances are we'll be behind a rev or two on the kernel release by the time you read this page. Up-to-the-second information can always be found at LinuxHQ.
	Top / News / Security / Kernel / Dists / Ports / Devel / Free / Announce / Feedback
	Debian Apt 0.0.16 has been released. John Goerzen has made some great progress porting the GCC, gdb, binutils, etc. packages for Debian to the PalmPilot. And more continues to be ported... Slackware We missed the opportunity to point out the slackware 3.5.0 betas that came out last week, so let us not miss the chance to point out that the final version of Slackware 3.5.0 was released this week!	Please note that not every distribution will show up every week. Only distributions with recent news to report will be listed.
	Top / News / Security / Kernel / Dists / Ports / Devel / Free / Announce / Feedback
	Alpha New installation disks for Debian Alpha 2.0 have been released
	Top / News / Security / Kernel / Dists / Ports / Devel / Free / Announce / Feedback
	Perl Tom Christiansen posted recent reviews of Advanced Perl Programming, Effective Perl Programming and Perl5 Interactive. All of them received "4 Camels", so either they are very good, or the camels have been proliferating recently ... Ah well, camels aren't quite that common. Perl5 for Dummies only got 2 camels ... MacPerl: Power and Ease got 4 camels and Perl: The Programmer's Companion got 5 camels! It is not only free of technical errors, it is a pleasure to read. Python The final release of HTMLgen 2.1 is out. A mailing list for python cryptography has been announced. Mark Nottingham has put out a call for participation in the creation of a Python Journal. Seems Sean Reifschneider already has a domain and mailing list set up ... mxDateTime Package - Version 0.9.0
	Top / News / Security / Kernel / Dists / Ports / Devel / Free / Announce / Feedback
	Free/Open-Source Software News Beowulf Jacek Radajewski has proposed the formation of a Beowulf Documentation Project. Beowulf fans will probably also want to check out the Ziff-Davis review of Red Hat's Extreme Linux product. Red Hat wishes to actively encourage one or more people to develop a proposal for a book on Linux clusters that would be published by Red Hat. The intention is for the text to be freely distributable. One person commented that Don Becker is already writing a book on Beowulf. Of interest to Beowulf people and linux-ha fans, MOSIX, a mechanism for transparently migrating processes from one node to another, is being ported by the team to Linux. Mozilla The source code for the Netscape Directory SDK for C is now available through Mozilla.org.
	Top / News / Security / Kernel / Dists / Ports / Devel / Free / Announce / Feedback
	Linux and the Commercial World A recent NASA request for proposal specified Alpha hardware. Operating system: Linux. Compatible Systems has been awarded an export license for its 56-Bit DES Encryption software, supported on the Linux platform, as well as others. Press Releases: Opera Software, now supporting the Linux platform. webMethods' B2B Integration Server
	Top / News / Security / Kernel / Dists / Ports / Devel / Free / Announce / Feedback
	Software Many thanks to all the people who took the time to send feedback on the modified announcement section. We got a lot of positive feedback, but also an overwhelming number of requests for the return of the brief descriptions of each package. The usefulness of the weekly summary was diminished by the loss of these descriptions (we miss them, too!). Patrick Lenz of Freshmeat has agreed to start adding such an item to his database. That work will take a little while, so please be patient. Our collaboration with Freshmeat will continue and your short descriptions shall return! 8hz-mp3 0.2 Amanda 2.4.0p1 AutoRPM 1.6.1 BeroList 2.5.8 Bezerk 0.3.0 Blackbox 0.33.0 Bonsai and Tinderbox Source Boust v0.012 C-Forge v1.1d-4 Clone 1.12 cRadio 0.55 Date::Calc 4.1 DDD 2.99.99 DDD snapshot 19980616 Doc Welder 0.6 beta 1 DOSEmu 0.97.9 E-Data 1.2 Eggdrop 1.3.16 Fetchmail 4.5.0 FileRunner 2.5 fltk beta-980616 FreeType 1.1 Frontpage extensions for Apache 1.3.0 ftape 4.x beta 5 ftap-tools1.01 gltt 2.2 GNOME 0.20 RPMs revamped GnoRPM 0.2 GNU enscript 1.6 GRadio 0.9.5 grpm 0.1 Gtk-- 0.9.7 icewm 0.9.6 ImageMagick 4.0.7 Imlib 1.6 IPTraf 1.2.0 IRCIT 0.3 Joy2key 1.3 kalendar 0.4b Karpski 0.97 kcmbind 0.2.1 kcrontab 0.1.3 KLyX 0.9.6 KPackage 0.9 Ktelnet 0.61 Kticker 0.1.6 kvoice 0.2 kwintv 0.4.3 Linbot 0.5.4 Linux 2.1.106 Linux 2.1.106 pre-patch Linux joystick driver v1.2.3 lsof 4.33 Lynx 2.8.1dev16 man-pages 1.20 Mesa 3.0 beta 5 Micq 0.2a Ministry of Truth 1.0 Moonlight Creator 0.5.3 MRTG 2.5.3 MySQL 3.21.31 MySQL 3.22.1 ncurses 4.2-980613 nEtDIT 0.2 New IBM Research Technologies on alphaWorks newmaild v1.0 ObjStore 1.40 PalmPilot Development Environment for Red Hat 5.x Pavuk 0.8pl3 pciaudio n/a PGCC 1.0.3 PRFM 0.5.0 (beta) PRFM 0.5.1 (beta) Qmail 1.03 radiusContext 1.30 Red 2.1.6 Roxen 1.2 beta 2 rpm2html/rpmfind 0.96 Samba 1.9.18p8 Secure Ping1.0 setserial 2.14 Simple File Manager 1.4 Slackware 3.5.0 final sn 0.1.8 SNES9x 1.0 ssh 1.2.25 System Recovery 1.01 TB Multisound Drivers 0.5b tircproxy 0.3.2 Tk3play 2.0e util-linux 2.8 Vim 5.2d webcrawl 1.00 Webmetrics 1.0 Webmin 0.53 Website META Language 1.6.5 WindowMaker 0.15.1 Wine 980614 wmconfig-tools 0.02 WPP 1.33 WWR 1.10 X-Mame 0.33b5.1 X8Hz 0.5 xacc 1.0.18 xnetload 1.4.2 Xscreensaver 2.21 xtv 0.6 Xwhois 0.1.2 xwintv 0.4.1 Xxl 2.0.2 Events Linus Torvalds, Robert Hart, Larry Augustin and Jeremy Allison will be panelists at a discussion on the Future of Linux on July 14th. Jointly hosted by SVLUG (Silicon Valley Linux User's Group) and Taos Mountain, the additional sponsor list reads like a who's who in the Linux community. Should be a fun time! Wish we were going ...
	Top / News / Security / Kernel / Dists / Ports / Devel / Free / Announce / Feedback
	Linux links of the week Check this site for a way to voice your opinion to your Congressional representative about H.R. Bill 2281. This is the site for the Home Recording Rights Coalition. They have their own reasons for disliking the bill, which would restrict the use of the home-use of future recording technologies. Our concern remains the issue of being able to publish benchmarks or reviews of software without permission. Either way, they've made it easier to make your voice heard. (Thanks to Mark Mathews for the pointer.)
	Top / News / Security / Kernel / Dists / Ports / Devel / Free / Announce / Feedback
	Feedback and Corrections More Year 2000 information has been sent in, this time by cbbrowne. John Dodge's column last week sparked some letters. Here is one letter, from Chao-Kuei Hung.

This page is produced by Eklektix, Inc.