Bringing you the latest news from the Linux World.
Dedicated to keeping Linux users up-to-date, with concise news for all interests
Published July 16, 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 Much effort was expended in the eternal KDE / GNOME flame war. If you're a glutton for punishment, you can catch some of it in this SlashDot discussion (note that SlashDot has been hard to get through to sometimes recently). It is really time for people to get a bit of a grip here. It seems strange that KDE draws so many more attacks than outright commercial code. There is something in that particular hybrid of free and non-free code that really gets to people. It really is not worthwhile to tear apart the Linux community over something like this. Those who do not like KDE should not use it. Those who like it should; by now they should be more than aware of the licensing issues involved. It is clear that enough people do not like KDE to insure that an alternative will be available. It looks like it will be a good alternative at that. Rather than hurl incendiaries at KDE, wouldn't it be better to put some effort into helping GNOME along? ...And while you're at it, it is worth considering some of the advantages of having KDE around. Choices are always nice to have, and it seems a bit much to assume that one desktop would be best for everybody. And, if nothing else, consider just where the GNOME project would be now, had there not been KDE to light a fire under it. Even if you never use it, KDE may have done you some good. So let's all do ourselves some good, and get back to some more productive activity. This rather lengthy article recently translated from French contains a very good overview gently introducing non-computer-experts to the inherent perils of a world taxed by Microsoft. It ends with a call to France to move to the use of "freely acessible software" in the school systems. Such software allows students to work and learn in total security while affording inquisitive minds the opportunity to acquire an advanced and intelligent computing knowledge: the availability of the source code makes it possible to "open the hood" and even, if desired, to "take the engine apart" to see how it works. This is an excellent article and high recommended. We learned on the ISN mailing list that Ireland released a document on June 24th entitled "A Framework for Ireland's Policy on Cryptography and Electronic Signatures" which states: The production, import, and use of encryption technologies in Ireland shall not be subject to any regulatory controls other than obligations relating to lawful access. Every country that comes out with such support for cryptography will put continuing pressure on the U.S. to reconsider its policies for economic reasons. It looks like somebody at NIST is buying a Beowulf cluster (NIST being the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology). We expect to see more Requests for Proposals like this one from NIST in the future. The Linux Weekly News will be very shorthanded next week, with the result that the July 23 issue will be very thin. That should be our last "outage" for some time, if all goes well.	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 As of press time, there is a poll on the front page of Sm@rt Reseller asking "Would you recommend the Linux platform to your corporate clients?" Yesses are winning overwhelmingly, for now...let them know what you think... The Economist covers Linux again in this article. It's very positive, though some of their facts are not quite up to the level that one expects from The Economist: "Oracle, a database firm, is planning to offer Linux versions of some of its software. Sun Microsystems already uses the program for low-end workstations. IBM might soon do the same for its hardware..." Would that it were true... Thanks to Henry Story for the pointer to this one. [Editor's Note on July 16 this link is returning a server error at the Economist site; hopefully they will fix it at some point]. The first report on the "Linux in the enterprise" gathering on the 14th seems to be this brief summary in InfoWorld. Highlights include a reaffirmation from Intel that they want to see Linux running on the Merced chip, whenever they manage to get it out. (A pre-gathering article was published in Wired News). TechWeb has an article on Computer Associates' port of Ingres to Linux. "The Linux port of Ingres II won't be a full production version, but CA said it plans to make it available for free download when it's released. In doing so, CA will stay with a financial model Linux users are used to. " The article also includes quotes from Mark Bolzern of Linux Mall fame. Ingres is also the topic of this InfoWorld Article, which also discusses the possibility of Informix support in the near future. The Andover News Network did their own survey on whether they could buy computers with Linux installed. Seems they had no trouble. A similar article in The New York Times discusses VA Research (Note that this is a registration-required site, and only wants to provide free access for U.S. readers. "Cypherpunks/cypherpunks" can be used to get into this site). One we missed from a few weeks ago: an article in Computer Dealer News is very upbeat on the future of Linux. "Vendors are listening to the results, and while most of the early offerings have come from marginal players, it's not unlikely that Linux-based workstations will someday be on the market from some of the industry's biggest names. And that day might come sooner than later." A couple of worthwhile articles that don't mention Linux explicitly: The Fog of War in CIO Online goes over the Unix-vs-NT battle in some detail, describing some of the political pressure which lead to adoption of NT. Nicolas Petreley finishes his series in the ill-fated NC World with this devastating criticism of the design of NT. "One doesn't have to introduce any more pertinent factors to future Windows NT design to understand that Microsoft is either misrepresenting what it can and will deliver, or Windows NT is headed for almost certain disaster." Save a copy of this one (the whole "Next Ten Minutes" series, actually); it's not clear how long the NC World web site will stay around. This interview with Linus in the latest issue of Boot magazine is very long, but excellent, with lots of details and more technical information than the standard Linus interview. Martin Jackson gave his opinion that the important information in this ZDNet piece was almost buried. It mentions the comment from one manager of an unnamed "Very Big Company" who said his company "would never put their accounting system on an OS from somebody that they cannot sue--and get something." This is not so much a Linux-issue as a frightening comment on the priorities of American business. For an alternate viewpoint, consider that moving to open source software could have the side effect of reducing corporate litigation ... Steve Jardine mentioned on the caldera-users list that Computer Technology Review has a four-plus page write-up entitled "Linux Setting Reseller Free". The article spotlighted Caldera and was very positive. Computer Technology Review does not appear to have an on-line site (that this editor could find), so no pointer to the article is available. Internet Week ran yet another Beowulf article, this one seemingly most interested in the role played by ethernet as the interconnecting medium. CNN had an Avalon article as well. "A Los Alamos spokesperson says that Linux is the key to Avalon's success. After six weeks of operation, stressed well beyond its theoretical failure point, Avalon hasn't crashed once. Just try that with Windows. " Thanks to Dohn Arms for the pointer to this article. InfoWorld reviews Mark Sobell's A Practical Guide To Linux.
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	A large thread on Bugtraq the last couple of days discussed setuid programs and the wide-spread security problems they pose. Should libraries be responsible for checking whether or not they might be "tainted" by being called from a setuid program? Or do we need to fix every setuid program already written to make sure it drops its privileges immediately, restoring them only when needed? Can this even be done in all languages? (such as C++) Warner Losh even suggested changing the meaning of setuid, so that a setuid program comes up automatically with its privileges disabled. That would break a lot of code, but has a lot of potential benefits. The imapd server released with Pine 4.0 has a security problem. If you are using this server, pointers to a repaired distribution of imapd are provided in the posting. Serious security problems have been found in all versions of Samba shipped with Red Hat Linux. All user's of samba should upgrade to the latest version as soon as possible. A recent report of a problem with eperl mentioned a security problem with eperl's handling of ISINDEX queries. As a result, ePerl 2.2.13 is now available and the author recommends that people upgrade to the latest version. The security audit project has a website. Marcus Butler has volunteered time and space to support this site. The program SmurfLog that we mentioned last week had some generic coding problems. These have been repaired and version 1.1 is now available. The following posting by Michal Zalewski is Mime-endoded, so beware! The posting contains zipped source code for a kernel module designed to fix problems with world-writable /tmp. He is asking for comments, so consider this a work-in-progress report. The IEEE Technical Committee on Security & Privacy puts out an electronic newsletter every couple of months. Most of the information is similar to what you may have already found here, or on other security mailing lists, but the comments on employment drives by the CIA are amusing. In addition, some conference reports and book reviews are included.
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	The current development kernel release remains 2.1.108. Linus has put out a a 2.1.109 pre-patch; chances are good that the real 2.1.109 release will happen by the time many people read this. The 2.0.35 stable kernel has been released. Alan Cox put together a set of release notes for this kernel; check them out of you want to see what changed. This may, in fact, be the last of the 2.0 kernel releases. Kernel memory management was a hot issue this week in linux-kernel. The thread actually started with a brief post from Alan Cox describing some interrupt problems he has been seeing with the 2.1 kernels. It expanded into a more general discussion of 2.1 performance problems, of which there are a few, then homed in on the memory management system - always with the "strange interrupt behavior" subject line. The problem is this: many people do not like the "buddy" memory allocation system used with the kernel, believing that it leads to excessive memory fragmentation. When memory becomes too fragmented, it is difficult or impossible to allocate larger contiguous chunks. Some operations need these larger chunks. Perhaps most crucial is the fork() system call, which needs an 8k piece. If the memory is not available, fork() fails, and users get grumpy. NFS can require larger chunks as well. [The buddy system works by allocating all memory in sizes rounded up to the nearest power of two times the basic page size (4k). Additionally, memory chunks are paired into "buddies," simplifying the process of coalescing adjacent blocks when they are freed. You can read a bit more by looking at the description of the buddy allocator in the Harlequin Memory Management Reference; and by reading the description of Linux memory management in David A Rusling's "The Linux Kernel" book.] Linus has mostly claimed that there is not much of a problem here; his belief is that the current memory management system is sound, needing at most some minor tweaks. He even went through some math to try to demonstrate that the odds against failing to allocate an 8k page were very small in most cases. When he later posted some results this position was mostly justified - except in one case: where the system does not have a large amount of memory. That seems to be a central aspect of this problem: the 2.1 kernel does not perform well on small-memory machines. Users with lots of memory (say 64MB and up) are happy. [Linus does admit that performance on small systems is not as good as his math would indicate; this he attributes to kswapd falling behind in its job of swapping out (and thus freeing) pages.] Others suggest more far-ranging changes in the Linux memory management system. Rik van Riel's proposed design for a zone-based allocator that we mentioned last week would replace the buddy allocator entirely. This development was intended for the 2.3 kernel, but there are voices calling for its inclusion in 2.2. Ingo Molnar has proposed some changes to the buddy allocator which would make it try to keep a number of larger blocks available at all times. Kevin Buhr has put out some patches which move inode and dentry allocation up a level to the slab allocator. As one might expect, no resolution was reached. Linus has declared himself out of the discussion, and says he has a solution he likes ready to go for 2.1.109. Anybody who wants something else needs to come up with working code. The prize will probably go to whoever can produce a better memory system with the least changes - especially if it is to go into the 2.2 kernel. Meanwhile, with some of the problems that still exist, 2.2 may be farther away than some of us would like. The other big discussion in linux-kernel was the whole KDE thing. Many bits died for that discussion, but there's not much that was said that's worth reporting on here. Emanuel Pirker is working on an IEEE-1394 "FireWire" driver for Linux. He has posted a status report for those who are interested; he is also looking for help in filling out the functionality. Joseph Pranevich has put together a lengthy list of changes in the 2.2 kernel. You can read it here; he's looking for additions and corrections. A group of kernel folks have put together a new linux-kernel FAQ. Please read it before you post! A rather unusual patch was posted changing some of the initialization code in the kernel. If you wish to apply it, here it is, but be warned that some folks have complained that it causes lockups and blue-screen crashes. Be careful out there.	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.
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	Caldera Binary RPMs of KDE are now available for Caldera OpenLinux. The caldera-users archive is in the process of moving to a new site. As a result, official archives of this mailing list are not currently available. However, the list is also being archived on ftp.celestial.com. Debian People have been asking about where they can purchase copies of Debian 2.0 beta on CD, so we'll pass along this commercial for Cheapbytes, which was posted to debian-announce. The Hamm Bug Stamp-Out List is available on the web now and updated automatically every four hours (except for comments). You can find it at http://master.debian.org/~wakkerma/bugs.html. That leads us to our next point, which is that only 39 release-critical bugs were on the list as of 4pm Wednesday, July 15th. The 2.0 Beta release is up to level 2.0 Beta3. Red Hat Users are reporting slow access to news.redhat.com. No response from Red Hat has been posted yet. S.u.S.E. The suse-linux-e list has suffered last week and this week from bounced messages to the list. Bodo Bauer posted a note about the problem. Apparently, two different items were responsible, a pager service gone crazy and a FIDO gateway in Italy ...	Please note that not every distribution will show up every week. Only distributions with recent news to report will be listed.
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	Steve Smoogen of Red Hat has posted a request for help with the updating and improvement of the hardware compatiblity lists and FAQs for the Sparc and Alpha ports of the system. If you can, drop him a note on what you think should go into those documents. Alpha There's an InfoWorld article saying that Compaq sees the Merced delay as a prime opportunity for Alpha. They're going for it with price cuts on Alpha systems. That can only be good news for Alpha in general. It has often been wondered why DEC doesn't make it's Digital Unix libraries available to the Linux community. When a Linux system has these libraries, it is possible to run Digital Unix binaries, which can be a nice thing to do. But the only way to get the libraries is to have a Digital Unix license, which is not cheap. Jon Hall has posted a clear explanation of why those libraries are not made available; recommended reading for people who are interested in how the Unix business works. Sparc Derrick Brashear has put out yet another release of his Sparc audio driver and utilities. A recent FAQ has been whether it is possible to use the parallel port found on some Sparc 4 and 5 systems. The simple answer: no. There is not currently a working driver for that hardware. MIPS A prerelease of Red Hat Linux 5.1 for the SGI Indy is out. See the SGI/Linux page if you want to get yourself a copy. A brief note proclaims in initial success in getting Mozilla up and running under Linux/MIPS.
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	TechWeb talks about a new language called Rebol which is coming out soon; a Linux version will be available. It's nice to know that, as they say, "code can be written in a text editor". Java Bernd Kreimeier exchanged e-mail with Vania Joloboff @ OpenGroup regarding the Opengroup JDK port for Linux. It appears the release has been delayed a month due to other priorities. This posting by Seth M. Landsman contains license, support and pricing information for the Open Group's TurboJ software. The folks at TransVirtual have released version 1.0 of their "Kaffe" Java virtual machine. We're getting closer to a truly free Java. (There is an article on the release in Wired News.) Perl The first meeting of the Dallas Perl Mongers took place on Wednesday, July 15th, at Juan's Cantina. The impersonation game is an interesting twist ... Introductory/Intermediate Perl programming classes will be held will be held August 17th-21st in the Philadelphia area. Python MetaKit 0.2: a cross-platform, highly dynamic database library Cryptography modules 1.1a2: alpha version of python cryptography modules WebLog 0.98, a module to help with processing of web server log files. Tcl Scriptics announcement of a TclPro compiler which allows tcl code to be byte-compiled to "protect" the source code opens the question of whether the tcl community may be subject to a variety of incompatible, proprietary bytecode formats. It is early days yet, so we will have to wait to find out if the bytecode formats will be proprietary or not, or whether these efforts can be coordinated. The Unifex website, containing tcl/tk specific information, has been recently updated. TclExpat, a Tcl extension for James Clark's expat XML parser tkTable 2.2 Tuba 2.2, some added convenience features
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	Free/Open-Source Software News For those of you who may have wondered whether Jeremy Allison's move to SGI to support a Samba product there might foreshadow a split with a commercial version of Samba on the horizon, rest easy! We checked with Jeremy Allison directly and he commented, I'm glad you asked, I forgot to include that in my original message. No, there will be no license change. Samba is firmly available under the GPL and will always be so. I think SGI are just being very far-sighted in that they are starting to realize Open Source is the way to maintain a competitive advantage. KDE 1.0 is out! Check the KDE Home Page for more information. Mozilla/Netscape Al Sutton passed us a copy of the first press release for Jazilla. Seems they just passed a milestone with the download of the first document over the Web using HTTP and displayed using the Jazilla UI. Congrats, guys! Inter@ctive Week ran an article talking about how well the open-source approach is working for Netscape.
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	Linux and the Commercial World The C-Forge Integrated Development Environment by Code Forge Inc. is now available on the Alpha and supports full-cycle, multi-user development in C/C++, FORTRAN and Pascal. Red Hat has issued a press release describing their new hardware partner program. They have pulled together a list of vendors selling preinstalled systems; it's impressively long. Press Releases: Cobalt Networks latest server offering: Cobalt RaQ. "Cobalt RaQ's simplicity and low cost allow ISPs to dedicate individual servers to individual clients" TurboJ, a Java JIT from the Open Group. Compatible Systems virtual private network products. O'Reilly, "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide"
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	Software Package Version Description AFBackup 3.02 Client-server backup system AfterStep 1.5pre6 Window manager for the X/Windows environment with NeXT look and feel Amaya 1.3 Ttest-bed browser/authoring tool of the W3C AtDot 1.8.0 Web based e-mail system aumix 1.9 Color text mode sound mixer with GPM support AVFS 0.1.1 C library add-on, which enables all programs to look insidecompressed files Backup Copy 1.05b Copy program designed to quickly and efficiently store data. Batalla Naval 0.59.36 Networked BattleShip game Berkeley DB 2.4.14 Provides embedded database support for traditional and client/server application Blackbox 0.34.1B WindowManager for X11 written in C++ bttvgrab 0.10.2 Provides high-quality grabbing suitable for video recording BurnIT 0.54 JAVA front-end to mkisofs and cdrecord C-Forge IDE 1.1d-5 Multi-user C/C++ integrated development environment CD builder 0.05 CD cue sheet and subcode generating tool for Linux/UNIX Chameleon 1.0 X utility to customize desktop colors CheckURL 1.2b Sends notification e-mails for changed URLs Clone 1.13 Clone of WarCraft II cRadio 0.7 QT based X11 interface to several radio cards daVinci 2.1 daVinci is a X-Window visualization tool for drawing directed graphs automatical dcd 0.13 Simple command-line CD player DDD snapshot 19980710 Common graphical user interface for GDB, DBX and XDB DeleGate 5.5.8 Multi-purpose application level gateway (proxy) Ding! 2.0b2 ICQ like personal communicator egcs 19980707 Experimental set of enhancements for the GNU tools Emacs JDE 2.0.6 Complete Java Development Environment for Emacs Embedded Perl 5 Language (ePerl) 2.2.13 Embedded Perl 5 Language EPIC 4pre2 ANSI capable textmode IRC Client Ethereal 0.2.0 GUI network analyzer e2fsprogs 1.12 Ext2 Filesystem Utilities FCT 1.0.9p1 HTML based tool for the configuration of a firewall Fetchmail 4.5.2 Free, full-featured, robust, well-documented remote-mailretrieval utility fltk 0.99 C++ user interface toolkit for X and OpenGL Free Builder 0.71 Free Java Integrated Development Environment FREEdraft 0.3.4 2D mechanical cad project FreeWRL 0.12 Free VRML browser for Linux FTP4ALL 2.20b1 FTP server program for UNIX systems g2 0.23 Easy to use, portable and powerful 2D graphics library Gamora 0.60.1 Java based server construction, hosting, and adminstration architecture. gIDE 0.0.2 gtk-based Integrated Development Environment for C Glide Voodoo2 drivers 2.51 Linux port of the Glide rasterization library GNU Privacy Guard 0.3.2 GPLed PGP replacement tool GTimer 0.98 Scheduler for your personal activities GXedit 1.08 Simple GPL'ed graphical editor using GTK HPP 1.0 Simple including and conditionalities for HTML like cpp. ident2 0.992 An auth/ident server. IPAC 0.98 Linux IP accounting package JacORB 0.9d Object request broker written in Java Jikes 0.36 Java compiler that translates Java source into bytecoded instruction sets kaffe 1.0b1 Complete, PersonalJava 1.1 compliant Java environment KDE 1.0 Powerful graphical desktop environment for Unix workstations. kIRC 0.9.6-pre8 IRC client for Unix running X Windows and the KDE desktop environment ksoa 0.1 Checks authorative nameservers for given domains Kticker 0.1.8 News ticker widget that downloads news headlines and displays them periodically ktuner 0.4 KDE program to control a radio card connected to your pc kwintv 0.4.6 Watch TV in a window on your PC screen Licq 0.34 ICQ clone for linux with most of the functionality of the official Java version Linux Logo 2.03 Displays an ANSI or ASCII Linux penguin, along with some sytem information. Linux Userbase Counter Applet 1.10 Java applet that displays the estimated number of world-wide Linux users Micq snapshot 980710 Publically available ICQ clone for the console MindsEye 0.5.26 3D modelling program for Linux Ministry of Truth 1.15 Web-based job tracking system MMX Emulator 0.5 Allows execution of MMX binaries on non-MMX machines mon 0.37l Highly configurable service monitoring daemon moodss 4.0 Modular Object Oriented Dynamic SpreadSheet MSWordView 0.0.26 Microsoft Word 8 document viewer Mutt 0.93 Small but very powerful text-based mail client for Unix operating systems Netscape Communicator 4.5PR1 All-in-one browser and communications suite newmaild 1.0 Sends an e-mail to another account whenever an account gets mail newplayer 1.1 ncurses based mp3 player. NewsX 0.16 NNTP client for Unix ObjStore 1.41 Object-oriented database Panorama 0.9.1 Framework for creating, rendering, and processing three-dimensional images PGCC 19980707 Pentium optimized copy of the standard GNU C compiler pgdbm 0.1 db/dbm-emulation for PostgreSQL RDBMS Pi3Web 1.0.3 HTTP server and development environment Pine 4.00 Tool for reading,sending, and managing electronic messages poptalk 0.2 Verbally notifies users of the number of messages in their POP3 mailboxes. qps 1.4 Displays processes in an X11 window Qt 1.40 GUI software toolkit R 0.62.2 A language and environment for statistical computing. rjobs 1.3-pre5 A Periodic Remote Job Agent/Daemon ROOT 2.00/09 Comprehensive object oriented framework RT: Request Tracker 0.9.17 Web, command-line and email based trouble ticketing and bug tracking package Saint 1.2.3 Security Administrator's Integrated Network Tool SB1000 1.1.2 Network device driver for General Instruments SB1000 sdragon 0.90 configuration utility for Hagenuk's DataBox Speed Dragon Secure Syslog 1.21 Cryptographically secure system logging tool for UNIX systems semu - sega saturn emulator 0.1.10 Sega Saturn Emulator smix 1.2 xforms based audio mixer SNES9x 1.05 Portable, freeware Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) emulator ssh 1.2.26 Remote Login Program svgalib 1.3.0 Low-level graphics library that provides VGA and SVGA modes in a console Taper 6.9pre2 Tape backup and restore program with a friendly user interface thttpd - tiny/turbo/throttling HTTP server 2.03 A simple, small, portable, fast, and secure HTTP server. ticker 0.5 Configurable text scroller, with slashdot and freshmeat modules TkInfo 2.5 Tk script to read GNU "info" files and display them UAE 0.7.5b Software emulation of the hardware of the Commodore Amiga 500/1000/2000 UCD-SNMP 3.5 Various tools relating to the Simple Network Managemnet Protocol Vis5D 4.3 System for interactive visualization of large 5-D gridded data sets w3mir 1.0.3 HTTP copying and mirroring program Webalizer 1.20-05 Web server log analysis program WebGrams 1.1 Web-based greeting card application Webmail module (Roxen) 0.2 ALPHA Roxen module to read e-mails via a Webbrowser WebRSH 1.1b Web-based computing shell WebShop 3.30 Full-featured on-line shopping cart software suite Wine 980712 Emulator of the Windows 3.x and Win32 APIs. WMFinder 0.3 Easy to use file manager for WindowMaker WPP 2.0 Small perl5 script that allows preprocessing of HTML files wu-ftpd 2.4.2-beta-18 FTP Daemon for UNIX systems WWWThreads 2.7 WWW based discussion forums X Northern Captain 4.0.5 Filemanager for X Windows XCallerID 1.1 callerID program that pops up incomingphone numbers in an X-window XCopilot 0.6.4 Emulator for the 3Com/USRobotics Pilot/PalmPilot XFCE 2.0.1 Easy-to-use and easy-to-configure environment for X11 XFrisk 1.00 Networked X11 version of Parker Brothers' classic game, with computer players. Xicq / KXicq snapshot 071298 An ICQ client for use in both console and X11. XgIRC 0.1 Internet Relay Chat client for Linux / X Windows XQF 0.8.2 QuakeWorld/Quake2 server browser and launcher for Linux/X11 Xscreensaver 2.24 Modular screen saver and locker for the X Window System XVidCap 1.0.6 Video capture program for X11/Xt XVScan 1.80 Scanning software based on xv Xwhois 0.1.6 small and fast GTK+ X11 client for the whois network services. Xwrits 2.6.1 Reminds you to take wrist breaks Zipper! 1.62 Linux X/TCL/Tk based IRC client Projects The folks at LinuxFocus are looking for contributors for their September issue. Here's your chance to be famous... Resources The July issue of the (Italian-language) Pluto Journal has been announced. They are also looking for more contributors; if you are an Italian-speaking Linux user, consider helping them out. Also in Italian: version 0.8 of the Italian Linux FAQ. Events For folks who will be at SigGraph: a gathering of folks interested in 3D graphics under Linux will be happening the evening of July 22. See this announcement if you're interested in attending; they would like an RSVP if possible. Web sites Although this site is not Linux-specific, CPU Review is a brand-new site for information on the latest news in PC microprocessors and related hardware and therefore will be of interest to many of us. They have some good comparisons of the leading brands of CPUs currently available and plans for some upcoming hardware reviews that look promising.	Our software announcements are provided courtesy of Freshmeat.
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	Linux links of the week While not directly Linux-related, the Newhoo directory takes an open approach to web directories. It's clearly intended to look like yahoo, but the management of it is delegated to volunteer editors out on the net. Their Linux pages are already fairly well developed. The Linux monitor database can help you with those difficult X configurations.
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	Feedback and Corrections We received a message from Francesco De Carlo, the person behind the spamming of Italian Linux users that we reported last week. His message is conciliatory and specifically absolves S.u.S.E. in any involvement with the mailing. Another message from him, which appeared in it.comp.linux (in Italian) is rather more combative, but when we asked if they were making a firm commitment to avoid spam in the future, he replied, We can assure you and all italian users we'll never use anymore, in future, email messages for promotional purposes. This is a commitment we are engaging with all our potential customers and we confirm our intention to resolve this incident. Rainer Dorsch pointed out an error in last week's edition where we incorrectly attributed a conversation that Dan Kegel had with some EDA vendors to Rainer. We appreciate the pointer and we have repaired the text of the last edition. Last week we wrote that the Samba project was finding it self short of developers. Jeremy Allison of the Samba team wrote in to give us the reality behind the rumors. He fears we grossly exaggerated the situation since they are far from beind on their last legs (sorry if that was implied!). That said, they could indeed use some help, which they outlined in their response.

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