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Trinux

Matthew Franz has composed a list of Development Goals for Trinux. This list is also available on the Trinux website.

Debian

In response to claims that his proposed changes to the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) are motivated by a desire to "spite Qt and KDE", Ian Jackson posted this note. In it, he states that he believes the new Qt license will be compatible with what he calls the DFSG2. This will be a hotly debated topic, but in our opinion, Ian is quite believable. He has not proposed these changes to spite anyone, but because he has a strong belief that the changes are the right thing to do. Not every one agrees with his belief, but he is certainly entitled to hold it.

Note that any actual change to the DFSG will come about only by a vote of the developers, not by Ian's personal decision, and it is clear that many developers prefer either to leave the DFSG alone or to modify it slightly rather than replace it. The outcome is definitely still open.

For more insight on Ian's motivations, you may want to check out his talk on `Why is software freedom useful, and what does it mean ?, available in postscript format.

On a related front, Troll's version 0.91 of their draft license for Qt 2.0 is now available. Reports in the Debian groups indicate that the new version is considered to be GPL compatible.

Eric Delaunay has provided new bootdisks for Debian Sparc. His announcement mentions that diskless support is now included, the 2.0.35 kernel is used and apt support is now in place. Initial reports are that the new bootdisks are excellent and work better than any prior disks. However, note that Jeffrey Ebert tried out the new bootdisk and reported a possible SILO problem with certain hardware/PROM combinations. Check out his note for information on how he got around this.

MkLinux

MkLinux 2.0.36 has been announced. The new version is still considered a development release.

Meanwhile, the support of MkLinux by the Open Group has ended. From their website, you can see their notice, which states " Status as of November 1998: This page is no longer being maintained, since The Open Group Research Institute is no longer active in MkLinux development." However, this note from David Gatwood indicates that development is progressing, nonetheless. The change does not appear to have made much impact on the mailing lists, though, of course, the loss of good developers is always a sad thing.

Elgin Lee reported that an overview paper that describes the original Linux/Mach design for MkLinux is available.

PowerPC

Mark Wielaard dropped us a note to report that we missed reporting the Beta Release of Linux PPC r5. The LinuxPPC website indicates that r5 will premier the week of January 4th, 1999, at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco.

Red Hat

Many people have been asking on the lists this week about where to find rpm files for XFree86 3.3.3. They are available on Red Hat's Contributor Network at this URL.

Robert Tennent reposted an article by Gene Czarcinski which contains the basis for mini-HOWTO on Installing/updating a new kernel on Red Hat Linux. It definitely has some useful tips in it.

S.u.S.E.

The first beta of the English version of S.u.S.E. 6.0 is now available for download. No support is available, but for the brave, they will happily accept your bug reports.

Stampede

The Stampede Linux distribution for the Alpha architecture is nearing readiness. Of course, no release date has been set at this point. However, if you would like to serve as a tester for this new distribution, please drop Dan Powell a note.

December 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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