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Bringing you the latest news from the Linux World.
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Leading items![[Touchphone]](/1999/features/TouchPhone/tp1-sm.gif)
The Linux-powered telephone. Our latest feature article looks
at the Touchphone - an intelligent telephone product which runs Linux
internally. It is an interesting piece of technology, and an even more
interesting look into a possible future of Linux: the system of choice for
embedded consumer applications.
Eric Raymond has released a new paper: The Magic Cauldron. It's the third in the series that started with "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." According to Eric: "This paper focuses on economics and the `How do I make money at this?' question." The Mindcraft rerun. The results are in; as expected, NT still beat Linux strongly, though not so strongly as before. For this particular set of tests, NT just performs better. For details, see the PC Week article that first made the results available. There are a few things to note about these results. First, perhaps, is that much of the Linux community (including this publication) reacted a little too strongly to the initial results. Certainly there were numerous problems with how the first test was done, and it was right to bring those to light. But, in the end, fixing the problems did not change the ultimate results of the test. More recent criticism points out that the benchmark has little to do with any sort of real world situation. Doug Ledford of Red Hat was quoted widely as saying "The tests do not accurately represent how and what our customers are using Red Hat for." Penguin Computing put out a strongly worded press release arguing the irrelevance of the benchmark. See also Chris Lansdown's article on the sort of network connectivity it would take to actually sustain the number of hits per second tested in these benchmarks. A separate set of tests documented in this c't article show that, under more "realistic" conditions, Linux performs much better. All that is true - the connection with the benchmarks and reality is weak at best. But complaints along those lines just sound like sour grapes at this point. They make Linux look bad, and are not worth the trouble. A few problems with Linux have been found as a result of these benchmarks. There is a bottleneck in the networking code that appears to be the cause of the plateau in Apache's performance, for example. Work is already well underway to fix those problems. See Dan Kegel's page for a detailed discussion of what is happening in this area. And that, really, is the best result out of these benchmarks. There is no deep design problem within Linux that causes performance problems in these conditions. There are, instead, specific implementation problems that have been found, and will soon be fixed. It may not be long before Linux starts winning these benchmarks. The end result will be to show how quickly Linux can adapt and deal with problems. In the long run, these benchmarks will probably look like a good thing for Linux, from both the technical and public relations point of view. Slashdot has been acquired by Andover.net. If it works out as planned, the deal should be a good thing for Slashdot - they will get money to pay for help and redundant servers, and absolute creative control is written into their contract. Details can be found in Slashdot's announcement and Andover.net's press release. The Free Practice Management Project has been launched. FreePM seeks to create an open source system to handle most of the information system needs of medical offices and clinics: appointment scheduling, medical records management, insurance claims, etc. If it is successful, this project could well be the biggest one of its kind: a deeply domain-specific system for the needs of a particular industry. For details, see the FreePM announcement. Whether the project will be successful remains to be seen, however. This project appears to have broken one if the cardinal rules of free software endeavors by starting out with no code base whatsoever. Getting their desired "100 to 1000" volunteers could be hard given that there is very little for them to start hacking on. We wish FreePM luck. It is, in any case, likely to be the first of many such projects. As free software gains "respectibility," players in many industries will see the advantages of having an industry-specific base of free code. It is certainly a question of "when," and not "if" free software will move into this realm. Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond are fighting again. Stallman posted some comments via Slashdot about how he wants no part of "open source." Raymond responded with a piece called Shut up and show them the code claiming that open source tactics have a lot to do with the current success of Linux and related software, while FSF tactics have been ineffective. Ho hum... This Week's LWN was brought to you by:
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July 1, 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. |
SecurityNewsThe folks from Bugtraq, the full-disclosure security mailing list which is widely recognized as one of the best resources for up-to-date security information currently available, are moving to their own website, SecurityFocus.com. Next Monday, July 5th, the Bugtraq list will actually move to the new site (subscriber information will not be impacted) and mail to bugtraq will need to be directed to bugtraq@securityfocus.com. The mailing list archives from Geek-Girl.com, which we have used as a resource for so long, will be moving to the new site, along with the Geek-Girl herself!In fact, it seems that the staff at Security Focus are mostly built from long-time supporters of Bugtraq and members of that community. That promises much for the quality of the resources that they plan on providing. The SecurityFocus.com site is already up and running, with a newsfeed of security-related articles, recently published vulnerabilities, products and a library. Aleph One's announcement also outlines additional planned resources. A mailing list just for incident reports (which are not currently allowed on Bugtraq) is being created, along with Bugtraq lists for non-English speakers, whose moderators will be responsible for translating postings as required to make sure that the same topics and information are accessible to all the mailing lists. We wish them luck in their new venture. It is good news for the Linux community to see this community flourish and grow as well. Meanwhile, here is a a SecurityPortal piece which says Linux needs to worry about viruses too. "As Linux is increasingly adopted in corporate environments, it must not act as 'Typhoid Mary' during a virus outbreak, obliviously storing and passing along a virus." It also mentions one open source project that provides a solution for this problem. AMaViS - A Mail Virus Scanner is licensed under the GPL and sits on top of commercial virus scanners such as McAfee, Dr. Solomon, AntiVir/X and Sophos. It currently only supports sendmail. Performance Computing looks at Linux security tools. "It's wise to view all open-source software downloaded from public domain sites with suspicion. It is important to ensure that the downloaded software is the intended product. After all, what good does it do to download tainted security software?" Security ReportsA security problem with klock was found by 7-year old boy trying to get control of his father's session, according to his Dad's posting to Bugtraq. A patch was quickly put together by Martin Jones. Caldera has released an advisory and upgraded packages (kdebase-1.1.1-3, kdebase-opengl-1.1.1-5) in response.VMWare for Linux 1.0.1 and earlier contains an exploitable buffer overrun which can result in unauthorized root access. VMWare 1.0.2 has been released with an update to fix this problem. For the updated version and more information on the problem, check out VMware's advisory. Patches for Xi Graphics, Inc.'s Accelerated-X Server 4.x, 5.x have been released to address problems due to insufficient bounds checking on command-line parameters, which leave it vulnerable to buffer overruns. If you are using this server, installing the patches is highly recommended. UpdatesMandrake has issued a set of security fixes for the 6.0 distribution; affected packages are printtool (upgraded to printtool-3.40-5), kdenetwork (upgraded to kdenetwork-1.1.1final-4), kdebase (upgraded to kdebase-1.1.1final-11), and net-tools (upgraded to net-tools-1.52-6). Note that the printtool update does not appear to be security related, so if you do not need the new printers that have been added to that package, you should not need to upgrade. The other three are security-related and upgrading is recommended.Red Hat has also issued an advisory for nettools (upgrade to net-tools-1.52-2) under Red Hat 6.0. In addition, a "potential" problem has been turned up in the NFS server used with Red Hat 5.2. If you're running NFS under 5.2 (or earlier), take a look at the notice and apply the updates (nfs-server-2.2beta44 and nfs-server-clients2.2beta44). The 6.0 release uses a different NFS server, and should not be vulnerable. Red Hat has also issued new RPMS for kde, which upgrade the packages to KDE 1.1.1-1. These new packages close a few security holes in addition to other bugfixes. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
July 1, 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 development kernel release remains 2.3.8. Further releases have been held back while some more problems with the new page cache code get ironed out. One of the big ones was turned up on June 30; that should clear the way for 2.3.9 (for which there is already a prepatch in its eighth iteration) to come out soon. The current stable kernel release remains 2.2.10. Alan Cox has a 2.2.10ac5 out there with a lot of good stuff. 2.2.11 is likely to come out shortly after the filesystem corruption problem is found, but... The 2.2 filesystem corruption problem remains unsolved despite quite a bit of effort that has gone into tracking it down. There appear to be weak correlations between the problem and (1) overclocked systems, and (2) Adaptec controllers. However, neither is particularly strong, and a solution does not appear to be readily at hand. This is a difficult one, and certainly not much fun to have in a stable kernel. The albods are coming. There is a continuing debate over whether Linux should provide a filesystem which provides a richer view of files. The discussion grew out of the idea of implementing "forked" files like the Macintosh does , or "streams" in files along the lines of Windows 2000. Last week we mentioned Hans Reiser's posting on the subject which claims that current filesystems are inadequate. According to Hans, any time that an application developer has to implement some sort of namespace, the file system has failed that developer. Ted Ts'o responded with a strawman design for "application logical bundles of data" (or "albods") implemented entirely in user space. These "albods" had the advantages of working with any filesystem (even on a DOS diskette), of being transferable over FTP, and of requiring no kernel changes. His point was simply that such an approach is possible, so it is too soon to be thinking about hacking advanced namespace features into the kernel. Transferability, via NFS, DOS diskettes, HTTP, or FTP, is a contentious issue. Many people are understandably nervous about changes that break all of those modes of moving files around. Hans replies that such people prove Bill Gates right: only Microsoft has the kind of centralized control that allows large, system-wide changes to be made. The issue of implementing things in user space is also important. There is the (always contentious) issue of whether some desired feature belongs in the kernel - the Linux kernel is growing fast enough as it is. But another point is that a Linux kernel solution is probably a Linux-only solution. Application writers (such as those writing GNOME and KDE office suites) are much less likely to use a feature that is not portable across multiple systems. This issue is far from any sort of resolution. Hans has stated his intention to hire somebody to implement his ideas, at which point there would at least be some code to argue about. (See also: Hans's Reiserfs web page that details a lot of what he is about). A side discussion came up on the handling of filesystem flags. Alexander Viro proposed a new set of system calls for handling the specific attributes that would come with extended types of files. Stephen Tweedie pointed out that he had implemented a similar interface some time ago. And Linus chimed in on how it would work; his message indicates a certain amount of sympathy to the "albod" idea. Various patches and updates released this week:
Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
July 1, 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. |
DistributionsAnother site with a long-standing, long list of distributions is Kernelnotes.org (formerly LinuxHQ). As of last count, it has over 116 different distributions listed. In addition, their list is already categorized by type of distribution and contains a description of the distributions. While we have continued to add distributions that people have sent to us, it may be that the number of existing distributions is simply too large for us to use as a list of links on this weekly report. We'll be taking a look at some of our options in the next couple of weeks. Meanwhile, here's some brief descriptions of distributions that people pointed out to us over the past week. Mastodon is a Slackware-derived distribution pointed out to us by Navindra Umanee. It uses the older libc 4.8.0 (a.out) library, but has moved to the /etc/rc.d structure of startup files. He is also building his own collection of scripts to administer the system without "getting his fingers dirty" directly editing files. This is a work-in-progress, for those that are interested. Black Cat Linux is another Ukrainian/Russian distribution that Andrey Kolov told us about. We don't have many more details because the website itself is (understandably) not in English (or any other language for which we have local experts). Continuing in the area of specific language support, Best Linux is a distribution localized for Finnish and Swedish. [Thanks to Jan Ekholm] And Vincent Renardias pointed out eXecutive Linux, based on Red Hat Linux 6.0 under the French language. Next, Bruce Harada gave us pointers to three separate Japanese distributions, Vine Linux (RedHat 5.1-based), Plamo Linux (Slackware-based), and Stataboware, a set of Alpha-only tarballs. For those Italian-speakers among us, Bad Penguin Linux has been dubbed "La distribuzione Linux italiana". Back in the area of mini-Linux distributions, a couple of different people pointed out Floppix, a subset of Debian that fits on two floppies, developed by Professor Linda MacEwan, Algonquin College of Applied Arts and Technology, Ontario, Canada. In addition, covering two separate categories, nanoLinux II is both small enough to fit on three floppies and supported primarily in Italian. [Ottavio G. Rizz] CalderaCaldera Systems has announced its new "OpenLinux Developer Network." This network seems to be set up mostly as an information channel for people developing applications on OpenLinux, with the opportunity to buy discounted products as well.DebianAnother vendor has chosen Debian on which to base its products. Linux Laptops, Ltd has announced its choice of Debian as the only distribution that they pre-install on their line of Laptops.French-speaking? You may be interested in this brief interview (in French) with Christophe Lebars, who is responsible for the project to translate Debian into French. Check out the Debian Weekly News for additional Debian topics. It includes news of a draft of Debian policy 3.0.0, a major update to Debian policy. Hard Hat LinuxJust announced this week, Hard Hat Linux is a distribution specifically aimed at embedded systems, particularly embedded and applied computing applications in telecommunications, Internet and industrial control. Here is the press release that describes the new distribution.KRUDOur friends up at Tummy.com have announced the KRUD (Kevin's Red Hat Uber Distribution) distribution. KRUD is the latest Red Hat with all of the latest errata (currently well over 100mb) applied and a set of extra packages added. KRUD can be bought on a monthly subscription, making it easy to keep up with the updates.LinuxPPCThe LinuxPPC User Guide has been updated. In addition, the list of ftp mirror site has been expanded and the LinuxPPC port of the SheepShaver MacOS runtime environment has gone beta.MandrakeThe Linux-Mandrake development version is now being made available in real-time. Check out their announcement for more details.MkLinuxLarry Kollar sent us a news update for MkLinux, with a report on their status regarding their upcoming release.Additional MkLinux news can be found in this article at Linux am Mac. Red HatNew PHP packages are available from Red Hat. Their advisory indicates that the original version of PHP shipped with Red Hat Linux 6.0 (mod_php3-*-3.0.7) had problems with glibc2.1. The packages released previously to fix these problems in turn had a problem with postgresql. The latest packages should fix both of these problems (mod_php3-*-3.0.9-1).Red Hat has also released a new talk package (talk-0.11-2) which works with ytalk and apparently allowed them to close out several bug reports. See their errata for more information. We mentioned Dan Anderson's RPM 3.0 Signing HOWTO last week. Dan has put together an updated version this week. RPM 3.0 (as present in Red Hat 6.0) includes a number of incompatible and undocumented changes; this HOWTO is Dan's attempt to fill in the information gap. SuSEIn last week's Distributions Summary, we mentioned a rumor that SuSE was planning to stop "splitting releases into multiple versions". This "rumor" came from a misreading of a message posted to their mailing list. We have now exchanged mail with Lenz Grimmer and can give a more accurate story.SuSE will continue to have separate German and International versions, due to the standard legal issues with ssh, SSL and other cryptographic software. However, they will no longer be issuing a second version of a release. Previously, they've issued second versions as an opportunity to include bug and security fixes, as well as newer versions of some packages. From now on, they will only re-release the original master, making security and serious bug fixes available as separate packages only. This policy has been changed by request of their resellers (who don't want software already on the shelf to become obsolete before they have a chance to sell it) and customers, presumably because of the confusion as to what package is or is not part of a specific release. It is not an uncommon situation. Similar issues have been discussed for Debian, Red Hat and other distributions as well. TurboLinuxTurboLinux has announced "TurboLinux Workstation 3.6." This release runs on the 2.2.9 kernel, offers both KDE and GNOME, and has WordPerfect bundled in as well.Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
July 1, 1999
Please note that not every distribution will show up every week. Only distributions with recent news to report will be listed.
Our Distribution List: |
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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 toolsCobolMany people wrote in to very kindly point out errors in our Cobol coverage last week. For example, Pat Eyler mentioned that GNU Cobol has been under development for some time and the Cobol2C compiler has been available since 1997. He also mentioned the work being done to produce an ANSI 85 Cobol Compiler using the Sable Research Group's Compiler Compiler. More information on that product is available at http://acm.cs.umr.edu/~gnu-cobol/maillist/threads.html.You'll also see some letters to the editor that correct the inference in my last report that the only hope for Cobol was to translate the language into C. They do a better job than I of explaining why that inference is incorrect, so I'll encourage you to follow the postings there. JavaThe JDK 1.2.1 changes have been integrated into the primary code base, according to the JDK 1.2 status page. A release and corresponding diff files are expected out "in the near future".Humanoid 0.3.0 is an arcade game written entirely in Java and distributed as free software. An alternative desktop written in Java is something that Cliff Baeseman has started writing. It generated some interest on the java-linux list, along with this this followup with pointers to related projects. PerlA nice long report on yapc (Yet Another Perl Conference) is available at Perl News.Perl Poetry takes on a new meaning in Tom Christiansen's latest work, In Mountain View did Larry Wall. Thanks for brightening up this editor's late night work. PythonThe Friendly Snake is the title of this article (in Hungarian).Tcl/tkTwo week's of TCL-URL! are available. Here is last week's edition and this week's edition.News about the forthcoming Tcl 8.2 release was posted by Paul Gardiner. The main thrust of the new release will be bug fixes, but it will contain several new major features (outlined in the posting). This year's Open Source Software Convention will be held in Monterey, California, from August 21st through 24th, with a specific Tcl/tk conference (along with Linux, Perl, Apache, Python and sendmail). Check this announcement for more details. A contest for the 1999 Open Source Convention Tcl Conference has been announced. They are looking for your best Tcl Tips and Tricks. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
July 1, 1999 |
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Development projectsThe Open Source Writer's Group is calling for submissions for a mascot or logo to represent the project. Time for all you gimp gurus to fire up your systems and come up with something good. If that logo project doesn't inspire you, you can consider one for the Linux Counter project instead. They are also sponsoring a logo contest. ApacheThe Apache group has formed a corporation, called the "Apache Software Foundation," whose purpose is to "...provide organizational, legal, and financial support for the Apache open-source software projects." Details may be found in their press release.GnomeHere is this week's GNOME summaryby Havoc Pennington.We're also pleased to report that Havoc Pennington has just announced the forthcoming publication of his book GTK+/Gnome Application Development. The book, to be published by New Riders, will be available under a free license that allows redistribution. Availability is set for around the beginning of September. Also reported this week, The Gnome Developer's Site is up and running. KDEAccording to the KDE news page, movement towards the release of KDE 1.1.2 is on schedule, with the libraries and core applications frozen as of June 27th. Michael Wilkinson at osOpinion.com has written an editorial on KDE and its graphical interface, which breaks down computer users into "Circles, Rectangles and Squares". From his descriptions, it is doubtful that any of the appellations will be appealing to the people so-named. Take a look, though; clearly he is trying to handle the issues in an even-handed manner. And for the rest of the KDE news, we turn you over to Navindra Umanee's KDE Development News for this week. MozillaWill Netscape/Mozilla stay open source? It appears from this article that Sun is considering other possibilities. This is an issue to watch, particularly to see how licenses like the NPL and MPL really do at protecting the openness of developed source code compared to the GPL.PostfixDevelopment snapshot 19990627 of postfix has been announced. Note that this release is planned to become the next official release of postfix, depending on how well it works for people.QtQt 2.0 was announced on June 25th. This is the long-promised version, with the Qt Free Edition released under the QPL Open Source license. It also includes over a year of development, many new features and substantial improvements. The document "Porting from Qt 1.x to Qt 2.0" in the Online Reference Documentation contains information on how to port an existing Qt 1.x-based program to Qt 2.0.ZopeHere's this week's Zope summary from Amos Latteier. The big news this week, of course, was the release of ZCatalog, which provides a long-awaited and powerful searching capability to Zope sites.Those of you waiting for the Zope folks to get their "Portal Toolkit" out of the vaporware realm might want to check out the Zope Portal Toolkit Roadmap. It gives estimates as to when the various components will be released, with the last release happening sometime in the third quarter of the year. 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 businessCyclic drops out of the CVS support business. Cyclic Software has announced that it will stop selling support contracts for CVS - the version control system used in many, many projects. This move seems to have a lot more to do with the owner's personal goals than with problems with the business itself - this page at Cyclic claims that Cyclic was a profitable and growing business. The page also points out areas in which the business could have been improved. There may well be an opportunity there for somebody interested in picking up this line of work. Enterprise Java Beans from Groupe Bull. Groupe Bull has released its "Enterprise Java Beans" package - a set of Java classes for large enterprise resource management tasks. Their press release states that the software will be released under an open source license; if you go to the Enterprise Java Beans web site you will find, instead, a license which is most certainly not open source. One assumes that they haven't gotten around to changing it yet... Some information can also be found in slides from Bull's announcement presentation at the Europe-Japan Conference on Linux and Free Software. Insight debugger source release. Cygnus will be releasing the source to their "Insight" debugger (aka "GDBtk") according to this press release. Actual availability will be some time in July. New systems - big. Alta Technology has announced a new set of Pentium III-based cluster systems. These boxes have eight complete nodes (single or dual processor) in a single case. High-speed interconnects are available, and the boxes are "stackable" to produce larger clusters. Definitely a nice number cruncher. New systems - small. At the other end of the scale, The Computer Underground has announced a $499 system which includes networking, sound, and speakers. "Limit two per customer." A Linux endowed chair? Vovida Networks, Inc. is sponsoring a corporate seat for the Linux community on the International Softswitch Consortium. Linux developers can find additional information about the position and register for the seat at the Vovida Networks website. An election will be held in conjunction with the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo (San Jose) for the seat. IBM signs another deal. Caldera Systems, Inc. and IBM have announced a joint development, marketing and support agreement to promote the Linux operating system. Press Releases:
Section Editor: Jon Corbet. |
July 1, 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 newsThis week's recommended reading:
Open Source Business:
The Sale of Slashdot:
Mindcraft Benchmark Reruns:
Business news:
and finally:
Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
July 1, 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. |
AnnouncementsResourcesAudio LinuxToday. LinuxToday is getting into the audio broadcast realm; they are looking for beta testers. Check it out.Apache under attack. Conrad Sanderson's The Anatomy of a Frontal Assault on Apache describes the strategy he thinks Microsoft will take to bring about the end of the Apache web server. It is certainly a plausible scenario, worth a look. RPM signing HOWTO updated. Dan Anderson has put together an updated version of his RPM 3.0 Signing HOWTO. RPM 3.0 (as present in Red Hat 6.0) includes a number of incompatible and undocumented changes; this HOW is Dan's attempt to fill in the information gap. EventsWizards of OS. The Wizards of OS Conference on Open Source and Free Software has settled into its final form. The event will happen on July 16 and 17 in Berlin; notable participants include Richard Stallman, Tim O'Reilly, Kalle Dalheimer, and many others. Much of the event will be held in the German language.Personal Computing Strategies Workshop. Netproject, the organizer of a couple of successful open source conferences in the UK, has organized a conference on personal computing strategies and technologies for July 15 in London. It includes a segment on Linux on the desktop. LinuxTag 1999 summary. Here is a summary release from the organizers of LinuxTag 1999, held on June 26 and 27. The event appears to have been a success, with 7000 attendees. Web sitesThe Linux Consultants Support and Resource Center is meant to help Linux consultants learn more and do their job.User Group NewsThe LUG of Jackson (MS) has announced their first Linux installfest, to be held on July 10. |
July 1, 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 Back page page. |
Linux links of the weekIt's The Linux Portaloo, courtesy of Alan Cox. It's "a one-day hack" which provides a nice, concise view of news from several sites. Spanish-speaking readers may want to have a look at Proyecto Lucas, which claims to be the largest repository of Spanish-language Linux documentation out there. Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
July 1, 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. | |
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1999 20:56:07 +0200 From: Toon Moene <toon@moene.indiv.nluug.nl> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: GNU Cobol I read with some amusement the following blurb in LWN of the 24th of June: > GNU COBOL is now under development, as a result of Rildo > Pragana's decision to release the source code for a COBOL compiler > he created for MSDOS years ago. Alan Cox has apparently thrown in > some patches, as has Rildo, and now it actually produces GNU > assembler (gas). Of course, the goal is actually to get it to produce > C code. That would definitely help a lot of old COBOL projects move in > the right direction ... [Thanks to David S de Lis] A casual reader might interpret the last sentence as meaning that the only way to save old Cobol projects is to translate the Cobol code into C. I think this a somewhat naive view on the reasons why code is maintainable or not. Cobol has its strengths in dealing with the processing of business oriented data: It supports a declarative syntax to enable complex conversions between machine and human readable data. Converting Cobol to C would do nothing to improve the control flow of the programs, while making its data handling completely unreadable. Unless the only human resource one has available is C programmers, I would strongly discourage such a conversion. What the world needs is a free Cobol compiler - if this is the way to get one, even if it is not within the framework of the GNU Compiler Collection (which would make it retargetable to other architectures than the Intel ia32 model, among other benefits), then so be it. -- Toon Moene (toon@moene.indiv.nluug.nl) Saturnushof 14, 3738 XG Maartensdijk, The Netherlands Phone: +31 346 214290; Fax: +31 346 214286 GNU Fortran: http://world.std.com/~burley/g77.html | ||
Date: Sat, 26 Jun 1999 12:48:03 -0400 (EDT) From: <kend@cisco.com> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: Mindcraft Mk. II. Well, the results are in, and we didn't win. What do we do now? Firstly, it's obvious that these benchmarks have shown portions of Linux that need attention. I am, therefore, hopeful that these failings can be addressed quickly -- I know that several solutions are already being bandied about. But that still doesn't change the fact that we actually *learned* stuff from the Mindcraft fiasco. 1) People *do* listen to the Open Source community. The mere fact that we were able to make them recognize how unbalanced the first test was, really says something. 2) More interestingly, IMHO, is the fact that we learned Linux's own weaknesses -- things we really hadn't been aware of before, or at least _as_ aware of. I therefore suggest that the Linux community, on its own dime, run some sort of annual benchmark between, say, Solaris X86 or SCO (which nobody uses, but would be good yardsticks), NT, and Linux. The results, regardless of which way they lean, would be made public -- failings would be able to be addressed, and triumphs could be crowed about. But regardless of the way it went, we'd *know* more. Perhaps, even, PC Labs would be willing to run the test; I could see them enjoying a certain amount of prestige from being the moderators, and I'm pretty sure they have no editorial bias. Lord knows they'd have more to lose from biased results than Mindcraft. We've learned a lot from the recent test -- instead of trying to ignore it, or think of it as a single data point, let's take advantage of it, in a way that "closed source", simply put, can't. Sincerely, Ken D'Ambrosio SysAdmin, Cisco Systems, Inc. | ||
Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 09:17:38 -0700 (MST)
From: "M. Leo Cooper" <thegrendel@theriver.com>
To: Linux Weekly News <letters@lwn.net>
Subject: MS Linux?
Amidst all the speculation and rumors about Microsoft coming out with
their own proprietary Linux distribution, it seems that no one has
considered a much more likely scenario. When the Red Hat IPO hits the
market, MS could buy up virtually all the offered stock for $100,000,000
or so (Bill could take it out of petty cash) and thus acquire a name
brand Linux, not to mention the services of the Red Hat sales and service
staff and their engineers and developers.
The question is whether MS would actually gain from this. MS had long
practiced the strategy of buying out competing proprietary products and either
incorporating them into their line or just letting them die. Liquidating a
single Linux distributor, even if it is the largest and most well-known one,
would have little long term effect on the Linux community. But, ah, the
perception of the corporate IT world, that's a different matter.
Mendel
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
---Wallace Stevens
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+ http://personal.riverusers.com/~thegrendel/ +
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Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 22:12:45 -0700 From: Matt Ettus <matt@ettus.com> To: lwn@lwn.net Subject: EE CAD on Linux story The folks at intusoft (www.intusoft.com) are trying to gauge interest in a Linux port of their software, which is like spice, but with schematic capture and more features. They already have a solaris port, and said that 200 indications of interest would cause them to do the port. This would be a huge help to those of us EE's trying to get our companies converted over to Linux. You can send mail to info@intusoft.com or see their web page, http://www.intusoft.com | ||
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