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Bringing you the latest news from the Linux World.
Dedicated to keeping Linux users up-to-date, with concise
news for all interests
 Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Ports Development Commerce Announcements Back page
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Leading itemsWe have to do better than this. In today's press section you will find pieces from two different writers who have found out what it means to upset the Linux community. Both were amazed by the zealotry and sheer childishness of some of the responses they got to their articles. Neither, certainly, has been made more receptive to our message by this treatment. The arguable point that neither author showed much maturity in his original article is not relevant here; we need to keep to the high moral ground. Folks, if somebody writes something that you feel is unfair or untrue, by all means drop them a note and tell them why you feel that way. A calm, clear, rational message can go a long way toward straightening people out. But please let's stop flaming members of the press just because we don't like something they write. Even if their words are silly beyond belief. The press as a whole really likes us now. Why do we have to alienate them? We really shoot ourselves in the foot when we do that. The more paranoid among us could begin to suspect the presences of agents provocateurs here. What better way to discredit Linux than making its users look like a bunch of unruly children? Certain companies, one suspects, would not hesitate to do this sort of thing if they thought it would help. However, it is highly unlikely that anybody is doing that to us now. The Linux world seems entirely capable of producing its own flaming zealots. Nobody needs to help us. Wouldn't it be nice if we could make that change? Speaking of conspiracy theories, here's a good one. The Free Software Foundation has been part of a Microsoft plot all along, and we never knew... Well...we asked for comments on the new format, and we sure got them. The results are mixed; some people really like the new way, others really hate it. In particular, it seems we made life harder for the (many, evidently) folks who print out each weeks newsletter and read it on paper. We hadn't realized, somehow, that we were responsible for the death of so many trees... European readers, in particular, seem to use this mode. You do things differently when your local phone calls are metered. So, we will now provide both modes of access. The lwn.net URL will yield the multi-page version. Folks who want to read LWN as one big page can go instead to: http://lwn.net/bigpage.phtmlThe big page looks much like the Good Old Days, except that (most of) the text column has been widened to make things more printer friendly. Hopefully now everybody will be happy... We thank you all for your comments. |
September 10, 1998
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Ports Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Security page. |
SecurityA security hole has been found in bash. This appears to be a reasonably difficult one to exploit, but you might as well apply the fix anyway. Here's Red Hat's notice and Debian's notice, the only ones found by press time. If you are running a pool of HP print servers, be aware that a legitimate SNMP packet can crash HP 5M and 5N printers. The problem has been reported to HP and a response is expected once HP has a fix available. Navindra Umanee reported this problem with sshd, fearing its use to forge mail and potentially allow root access. In subsequent conversations on Bugtraq, Seth Schoen and "der Mouse" pointed out that the root access fear was unfounded, because sshd uses unprivileged ports. They did agree that the bug in sshd still needs to be fixed. Chris Wilson discovered a vulnerability in pine which can allow users to bypass site policies and run arbitrary commands. This is a problem for sites that issue "pine-only" accounts. The problem was reported to the Pine authors and a new version, 4.03, released. If you have a site that runs pine with restricted policies, you will want to upgrade immediately. Sunworld has provided an article reviewing the SANS SHADOW Intrusion detection software. The review is extremely favorable. Source-available and freely distributable, SHADOW uses information gathered by tcpdump (or snoop, for SunOS/Solaris). Here is a full description of SHADOW from SANS (System Administration and Network Security). Bernd Eckenfels and "others" have posted The Freefire Bulletin #3 to comp.security.unix. This edition has comments and information on Ethereal, SAINT, g2s, smtpd/smtpfwdd and the SINUS Firewall Mailing List. The Freefire Bulletin #1 and The Freefire Bulletin #2 are also available. |
September 10, 1998 |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Ports Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Kernel page. |
Kernel developmentThe current development kernel version is 2.1.121. This release contains the usual set of bugfixes, seems to add synchronous PPP support, and has a bunch of SCSI tape and UMSDOS tweaks. Kernel 2.1.120 proved unstable for quite a few people; reports on 2.1.121 are still sparse. Version 8 of the 2.0.36 stable kernel pre-patch is out. This one was labeled "release candidate 1," but it is already clear that a version 9 patch will be forthcoming. Even if you don't wish to install the patch, the announcement is worth reading, since it contains a set of release notes for 2.0.36. A number of people have asked why kernel 2.1.120 added support for the QNX file system even though there is a feature freeze in effect. The reasoning is fairly simple: the file system code is a separate piece which affects nothing else in the kernel. Thus it could be safely added without threatening the stability of the whole thing. The problem of how to deal efficiently with large numbers of virtual memory areas came back up this week. (This topic had been previously covered in the August 27 LWN). It seems that not everybody is happy with the performance of David Miller's "fuzzy hash" scheme. Bruno Haible went so far as to graft the old 2.0 AVL tree mechanism back into the 2.1 kernel. A set of timingsshowed the AVL scheme to be the fastest in the "many VMS's" case. David claims that the fuzzy hash approach simply needs more tuning. No easy agreement seems forthcoming. Linus, however, has stated that fuzzy hashing will not go into the 2.2 kernel; it is too much of a change for this late in the game. The possibility exists that the AVL scheme will go in. AVL trees, having been used up through the 2.0 series, are well tested and can be added back relatively safely. The linux-kernel mailing list FAQ has moved. Its new home is at: http://www.tux.org/lkml/faq.htmlThe announcement of the move gives a bit of background on how the new site was chosen. As more people try out the 2.1 kernels, this FAQ appears more often: why doesn't ipfwadm work any more? The answer, of course, is that the firewalling code has been completely replaced with the new "IP Chains" implementation. See the ipchains page for information on how to change over. |
September 10, 1998
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 atLinuxHQ. |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Ports Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Distributions page. |
DistributionsCalderaIf you didn't notice the interview with Ransom Love that we mentioned in our press section, take another look. For die-hard Caldera fans, it provides an optimistic glimpse of the future for this distribution. Love says VARs provide and service networks for about 80 percent of small businesses. He believes if he can win over the VARs, Caldera will be the one for other Linux distributors to try to catch. .DebianThe APT programming team announced version 0.1.6 of the APT package manager. This version contains a number of fixes, including ones for compilation problems on the Alpha and PowerPC platforms.Debian has announced security updates for netstd and bind. Red HatApache version 1.3 has been introduced into Rawhide version 1.0.4. Red Hat would appreciate it if people wanted to try the packages out and report any problems. Current reports are that egcs version 1.1.x will not be included in Red Hat 5.2. S.u.S.E.Reports from users playing with 5.3 are starting to trickle in. One negative comment was that YaST has slowed down. In response, it was pointed out that the manual now recommends loading the basic system onto the disk and then running YaST to speed things up.A couple of users were very upset when their sound no longer worked after the upgrade to 5.3. S.u.S.E. has provided a web page which covers the issue. There are also some reported problems with PCMCIA support and a nasty bug in YaST, but the engineers are working on it, so fixes should be available soon. Overall, the reports indicate that 5.3 is a rougher transition than 5.1 and 5.2 were. |
September 10, 1998
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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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Ports Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Development page. |
Development toolsTom Oehser wrote to mention that he has made several recent improvements to the 'tomsrtbt' package, for those interested in linux-on-a-floppy, either for fun or for rescue disk situations. Here is his note. JavaThe Blackdown Linux JDK porting team announced its Version 4a port of JDK 1.1.6. They also mentioned that most problems with JDK segmentation faults under Linux are due to old or incompatible shared libraries. Check out their FAQ on the subject.Cygnus Solutions has announced the addition of Java support to the gcc compiler suite. As usual with Cygnus, the enhancements are freely available, with source. This announcement has been looked for eagerly in many forums and now provides competition for the TowerJ Java compilation tools. (from Zenaan Harkness) The GNU Classpath project has been announced. This project was started to create a free software replacement for Sun's proprietary Java core class libraries. They are not currently working with the Kaffe folks, but mention in their announcement that they have contacted them. Hopefully something that be worked out to prevent duplication of effort in this area. If you are interested in the project, their project status page mentions that they don't yet have volunteers to develop all the packages. Vincent Trussart posted a java application development template, JAppTemplate as an example for people with questions about dependencies generation with java. A special edition of the JDC Tech Tips has been released, specifically covering debugging. A petition is available for those interested in seeing VisualAge for Java ported to Linux. PerlHere is a note from someone looking to find or start an Austin, Texas Perl Mongers group. Drop a line if you are interested.PythonVersion 0.5.3 of PalmPython, a conduit programming kit which enables desktop applications to access PalmPilots and their data, has been announced.Bobo, an open source python web application system, now has an extensive introduction available, with over 20 pages of information and screen shots. The Call for Participation for the 7th Internation Python Conference was posted this week. The conference will be held November 10th through the 13th, in Houston, Texas. Guido mentioned that Python 1.5.2 has been modified so that Tk().mainloop() will properly release the Python interpreter lock, good news for any one who has had to program around this problem. The posting also made it sound like 1.5.2 will be coming out soon, though no specific time frame was mentioned. Tcl/tk
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September 10, 1998
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Development projectsGNOMEVersion 1.0 of the GNOME FAQ is now available.Mozilla/NetscapePrecompiled binaries of the latest version of Mozilla are now available nightly. Supported platforms include Windows, MacIntosh and Linux/86. This is not for the faint-of-heart, since the updates are totally untested and time-bombed to expire after 30 days.Netscape has released the source code for Grendel, an incomplete mail/news client, written in Java. Hopefully the Jazilla group will find this release of use. WineThe next Wine release, which would normally have been released on Sunday, September 6th, has been delayed until further notice to allow the volunteer releasing it (Alexandre Julliard) to have a life (but only temporarily ...). | |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Ports Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Commerce page. |
Linux and businessOracle has announced partnerships with four Linux vendors: Red Hat, VA Research, Pacific HiTech, and S.u.S.E.. It is not entirely clear, at this point, just what that partnership entails. At a minimum, the Linux vendors all have little Oracle buttons on their sites now, and they will be reselling the Oracle product once it becomes available (later this year). Some sort of marketing effort on Oracle's part is another possibility. Oracle has also set up a Linux early adopter program. Linux users who register on the Oracle Technology Network site before September 15 will get a free advance version of Oracle8. The license agreement for this release is pretty strict - no production use, good only for two months - but it still should be fun to play with. Presumably the two month limitation will be enforced within the software. LWN has signed up for a copy, watch this space for our impressions once it shows up. If you want to read what the press is saying, start with the Oracle press release. There are several articles out there at press time, but most seem to be heavily drawn from the press release. They are:
The folks from Digital Networks U.K. wrote in to inform us that the United Kingdom has a new Linux VAR. You can check them out at their web site. It's good to see some VAR's get going outside of the U.S. Patronizing them can be a good idea; these people are taking risks to support the Linux market, and they need to get well established before the large PC vendors catch on. Plus, it can be awfully nice to have a system which runs Linux right out of the box. Speaking of large vendors, it turns out that Dell has been selling Linux-installed systems to a few customers for a year now. More info can be found in this article in Inter@active Week. They seem to be doing it mostly for their larger customers, and there is mention of a $250 installation fee. Given that this has been going on for a year, it is interesting to recall that, back in April, a Dell spokesman said "I haven't been able to find any examples of customers requesting Linux". (See this old ZDNet article for the quote, toward the end). Given that they were already selling Linux-installed systems at that time, why did they deny the existence of customer demand? Here's another attempt to make money in the free software world: John Ousterhout's "Scriptics, Inc." has launched a commercial TCL development suite. $1000 will get you a graphical debugger and a script checking tool. See this Inter@ctive Week article for more info. Press Releases:
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September 10, 1998 |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Ports Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Linux in the news page. |
Linux in the newsArticles on the Oracle partnership announcement can be found in the Commerce section. As mentioned in today's leaders, a couple of writers expressed their dislike for the reactions they have gotten from Linux advocates. First is "@lex" from Sm@rt Reseller, who wrote this FUDdish piece that we mentioned last week. This week he is back with a sarcastic column saying that the nasty responses he received are a result of a corporate plot. "Here's your mission. In the name of 'advocacy,' tick off as many people as you can, and turn them away from any interest in participating in the Linux community." Surprisingly, given that last week's column did not make him seem to be a supporter of Linux, he concludes with: "Sorry guys, it won't work. I won't fall for it anymore. You can't fool me with those fake flame messages. I'll continue to believe that Linux is a viable option, along with all the alternatives (including Windows)." The second in this series is this column in Compunotes. Compunotes, remember, was the source of this piece that we featured two weeks ago. The author mailed the column to us directly; evidently much of his hate mail was a result of the note in LWN. He has come back unrepentant and unimpressed. The September-October issue of the Harvard Business Review includes an article entitled "The Dawn of the E-Lance Economy." The focus of the article is on how business is increasingly done by ad hoc collections of small groups which dissolve after a task is completed. Their example of how this can work is Linux. This article is available on their web site, but only to those willing to part with a credit card number. So your editor bought a copy of the magazine ($15 - ouch). Here's a few "fair use" excerpts: The Linux Community grew steadily, soon coming to encompass thousands of people around the world, all sharing their work freely with one another. Withen three years, this loose, informal group, working without managers and connected mainly through the Internet, had turned Linux into one of the best versions of Unix ever created. [...] Here is a NewsBytes column based on a conversation with Caldera's Ransom Love. It offers some interesting views into where Caldera sees its future; definitely worth a look. Jesse Berst rides again with this Guide to alternative operating systems. His prognosis on Linux: "Linux will never go mainstream. But it will have a powerful influence nonetheless." Thanks to Moshe Vainer for the tip. The "PC Market" section of the Hong Kong Standard declares Internet rife with all kinds of free software. This is another introductory piece on the whole free software phenomenon. This Computer Currents article is really about whether companies should go to NT 5, at some future date when it may actually be available. The conclusion at the end: "If you're running an NT 4 network today, consider NT 5, but keep an eye on Linux and NetWare. I wouldn't abandon Linux or NetWare for NT 5." Robert Knop wrote in about two separate articles in the San Francisco Chronicle. The Penguin That Roared is an introductory article about Linux and its recent successes. Linux Is Cool, But Not Ready for Prime Time is more negative, describing the author's difficulties with the system. Some of his criticisms are more fair than others. It is not Linux's fault that the user may have to repartition a disk to make room for it. On the other hand, his disdain for fvwm95 makes some sense. Here is a mostly positive introductory article in the New York Daily News. Thanks to Jim Gleason for pointing this one out. The September issue of PC Quest mentioned in this week's newsletter is now online. Included therein are their "Users choice awards." In the Network Operating System category you'll find Linux, which has displaced Netware for second place. Thanks, as always, to Atul Chitnis for letting us know about this. Here's an article in the Irish Times, another highly positive introductory piece. The author "...wonders why the whole world isn't using this operating system " This appears to be the first of a series, so expect followups in the coming weeks. An article appeared in InfoWorld about the new Corel (Linux-based) server, and plans for an upcoming "Linux Computer." There is a brief introductory article in the Detroit News. Nothing too exciting about it; it was clearly inspired by Oracle's announcement. Arne Sagnes sent us a pointer to another article about the Open Source Developer Day, this one from CNN. It, too, emphasizes the differences of opinion between the various participants. Here is a TechWeb story on the Caldera split. Quoting Ransom Love: "Linux is exploding for us and we wanted to explore more of that." James Cownie wrote in with yet another article about Steve Ballmer's Seybold keynote, this one in Computer Reseller News. This one expands on Ballmer's passing statement that Microsoft might end up opening up some code. They go pretty far based on one sentence... Check it out. Didier Legein sent in a pointer to this article in SunWorld on running Linux on the Sparc platform. This article is part 2 of a series and covers installation of additional packages, kernel rebuilds and Linux on the Ultra. There is now an English translation of the c't editorial we mentioned in last week's newsletter. Thanks to Olaf Zimmermann for both doing the translation and telling us about it. |
September 10, 1998 |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Ports Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Announcements page. |
AnnouncementsEventsEvan Leibovitch sent us an update on the upcoming Canadian National Installfest. There will be CDs and other promotional goodies available from Red Hat, Caldera and other vendors. Fifteen locations are currently involved and they have registered the domain linux.ca, which can now be used to reach their home page.ISPCON Fall '98 will have a special panel on Linux, Linux and the Open Source Business Model of the Future, Or How Linux Got So Dang Hot!. The panel will include Linus, Sean Maloney (Intel corporate vice president), Marc Andreesen, (Netscape co-founder), and Robert F. Young, (Red Hat Software president). ISPCON will be held September 28th through October 1st at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, California. (Thanks to Zach Beane for pointing this one out to us). Eric Raymond will be speaking at the University of Delaware Linux User Group meeting on Thursday, October 15. The topic is The Open Source Revolution: How software engineering might finally grow up and the talk is bound to be an excellent one. Too bad we won't be able to make it! User Group NewsThe Northants Linux Users Group has been formed to serve users in Northamptonshire and Milton Keynes. Check the posting for contact information.Adrian Casey is interested in setting up a Linux User Group in Alice Springs, Australia. Check out his plans if you are interested. He believes this will be the first LUG in the Northern Territory, so it is about time ... Mailing ListsA mailing list to put together people with Linux knowledge and people who are trying to use Linux in K-12 schools has been created. |
September 10, 1998
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Software AnnouncementsSoftware
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Ports Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Back page page. |
Linux links of the weekThe User Friendly cartoon is often amusing. This week has been particular relevant, as the unfortunate employees of a taken-over internet service provider are ordered to install "that other system" over their Linux servers. If you have not been following it, pick it up from last weekend and catch up from there. PC hardware is both a blessing and a curse to most Linux folks. The selection is amazing, and, often, the price/performance can not be beat. On the other hand, some of it is of, um, marginal quality, and the sheer variety of it all is hard to keep up with. A good source for information on PC hardware is Tom's Hardware Guide. Much of the site is made up of basic descriptions of how various types of PC hardware work, what the acronyms mean, and so on. The rest, outside of a higher-than-desirable amount of advertising, consists of test results, performance evaluations, etc. |
September 10, 1998 |
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Feedback and correctionsNone this week. | |
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