Linux News for Oct 30, 2000

• LinuxWorld: Paint-on processors and nanotechnology (Oct 30, 2000, 23:55)
  "Peer-to-peer distributed computing and clusters are two recurring hot topics in the Linux world. What'll it be like, though, when those technologies truly take root, and we each have not two or ten external processors working for us, but a thousand, or a million?"


• LinuxNews.com: Move Over, Spartacus--Here Comes DeCSS (Oct 30, 2000, 23:09)
  "If I couldn't distribute DeCSS," remembers Mr. Bad, "I would distribute DeCSS."


• Enterprise Linux Today: TurboLinux & VERITAS to Integrate Backup & Recovery Into Enterprise-Ready Linux (Oct 30, 2000, 23:01)
  "VERITAS NetBackup Client to Ship With TurboLinux Workstation 6.1."


• Red Hat Bug Fix Advisory: malformed name and version in perl-Chart package fixed (Oct 30, 2000, 22:16)
  "A bugfix release of kpackage is avaiable. It fixes a segmentation fault when choosing "file list" and when installing or uninstalling a package."


• Enterprise Linux Today: Metro Link Porting X Window System Products to IA-64 Linux and Monterey (Oct 30, 2000, 21:29)
  "Metro Link's commercial-grade X server, Motif, and OpenGL products will allow users of high-powered graphics programs to work in a free-software Linux environment rather than in proprietary environments."


• Trustix Security Advisory - ping gnupg ypbind (Oct 30, 2000, 21:11)
  "Trustix recently released several updated packages."


• Tcl-URL! for October 30, 2000 (Oct 30, 2000, 21:06)
  Tcl (Tool Command Language) is used by over half a million developers worldwide and has become a critical component in thousands of corporations. It has a simple and programmable syntax and can be either used as a standalone application or embedded in application programs. Best of all, Tcl is open source so it's completely free.


• Conectiva Linux Security Announcement - gnupg (Oct 30, 2000, 20:57)
  "gnupg up to and including version 1.0.3 has a flaw in the signature checking code."


• KDE.org: The People behind KDE: Reginald Stadlbauer (Oct 30, 2000, 20:48)
  "I got involved after I read an article about KDE written by Kalle in the CT (big german computer magazine) shortly after I installed Linux the first time in summer 1997. I was not happy at all with the windowmanagers available...."


• eWeek: Dev tool goes open source (Oct 30, 2000, 20:40)
  "The drive to provide enterprise developers with robust Linux environments is gathering momentum."


• eWeek: Four scripting languages speed development; JSP scores high; PHP "does the job" (Oct 30, 2000, 20:23)
  "With our priorities of speedy development, ease of use, and a complete and powerful API, ColdFusion really stood out. We also recommend the use of JSP (JavaServer Pages), which is represented here by Tomcat, as a good choice for enterprises. ASP and PHP did the job, but they weren't our first picks."


• Linus Torvalds: 2.4.0-test10-pre7 (Oct 30, 2000, 20:20)
  "Ok, this one contains at least a preliminary fix for the problem with truncate together with a concurrent page access - the bug that causes oopses in block_read_full_page() and filemap_nopage()."


• Enterprise Linux Today: Software AG's Alf Goebel Discusses Tamino (Oct 30, 2000, 20:14)
  "Software AG realized that that the golden days for proprietary applications were drawing to a close."


• Enterprise Linux Today: Macro 4 launches first Output Management solution for Linux on S/390 (Oct 30, 2000, 20:06)
  UniQPrint gives Linux users a centralized point of control for printing


• ZDNet UK: Will free software come to the rescue of the UK's health service? (Oct 30, 2000, 19:34)
  "'Free software concepts make particular sense in medicine,' says Dr Douglas Carnall, associate editor of the Journal. 'Once a customer is 'locked into' proprietary software, its makers can demand premium prices, safe in the knowledge that the client would find it even more expensive to change. Much better instead to invest time on a system licensed under the General Public Licence that will always be free,' he says."


• LinuxPR: Nusphere Hosts First Official MySQL Training Program In North America (Oct 30, 2000, 19:03)
  "...will host Polycon's MySQL open source database training seminar from November 13-17 at the NuSphere corporate office in Bedford, Mass."


• LinuxPR: LinuxManiac.de: New German Linux community service (Oct 30, 2000, 19:01)
  "LinuxManiac.DE is a new service for the German Linux community, that informs about latest software news. Additionally it will be a nice repository for software-related information."


• LinuxPR: Yet Another Society Community Funded Perl Development Grant Awarded to Damian Conway (Oct 30, 2000, 18:59)
  "Blackstar... an on-line video sales company, offered US$27,500 in matching contributions at the start of the fund raising, amounting to half of what was needed to buy out Dr. Conway's obligations at Monash University in Australia. Other major contributions came from VA Linux... Manning Publications... O'Reilly Publications... and from several individuals."


• LinuxPR: Server Pages For Xbase Arrives;� Linux and Win32 Beta Testers Invited (Oct 30, 2000, 18:55)
  "Max Server Pages development focuses on creation of HTML templates with embedded Xbase control structures, expressions, commands and functions."


• Jerry Pournelle finally admits he's a Microsoft shill (Oct 30, 2000, 18:15)
  "The problem is that Microsoft Applications work. They work well. They're not all I would like them to be -- Outlook periodically goes off on it's own to do things I don't understand, as we'll see in an upcoming letter from Dr. Hume -- but they do work. Unfortunately all the various office suites for Linux DON'T work very well. And I have tried them all. I have written about them in great excitement when I got them. Then I didn't write any more. It's not because I didn't try them, it is because I will not recommend something I won't use, and frankly I cannot do my work with any of those. I only wish I could. Corel's Word Perfect as a word processor isn't bad, but the entire office suite just doesn't do it for me, and I don't think it will for most readers. Office 2000 has its faults but it does the job."


• Boson 0.5 Released (Oct 30, 2000, 17:43)
  "Boson is a real-time strategy game, like Command&Conquer or StarCraft. It is designed to run on Unix (Linux) computers, uses the QT Toolkit and the QwSpriteField library. A minimum of two players is required, since there is no artificial intelligence yet. Boson is still in very early development and not playable yet."


• Opera.com: Opera 4.0b2 for Linux is now available (Oct 30, 2000, 17:19)
  "Opera for Linux has been tested on RedHat Linux 6.2, Debian Potato 2.2, Slackware 7, NetBSD 1.5_ALPHA2/i386, and Linux Mandrake 7.1; we'll be releasing versions regularly now with the progress updated. There are now also ports to other platforms working nearly as well as the RedHat Linux 6.2 version is. We're compiling on pretty much everything and making use of tools that are different between platforms to make Opera work as well as possible."


• FreeOS.com: Open source movement key for Internet growth in India (Oct 30, 2000, 17:16)
  "Comparing the Indian Internet market to others like the U.S., net activist John Barlow said that countries which did not have deep ties to the industrial economy would be more unfettered to harness the Information Age. Indians have a particular strength in being able to deal with uncertainty, ambiguity and chaos, according to Barlow."


• Enterprise Linux Today: Tesco to use Linux in 20,000 checkout lanes in eight countries (Oct 30, 2000, 16:24)
  "The three-year agreement allows Tesco to deploy the ASP/thin-store concept initially in more than 800 stores in the U.K., Ireland and France... The Linux-based solution will support Tesco's global IT strategy for implementing and maintaining a single point-of-sale system across all its 20,000 checkout lanes in eight countries."


• LinuxProgramming.com: The Coming End of Anonymity? (Oct 30, 2000, 16:01)
  "Watching some of the industry news lately, I've reached an inescapable conclusion: It's only a matter of time before someone tries to ban online anonymity."


• The Register: Redmond strives to cram Great MS Hack back in box (Oct 30, 2000, 15:47)
  "If you think about what actually happened, even according to Microsoft, your confidence in the Microsoft version of events does tend to ebb. ... Microsoft incidentally says that the code couldn't have been downloaded because that would have been recorded, rather than that it couldn't be downloaded because it was secure."


• LinuxFormat.co.uk: The Microsoft Break-In: What are the implications for the open source community? (Oct 30, 2000, 15:36)
  "...it would seem that although they may not want it to be, Wine and Winelib are actually essential to Microsoft's attempts to embrace Linux. ...if people that had seen the source code contributed to Wine, would Microsoft attempt to claim damages, even though the software would currently seem central to Microsoft's Linux plans?"


• LinuxNewbie.org: Installing Snort 1.6.3 on SuSE 6.x-7.x (Oct 30, 2000, 15:10)
  "Snort is a lightweight network intrusion detection system, capable of performing real-time traffic analysis and packet logging on IP networks."


• The Register: Linux Growth Rate Slows in Japan (Oct 30, 2000, 15:08)
  "According to IDC Japan's latest stats, for the Japanese server OS arena, Linux will account for 7.8 per cent of the market come the end of 2000. That's due to a 144.4 per cent increase on the number of shrinkwrapped or bundled copies of the open source operating system shipped during the year."


• Apache Today: NuSphere to Contribute Row-Level Locking to MySQL Database (Oct 30, 2000, 14:23)
  "NuSphere, provider of NuSphere MySQL, the leading packaged software product for the open source database marketplace, announced today that it is partnering with the MySQL open source database community to develop a row-level locking capability for the MySQL database. Code-named "Gemini," this project will be part of MySQL Version 4, targeted for release in the spring of 2001."


• Financial Post: Red Hat boss joins board of Toronto Internet software company (Oct 30, 2000, 14:14)
  "In convincing Mr. Young to join its board, Tucows has scored a coup not only for itself, but also for the Canadian Internet industry as a whole."


• AsiaBizTech: Linux Seen Winning Nearly 8 Percent of Japan's Server OS Market in 2000 (Oct 30, 2000, 14:03)
  "Broken down by type, shipments of the Linux operating system are expected to jump 144.4 percent to 41,200 units. This 2.4-fold burst in growth will propel Linux to a 7.8 percent share of the overall server OS market in 2000, compared to a 4.0 percent share the previous year, IDC Japan said."


• AllLinuxDevices: TrollTech Will Release Qt/Embedded under the GPL (Oct 30, 2000, 14:01)
  In an interview, TrollTech CEO Haavard Nord said his company held off on releasing Qt/Embedded under the GPL while they observed the effects the licensing change had on Qt/Unix. According to Nord, the move encouraged commercial developers interested in purchasing licenses, which "affected revenue in a positive way" as several high-profile companies including Ericsson (makers of the upcoming Linux-based ScreenPhone), Hewlett Packard, and IBM decided to adopt Qt/Unix for projects."


• Hackers Saw Microsoft Source Code (Oct 30, 2000, 13:56)
  "Microsoft has admitted that source code for some of its products under development was seen by hackers who gained access to its corporate network."


• LinuxPR: Linux-Mandrake 7.2 "Odyssey" now available for download [Official Announcement] (Oct 30, 2000, 13:38)
  "The Linux-Mandrake 7.2 (Odyssey) is immediately available via different Internet servers. ... With this new version, MandrakeSoft confirms its commitment to empowering people by releasing a fully-secured solution which is one of the most complete and easy-to-use operating systems ever."


• Apache Today: JYACC Unveils Web-Development Tool POSSL (Panther Open Source Software for Linux) (Oct 30, 2000, 13:37)
  "POSSL is an enterprise application development environment that simplifies the building of transactional, component-based Web applications. The POSSL technology is based on Panther, a proven development environment used by Fortune 500 companies around the globe to build enterprise-level, mission-critical applications. The Panther software, including an Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) component builder, is most widely recognized as a development environment for IBM WebSphere Application Server. POSSL's source code license is modeled after the BSD license; it allows unrestricted use of the POSSL code in both open source and proprietary software."


• Rant Mode Equals One: Microsoft Forks Windows on Purpose (Oct 30, 2000, 13:28)
  Paul Ferris shows how the Open Source and Free Software movement is actually responsible for the recent heist of the Microsoft source code. Really! No Foolin'! Honest! (Right)


• NY Times: Copyright Office Backs Ban on Code-Breaking Software (Oct 30, 2000, 13:22)
  "In a decision giving copyright holders greater control over the way people use books, movies and music that are distributed in digital form, the United States Copyright Office on Friday endorsed a new federal law making it illegal to break the technological safeguards for such works."


• Apache Today: Apache Guide: ApacheCon Europe 2000 (Oct 30, 2000, 13:10)
  "After lunch, I went to Ryan's talk about modules on Apache 2.0. 2.0 gives modules much more control over the order in which they are called, and how they interoperate with other modules. Filters are a new way for content to be modified while it is on the way out to the client. Some very cool things are going into 2.0. In answer to the question that was asked every 5 minutes ("When is 2.0 coming out?"), Ryan said that we could expect a beta release soon. As with any Open Source project, things are ready when they are ready, which is when people have time and motivation to work on it. If you need something sooner, download the code and start working."


• LinuxPlanet: .comment: KOffice is a Good Start (Oct 30, 2000, 13:02)
  "So yes, the framework is in place, the design intelligent and thoughtful. The applications are a little rough-edged and limited and it's not likely that this incarnation of KOffice will grace many offices. But what this version does demonstrate is the enormous potential of the KDE2 office suite. It's to be hoped that it's enough to bring many others onto the bandwagon, producing at last a good, fast, and free set of professional quality productivity applications for the Linux desktop."


• Hardware Central: Transmeta's Crusoe, Hot Rod or Performance Hog? (Oct 30, 2000, 12:25)
  "In actuality Transmeta has developed a whole new approach to microprocessor design, and not just another processor. Currently an entire processor with the accompanied instruction set is implemented in hardware (for example a x86 processor such as the Intel Pentium III), and then the software is written specifically to make use of that instruction set. Transmeta chose to do it differently; rather than implementing the entire x86 instruction set of the processor in hardware, the Crusoe processor consists of a compact hardware engine surrounded by a software layer."


• Linux.com: Linux: Growing Pains (Oct 30, 2000, 06:25)
  "A recent example is the attempt by the Gnome group to provide Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) scripting support in its office suite, to be known as Gnome Basic."


• Security Portal: Weekly Linux Security Digest 2000/10/23 to 2000/10/29 (Oct 30, 2000, 06:09)
  "This week it's ypbind, some more Apache (1.3.14 was released), PHP (from last week), and MySQL. Oracle has also had quite a few problems revealed this week - three advisories on separate problems from separate groups."


• LinuxSecurity.com: Linux Security Week - October 30th 2000 (Oct 30, 2000, 06:05)
  "This week, advisories were released for apache, gnupg, ping, ypbind, ypserve, mysql, cyrus-sal, curl, ppp-off, and xlockmore."


• Zio Budda: Install Xfree4.0 under Debian 2.2 (Oct 30, 2000, 04:47)
  "Purtroppo non è ancora disponibile, sotto Debian, una serie di pacchetti ".deb" che includa il nuovo XFree 4.0. Poichè questa nuova versione del server grafico include delle novità davvero interessanti (oltre che fornire delle prestazioni velocistiche di molto superiori alla serie 3.3.x) è davvero un peccato non poterne usufruire."