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Leading itemsLinux Expo starts on Tuesday, May 18, with the real festivities beginning the following day. Linux Expo remains the original large Linux gathering, it is celebrating its fifth birthday this year. LWN's Jonathan Corbet will be there, trying to squeeze out some reports between the various events. See you there! Red Hat 6.0 breaks StarOffice. It is not surprising that a major operating system upgrade will create some turbulence in its wake, but there are a couple of factors here which are worthy of note. The cause of the problem, evidently, is that StarOffice made use of some undocumented calls in glibc-2.0 which went away in the 2.1 release. So if one wants to find a place to assign blame - not a very productive exercise, really - one would probably hand it to StarDivision for not following the rules. It is unfortunate that StarOffice fails to work against the "compatibility" 2.0 libraries provided by Red Hat. (For the more adventurous among us, some rather scary instructions were posted on how to make StarOffice work with these libraries. They involve, however, a fair amount of binary editing of the StarOffice executables. Not for the faint of heart. Thanks to Frank Lepore for pointing this one out). The really disappointing thing, though, is that, even though both Red Hat and StarDivision have known about this problem for a while, neither has made any effort to (1) make a fix available, or (2) even inform their users of the problem. Thus the StarOffice breakage remains a trap that will continue to bite users for a while. How long have these companies known about the problem? Long enough, in any case, to put a working version on the Red Hat 6.0 application CD. Red Hat claims that they are not licensed to distribute this working version via the net. That may well be true, but there is nothing preventing StarDivision from making this version available. It already exists, it works, it was good enough for the Application CD. Why is StarDivision leaving its users in this bad situation? (A request for information from StarDivision went unanswered). What we are really seeing here, of course, is another example of the type of risk that one runs with proprietary software. Any software can break in an upgrade, and one can only get so upset about that. But if StarOffice were free software, a version which fixes a show-stopper bug would not be withheld from users that need it. And, of course, if source were available, a fix would have been widely distributed in a very short time. But StarOffice is proprietary, so its users will simply have to wait until StarDivision gets around to making the fixed version available. There is a place in the world for proprietary software, but businesses and individuals that depend on proprietary systems are placing themselves at a certain amount of risk. Ken Thompson's criticisms revisited. Eric Raymond and Ken Thompson have had a talk about Ken's negative comments on Linux recently published in IEEE Computer. Here is Eric's summary of the conversation. As might be expected, Ken is not as anti-Linux as the interview made him out to be, though he is still not really convinced of Linux's capabilities. Learn Linux in the mountains. Eklektix, Inc., producer of the Linux Weekly News, still has a few slots in its Linux System Administration course being taught in Boulder, CO the week of June 7-11, 1999. This hands-on course, which emphasises the integration of Linux systems into larger, heterogeneous networks, is suitable for most students seeking an in-depth understanding of how Linux systems work. And June is a wonderful time to be in the Rocky Mountains... See the Eklektix training pages for more information. This Week's LWN was brought to you by:
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May 13, 1999
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Security page. |
SecurityNewsBy now most readers will have seen some coverage of the decision in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that the U.S. Government's crypto export regulations violate the first amendment. Source code is speech, and the government can not regulate it. This decision is currently only binding in a few western states, and will probably be put on hold until the Supreme Court has had its say. But it is an important step in the right direction. We may soon be able to get Linux distributions with proper cryptographic support "out of the box," rather than having to piece things together by hand.Interested folks may want to look at the text of the decision in full. There is some good stuff in there: "Government efforts to control encryption thus may well implicate not only the First Amendment rights of cryptographers intent on pushing the boundaries of their science, but also the constitutional rights of each of us as potential recipients of encryption's bounty. Viewed from this perspective, the government's efforts to retard progress in cryptography may implicate the Fourth Amendment..."It is interesting that they see potential fourth amendment (search and seizure) problems with the crypto regulations as well. This is a crucially important decision, taken by what appears to be a relatively high-clue court. See also: this News.com story on the decision. Security ReportsCaldera OpenLinux 2.2's installation leaves a privileged account behind with no password. This account, obviously, could be used to no end of obnoxious purposes. See this posting with the gory details. If you have systems running OL 2.2 that were installed with LISA (Lizard does not have the problem), you should run, not walk, to the system, look for this account, and disable it forthwith.A couple of problems with INN have been turned up. Known exploits do not yet exist, but may not be too far away. Users of INN may want to read the advisory and keep an eye out until a fix is available. UpdatesThe Oracle vulnerabilities mentioned in last week's newsletter have been confirmed; here is an advisory that was issued on the subject. Anybody who is running Oracle on a Unix server should have a look and react accordingly. A patch is included.About Shamir's TWINKLE engine, a fast factoring system which was reported on last week: many of you wrote in to contest the statement (since removed) that RSA's days were numbered. A bit of confusion let that slip in and remain there; clearly RSA will be good for quite some time yet. It's just a matter of using sufficiently long keys. Meanwhile, interested folks may want to check out Bruce Schneier's analysis of TWINKLE and what it really means. It's a good, clear summary of the situation, worth a look. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
May 13, 1999 |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Kernel page. |
Kernel developmentThe current stable kernel release is 2.2.8. This patch came out on Tuesday; it contains the usual large set of small fixes (over 500 files modified) plus some larger tweaks for USB and a few other things. 2.3.0 has been released, starting a new development kernel. Of course, there was not much to talk about - 2.3.0 is identical to 2.2.8 with the exception of the version number change. Here is the combined announcement that Linus sent out for both 2.2.8 and 2.3.0. A 2.3.1 pre-patch currently exists in the testing directory; 2.3.1 could be out by the time you read this. The problem of thundering herds. A number of different studies and articles recently have turned up performance problems with the Apache web server in very high traffic situations. Now it seems that one of the speculations which have been circulating could really be true: the Apache problem is really a "thundering herd" problem. Thundering herds happen when you have a number of processes that are waiting for an event. When that event (a connection to the web server, say) happens, every process which could possibly handle the event is awakened. In the end, only one of those processes will actually be able to do the work, but, in the mean time, all the others wake up and contend for CPU time before being put back to sleep. Thus the system thrashes briefly while a herd of processes thunders through. If this starts to happen many times per second, the performance impact can be significant. As an example of what can happen, Phillip Ezolt published some profiling he did of his system when it was under heavy web server load. 18% of the system's time was spent in the scheduler, presumably trying to sort through the herds. So how does one tame the herds? The basic idea is quite straightforward: find a way to wake up only one process when an event of interest comes through. The approach favored by Linus is this: processes in certain situations can mark themselves as being "wake one capable." When the system goes to wake processes waiting on a particular event, only one "wake one capable" process is revived. The herd is no more. The other advantage of this approach is that the system makes no assumptions about whether waking one process is sufficient. Thus, current system call semantics do not change, and situations where standards require waking multiple processes (i.e. select) still work properly. No patches have been posted yet, but it seems likely that a "wake one" tweak will go into the system before too long. (See also the Linux Scalability Project for more development in this area). A mailing list for the development of memory technology devices has been established, see the announcement for details. A new site for USB development has been set up, check it out at www.linux-usb.org. (Thanks to George David Morrison). Other patches and interesting releases this week:
Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
May 13, 1999
For other kernel news, see: |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Distributions page. |
DistributionsCalderaA bit of grumbling about OpenLinux 2.2 surfaced this week. A couple of the more prominent gripes were:
DebianThe Japanese version of Debian 2.1 is out, read the announcement for details. It consists of over 200 packages providing support for Japanese-speaking users.The Corel Debian installation scheme was aired in preliminary form this week by Dave Neil of Corel. See his posting for details. Essentially, they plan to put together a process that brings the system into a full X-window mode from the outset, before beginning the installation. Dave also followed up with a later posting pondering how Corel and Debian could work together on the upcoming "Potato" release. Corel seems determined both to make installation an easier process and to give their work back to the Debian distribution. How better to coordinate Debian releases? Adam Di Carlo sent out this proposal on how to make the next Debian release go a little more smoothly than slink did. A lot of it has to do with better communications, especially between people working on the different architectures. To that end, there will probably be (yet another) mailing list created - called debian-release - which will hopefully get the various teams talking to each other more. The Debian Weekly News from May 10 is also available. MandrakeMandrake 6.0beta has been announced. It includes a number of new goodies, including a Windows installation option, both KDE and GNOME, a new sound configuration scheme (from the Lothar project), and lots of other goodies.Red HatOne other 6.0 gotcha that is worth keeping in mind: the upgrade to PostgreSQL 6.4 breaks any databases created with earlier versions. If you are upgrading a system with postgres databases on it, you'll want to dump out the old databases before the upgrade, so that the data can be reloaded in the new format...SuSESuSE is getting into the games business. They have just announced that they will be reselling in Europe the games released by Loki Entertainment Software. They will be starting, of course, with Civilization: Call to Power, whose release is coming up shortly. Civilization can be ordered now at a cost of 49 Euros.SSH for SuSE Linux is, of course, not available in the international edition due to obnoxious crypto laws in a number of countries. The good news is that SSH rpms can be found at a number of non-US SuSE mirrors. Lenz Grimmer suggested looking at ftp.gwdg.de first. TurboLinuxPacific HiTech has announced its high-availability clustering product for Linux. This system is claimed to be able to pull together up to tens of thousands of nodes into a high-availability system aimed at web serving and other corporate tasks. PHT seems to intend to release most of their high-availability code back in GPL form. Their kernel enhancements will be immediately GPL'd, of course. Some of their other tools may see a bit of a delay, as in the ghostscript model, before being released. (Thanks to Alan Robertson).Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
May 13, 1999
Please note that not every distribution will show up every week. Only distributions with recent news to report will be listed.
Known Distributions:
Caldera OpenLinux |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Development page. |
Development toolsPerlA new maintenance release to Perl 5.004 has been announced. Even though the current Perl release is 5.005, version 5.004 continues to be actively maintained. This is good, since not all users are yet happy with 5.005, and are holding off on upgrades. See the announcement for details of what's in this release.A new monthly magazine dedicated to Perl has been announced. PerlMonth put out its inaugural issue this month; it includes several articles, seemingly mostly of a tutorial nature. Ten web design principles by Tom Christiansen went out this week, here's the list. The principles are aimed at "diversity compliance," but have more general concerns as well. As might be expected from a posting by Tom, no punches are pulled. "There is a special pit of hell reserved for those who use <BLINK> tags" This posting was followed up by something a bit more Perl-related - a personal web proxy program written in Perl which filters out most of the things Tom rails against in his ten principles. PythonWhy Python? asks OpenSourceIT. "For many people doing OO development, the constraints of C++ or Java are such that a throwaway prototype is inevitable. With Python, OO design is freeform enough that a great deal of code from a prototype is reusable even if the model changes radically."Tcl/tkWe'll defer to this week's Tcl-URL for coverage of interesting events in the Tcl/Tk realm.Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
May 13, 1999 |
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Development projectsEddieThe folks in the Eddie project have announced the source release for their Commercial Grade Web Server product. It includes their IP migration, HTTP gateway, and load balancing applications. See their press release for more.GNOMEA mailing list for the "genius" calculator program has been created, see the announcement for signup information. This comes along with the release of Genius 0.4.2.Other GNOME goodies released this week: High availabilityAlan Robertson has released version 0.3.0 of his "heartbeat" system. Heartbeat allows for monitoring of high-availability clusters, and for "IP address takeover" to keep things working transparently in the event of an internal node failure.KDESession management in KDE Matthias Ettrich dropped this note to the list on the future of KDE's session management. As has been previously stated, session management support is being separated from KWM; this update also makes session management between KDE and GNOME more compatible. There are currently some objections noting that the planned update will not work under older versions of Unix still runing X11R5 (such as Solaris 2.5.x).Some other KDE quickies. This week, Christian Esken sent out a call for KDE multimedia developersalong with a description of the current multimedia projects. Richard Moore gave us this summary of the SIMPLINUX conference including KDE issues raised by the audience. Preston Brown made version 0.9 of the Desktop Entry Standardavailable with at least one more version forthcoming. Lots of KDE goodies released this week:
Linux Standard BaseVersion 1.0 of the LSB-FHS test suite (which verifies that systems conform to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard portion of the Linux Standard Base) has been announced.MidgardMidgard is a newly-released web application platform based on Apache and PHP3. It has been put out under free software licenses; evidently the core parts of the system are under the GPL, while some of the rest is, instead, under an X-Consortium type license. See the Midgard web pages for more information and downloads. (Thanks to Henri Bergius).WineWine release 990508 has been announced. This is a developer's release.ZopeAs usual, Amos Latteier has made our lives easy by sending in his weekly Zope report. As had been anticipated, the first Zope 2.0 release will happen at Linux Expo. Those of you who will be at Linux Expo will certainly want to drop by and check out their business portal unveiling as well.Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh | |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Commerce page. |
Linux and businessVMWare hits the shelves. VMWare has announced that its VMWare emulation product will be shipping for real this Saturday, May 15. This product promises to make life a lot easier for people who are unable to wean themselves entirely from the Dark Side by allowing them to run Windows software within a virtual machine on their Linux box. Active server pages for Linux. If you absolutely have to run Active Server Page stuff on your site, you may want to check out this announcement from Chili!Soft, which will be offering an ASP product for Linux "by the end of 1999." Linux binaries on Solaris. Here is the announcement from Sun that lxrun - the utility allowing Linux binaries to run on Solaris - is available for download. It is still interesting to contemplate how quickly vendors of other systems have gone from saying "Linux has no applications" to "we run Linux applications." Warehouses on Linux. LIS Warehouse Systems has announced that its "Dispatcher-CS" warehouse and inventory management system will be made available on Linux. Here we are seeing another important step in the adoption of Linux - the increasing availability of industry-specific tools. SuSE and CAI sign a deal Computer Associates and SuSE have announced a deal wherein SuSE will bundle CA's "Unicenter TNG Framework" with their distribution. Clustered thin servers. Here's a twist on the Linux-based thin server product: Network Engines has announced a rack-mounted product that looks much like the Cobalt RaQ, but which is intended to be operated in clusters of up to 256 hosts. Software (presumably proprietary) is included for cluster management and load balancing. OMNIS Software has announced Linux support for their Studio rapid application development tool. They promise 100% Linux, Windows & Macintosh application portability will be available soon. Software AG jumps on board. Software AG has announced that it will be supporting Linux with a number of its products. "...Linux is a scalable, stable and secure system that is no longer behind other flavors of Unix and Windows NT. It is particularly appropriate as an economical platform for mission-critical applications for electronic business." (Thanks to Cezary Cichocki). Linux-certified Toshiba servers. Toshiba has announced that it is certifying its servers for use with Red Hat's distribution. "The move came in response to growing customer demand for powerful and reliable Internet and enterprise server solutions based on the Linux operating system." Now if they would only see the light with their laptop line.. Linux training in Australia. Cybersource Pty Ltd in Melbourne, Australia has announced a set of Linux training courses. Demo version of Linux accounting package The folks at Proven Software have announced that evaluation copies of their Linux-based small business accounting packages are now available for free download. Another enterprise backup tool. Legato has announced support for its Networker backup software on Linux - at least, if you're running Red Hat.
Press Releases:
Section Editor: Rebecca Sobol. |
May 13, 1999 |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Linux in the news page. |
Linux in the newsWithout ado, here's this week's recommended reading:
Reviews of one type or another were popular this week:
There were only a couple of introductory pieces this week:
Sun's approach to Linux drew a couple of articles:
There were many business-oriented pieces, as is usual these days:
Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
May 13, 1999 |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Announcements page. |
AnnouncementsResourcesDeja.com (the site formerly known as Deja News) has a page rating various network operating systems. Linux is currently coming out on top. (Thanks to Mike Gerdts).EventsHere's the official announcement for LinuxWorld II, to be held in San Jose this August. Linus Torvalds will be keynoting again, and the exhibit floor will be doubled in size.The Free Software Foundation is looking forvolunteers to staff its booth at Linux Expo. Linus Torvalds will also be giving a keynote talk at Lotus DevCon99, according to this announcement. The conference is happening June 20-23 in San Francisco. Rich Roth is finishing out his Linux Expo talk on how to get Linux accepted in businesses. He's looking for suggestions and war stories to help illustrate the talk. If you have any to contribute, please drop him a note (mail address can be found on the page above). The program and registration materials for the six O'Reilly Open Source Conferences have been posted: Apache, Linux, Perl, Python, Sendmail, and Tcl/Tk. Also don't forget the Open Source Business track. All this is happening in Monterey, California on August 21 through 24. There's lots of big-name speakers, it looks like a good time. Web sitesThe pan-European Linux page at www.linux.eu.org has found a new home on Rik van Riel's network in the Netherlands. See the announcement of the move for details. They are looking for volunteers from all over Europe to help in the creation and maintenance of a new set of linux.eu.org pages.The one-page Linux manual is now up and available for downloading. User Group NewsThe Malaysian Open Source Group will have an active presence at the InfoSoc99 Expo in Shah Alam, Malaysia. The event runs from May 20 through the 23rd. |
May 13, 1999
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Software Announcements
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Back page page. |
Linux links of the weekThe DaveCentral Linux Software Archiveis mostly dedicated to a hierarchical database of available Linux programs. One cute touch is that it includes screenshots from many of them. Their database is incomplete, but there is still good information to be found there. The Free Software Jobs Page is maintained by the Free Software Foundation, so only jobs which involve working on free software will be listed. LinuxToday also has a jobs page with slightly looser criteria (and correspondingly more listings). Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
May 13, 1999 |
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Letters to the editorLetters to the editor should be sent to letters@lwn.net. Preference will be given to letters which are short, to the point, and well written. If you want your email address "anti-spammed" in some way please be sure to let us know. We do not have a policy against anonymous letters, but we will be reluctant to include them. Choosing letters to publish was unusually hard this week, due to the large number of them that we received. A number of quality letters were left out. We can only apologize to the senders, and encourage you to write to us again when the inspiration strikes you. | |
Date: 6 May 1999 21:25:46 -0000 From: bruce@perens.com To: lwn@lwn.net, malda@slashdot.org, nicholas@petreley.com, Subject: Bake-off proposal Instead of griping over this mindcraft benchmark, let's hold a bake-off at LinuxWorld in August. We will challenge NT and Linux developers to each field teams to compete at LinuxWorld. The two teams get identical hardware provided by a non-competing third-party: Dell, IBM, whoever. The NT team and the Linux team have a day or two to bootstrap their systems and tune them. Then they compete on a number of issues. Besides how fast they can serve, etc., let's make rapid application development one of the issues too. Each team could be handed a list of tasks to develop using their respective environments, and could be judged on time to completion, bugginess, features and elegance, speed, etc. Cover it with live webcasts, etc. It's sort of like Deep Blue vs. Kasparov. You win on the publicity front even if you lose. Pass this on to anyone you like if you think it's interesting. Thanks Bruce Perens | ||
Date: Fri, 7 May 1999 15:02:32 -0400 (EDT) From: Ray Jones <rjones@pobox.com> To: bruce@perens.com, lwn@lwn.net, malda@slashdot.org, nicholas@petreley.com Subject: Re: Bake-off proposal > [Bake-off suggestion by Bruce elided...] There are two things I like about Linux compared to other OSes (and the accompanying software): 1- high quality 2- low hype A bake-off doesn't do much for either of these. Yeah, Mindcraft's benchmark was pretty useless and made us all angry, but it doesn't really matter to Linux's continued success. The results have been shot down sufficiently well (by people outside the Linux community!) that we should just be ignoring them and working on making Linux better, so the next time someone like Mindcraft wants to put out a benchmark that makes NT or whatever else look better/faster than Linux, they won't be able to.[1] IMO, a bake-off as described by Bruce would produce less good than an actual bake-off with the food being sold and the money being donated to the FSF. Ray Jones [1] I realize that's impossible. But it can be made more difficult, and tuning information can be collected and made easily available so that the "no documentation" argument falls apart. | ||
Date: Fri, 7 May 1999 01:09:44 +0200 (METDST)
From: Morten Welinder <terra@diku.dk>
To: letters@lwn.net
Subject: Attribution
In the May 6 issue, I think you are misrepresenting the quote
"While the NT Testanlage an intensive Tuning experienced by
Microsoft specialists, at the Linux version one did not screw."
I am quite sure that this quote should be attributed to Yoda the Jedi,
not Babelfish.
Morten
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Date: Thu, 6 May 1999 08:20:03 +0200 (CEST) From: Jens Ritter <jens@hilbert.weh.rwth-aachen.de> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: RSA not obsoleted Dear Editors, I guess you confused DES (Data Encryption Standard) and RSA in the current security section (6th may issue). It is true that DES features only 56 bit key length and that it is obsoleted by the the eff's descracker machine. See: http://www.eff.org/pub/Privacy/Crypto_misc/DESCracker/ So the current announcement of Shamir only puts another nail in the already sealed and buried coffing of DES. RSA in contrast is the public key encryption scheme used in pgp as default method up to version 2.6.3. It uses the product of two large prime numbers and the security is based upon the fact that factorising such a product is a difficult (or hard) problem. While it is clear that to factor the product of two prime numbers with say 3 digits is a matter of seconds on current hardware, the problem becomes difficult if one uses products in the range of 1024 and more binary digits. The result of Shamir only pushes the number of digits up, if one wants to get a key which can be considered secure for some years. As Bruce Schneier in his book "Applied cryptography" notes, if you want to have a long lasting RSA key, you have to use as many bits as possible. Yours sincerely, Jens Ritter P.S.: Please vote against Spam! At http://www.politik-digital.de/spam/ (Sorry Europeans only) --- Jens.Ritter@weh.rwth-aachen.de grimaldi@debian.org Key ID: 2048/E451C639 Jens Ritter Key fingerprint: 5F 3D 43 1E 24 1E CC 48 1E 05 93 3A A7 10 73 37 | ||
Date: Thu, 06 May 1999 03:47:52 -0400 From: Piotr Mitros <pmitros@MIT.EDU> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: xv Quick comment on Red Hat 6.0 and xv. I would guess that the reason that Red Hat left it out is because xv is not free software. It comes with source, but it is distinctly shareware. Red Hat is phasing itself over to be a pure free software company. I think the good of having a completely free OS outweigh the disadvantages of loosing a little utility like xv. Xv is convenient, but it's not that big a deal. | ||
Date: Fri, 7 May 1999 15:40:09 -0400 From: ajc@uncnsrd.mt-kisco.ny.us (Art Cancro) To: letters@lwn.net Subject: wxWindows, Qt, and other cross-platform toolkits Dear Editor, I came home from a vacation this week to discover that the latest "war" in the open source universe appears to be wxWindows vs. Qt. It's ironic that nearly every time another debate surfaces in our community, Troll Tech AS seems to be involved, although that's not what I intend to discuss today. I recently began a non-trivial development project that requires a cross-platform toolkit, and I went through the same search that Matt Heck and many others did. I have to say that Mr. Heck's conclusion is a good one: wxWindows and Qt are both very good toolkits, and you can't make a bad choice. Yes, I do have a preference. I chose wxWindows. Right out of the box, it can target Linux (using GTK), Microsoft Windows (using Win32), and commercial Unix (using Motif). It's a wonderfully complete, portable toolkit that is very sensibly classed. It's free of commercial licensing restrictions, and a Macintosh version is also in development. Given a selection of several high-quality toolkits, why not go with the one that will please the most people? I'm rather excited about the potential for products like wxWindows to blur the lines which can divide developers. I've heard that there is a version of wxWindows in development which can link to Qt. This would be a perfect bridge between the GNOME and KDE worlds, as well as giving the hordes of Linux programmers an opportunity to get backports to Windows and Macintosh with very little additional effort. When two or more great products go head to head without one having an unfair advantage, there can be only one winner: the consumer. (Yes, I'm talking to you, Bill.) The truly important message which I gleaned from this week's debates is this: cross-platform toolkits are becoming an increasingly important part of the development world. Developers are realizing that simply targeting one platform is no longer a safe option. Like many Linux users, I had high hopes for Java, but in its current incarnation it seems to have failed in the "standalone app" universe (although it has done quite well in the "small front-end embedded in a web page" universe). I'm confident that Sun will eventually figure out how to make Java's success more widespread -- GPL'ing the entire JDK and JVM comes to mind -- but in the meantime, we must look elsewhere. That "elsewhere" is currently the several cross-platform toolkits that are available. I would encourage all developers to give wxWindows, Qt, and the others a good close look, and keep portability in mind when starting a new project that doesn't necessarily have to be Linux-only. Unlike some people, we don't need to create platform lock-in. Art Cancro UNCENSORED! BBS ajc@uncnsrd.mt-kisco.ny.us http://uncnsrd.mt-kisco.ny.us | ||
Date: Fri, 07 May 1999 19:26:20 -0700 From: David Smead <dsmead@cyberhighway.net> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: OS Battle is won, war lost Greetings, Sure I'm a Linux user and hope to stay one, but while us peons are scratching in the OS barnyard, M$ is developing a new twist on an old strategy - delivery of information using proprietary formats/protocols. For the few of us who use computers to enhance engineering productivity, Linux will eventually be the OS of choice. In the meantime, look for the masses to remain addicted to some variant of M$ CE, with content delivered not only encrypted, but also in formats that are not public. Their investment in AT&T doesn't look so innocent to me. Just send payment of your information utility bill the Bill. So we win the OS war - so what? Perhaps the Justice Department should start developing foresight and make sure that delivery of information isn't monopolized by anyone in the future. That means if I want to use an information and entertainment appliance that happens to run Linux, then I should be able to connect to any delivery service in like manner to the Internet today. -- Sincerely, David Smead Please visit our web site -- amplepower.com. | ||
Date: Sat, 08 May 1999 21:27:51 +0300 From: "Khalid M. Baheyeldin" <kbahey@ab2.com> To: editor@lwn.net, letters@lwn.net Subject: Voice over IP for Linux This is a call for help and/or pointers. If you can publish this letter, and maybe some reader will be able to point me in the right direction. The issue is that I am looking for an application that works under Linux (preferrably KDE, but will consider all options) that would allow me to talk (in voice) to someone else with Linux and KDE. The world of Windows95/98 abound with such application from all spectrums (open source, free, shareware, commercial), such as Speakfreely, Netmeeting, CU-SeeMe, MediaRing, ..etc. However, when it comes to Linux, there is a dearth in such applications. I have tried most of those I know of, but some do not work at all, and others provide low quality voice. Those I tried include: - SpeakFreely (http://www.speakfreely.org) doesn't work under Linux since the sfmike program bombs out. half Duplex only. - fphone (http://rodeo.inria.fr). Has a nice interface, but the voice is very jittery. Half Duplex only. - KVirc (http://www.kvirc.org). A super program, but there seems to be severe lag of voice (in minutes!!). Half Duplex only. - ephone. Seems to require a fast connection (Ethernet?) What else is out there? Thanks, and feel free to edit the message above. -- Khalid M. Baheyeldin | ||
Date: Thu, 06 May 1999 17:44:26 -0500 From: "Spencer T. Kittelson" <spencertk@abasys.com> To: lwn@lwn.net Subject: Mindcraft suggestions Here's my email to Mindcraft: ------------------------------------------------------------- Spencer T. Kittelson VP Systems Engineering Advanced Business Automation ------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mr. Weiner, There two essentials that are required to perform a reasonable and useful test of Linux vs. NT: 1) Test using NT Workstation for clients since many business users deploy NT on the desktop (they don't like the instability and lack of security in Win95/98). If you want a real test, use real configurations. 2) Use absolutely current, state of the art releases, patches, etc. The choice of 20-Apr-1999 based upon your unreleased second test is an arbitrary date. It serves no purpose to restrict the software source dates in such a manner. As a matter of opinion, since the original testing was handled so badly, it looks like you are trying to use a cutoff date to prevent the most recent Linux based performance enhancements from being used. It is unlikely that Mindcraft (and any of the personnel involved in the first test) will be able to completely recover their credibility. Trust and confidence, once shattered, is difficult to restore. It remains to be seen if Mindcraft et al. have integrity. Until then, all my clients are advised to dismiss any and all Mindcraft "tests" as cooked, bought and paid for propaganda. | ||
Date: Fri, 07 May 1999 17:23:34 -0700 From: Ariel Faigon <ariel@cthulhu.engr.sgi.com> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: An idea for Mindcraft second chance While Mike Abbott is working on speeding up Apache (stay tuned)... Since we are comparing Linux and NT here, why not open the game and try a truly fast web server like thttpd or even better Zeus on Linux? Having a lot of prior experience with Apache and Zeus, I suspect this will put NT and IIS in the right perspective even on a very favorable (to NT) basic hardware config. Since according to Jef's graphs at: http://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/benchmarks.html Zeus outperforms Apache by a factor of 3 to 20 depending on load on static small files, The 3x Mindcraft claim might be solved right there. -- Peace, Ariel | ||
Date: Thu, 6 May 1999 01:22:15 -0500 (CDT)
From: Dave Finton <surazal@nerp.net>
To: letters@lwn.net
Subject: Vague feelings of uneasiness with Mindcraft
It didn't surprise me at all that Microsoft, with its vast arsenel of
marketting assault techniques, would do something like fund an
"independent" benchmark study with NT against Linux. It surprised me even
less that NT "won" in these benchmarks.
At first I wasn't too bothered by all the hubbub, since anyone with half a
brain takes everything Microsoft says these days with a grain of salt (the
much-lauded security rating Microsoft got with NT disconnected from a
network comes to mind :). What started bothering me, however was the
negative publicity. Keep in mind I was glad someone out there would care
enough to refute the results rationally and logically. What bothers me
now is the *amount* of publicity this is getting.
Think about it: Microsoft's position is pretty sweet right now. Linux
developers and enthusiasts are arguing with some backwater benchmarking
company, and all of this is very public. Mindcraft looks bad because
their benchmarking results weren't very credible. Linux looks bad both by
proxy and by looking like a bunch of guys screaming "No fair!" Not only
that, but now this study is getting tremendous amounts of publicity that
it probably would not have generated on its own. And all Microsoft has to
say is "Hey don't look at us, we just hired them."
We've got to be a little bit more careful in choosing the targets that
Linux wants to hit. Was the Mindcraft test all that dangerous really?
It's hard to say, but now all of the sudden it's clear that the test
now has a lot more potential to do damage to the credibility of Linux and
Open Source in general that it would have had without front-page
feature-length articles on e-zines like Salon.
Linux enthusiasts have always been ready and able to respond to perceived
threats. But it can be too easy to allow ourselves to jump at every
opportunity for a cause to defend. The image I have in my mind right now
is a little hamster running in a wheel chasing after a carrot tied to a
string. The hamster is very determined to continue its existence by
chasing and eating the carrot, but it's completely blind to the cat
stalking up behind it. Populist movements can be very powerful, but they
can be easily swayed into making rash decisions. We have to keep that in
mind in the future (and in the present for that matter).
- Dave Finton
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| Name: Dave Finton |
| E-mail: surazal@nerp.net |
| Web Page: http://surazal.nerp.net/ |
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