Linux News for Sep 24, 2001

• Washington Technology: Is Linux Going Mainstream? Maybe, But Government Still Lags (Sep 24, 2001, 22:54)
  "The FAA began exploring the Linux option about eight months ago, as the need to upgrade existing Oracle databases to later software versions became a priority. At the time, frequent problems with Microsoft NT-based servers soured Kelly and others on the operating system."


• Enterprise Linux Today: KDE::Enterprise Launched (Sep 24, 2001, 21:37)
  "The KDE::Enterprise Initiative was launched today, with the goal of improving, integrating and customizing the K Desktop Environment (KDE), for development and use by enterprises. ... The aim of the project's website is to create an information repository of successful business cases using KDE, to provide contact points for KDE support, and to further the awareness of KDE as a business platform."


• BBC News: India's simple computer for the poor (Sep 24, 2001, 20:32)
  "We have had a tremendous response from all over the world - from South America to Australia and every other country in between including some of the developed countries. Even the developed countries are interested in seeing how they could use it. Not just for applications for the poor but also applications for the urban elite, the urban affluent."


• ZDNet: Red Hat's market-leading Linux (Sep 24, 2001, 19:18)
  "Red Hat is currently the most influential Linux distributor. Red Hat Linux is a comprehensive and sound implementation, with a variety of configuration, development, installation, networking, usability, and security features... Red Hat's prominence in the Linux market is deserved; struggling but holding its own against the current world economic downturn, Red Hat continues to improve its products, service, and training."


• JesusGeeks: RMS Speaks (Sep 24, 2001, 18:15)
  "Some free software is very well written; and wins users for its technical merits. Other free programs are ugly inside and just barely do their jobs, but they are very important nonetheless, because we need to have some way to do those jobs. The free software community offers some practical advantages for software development. Proprietary software development has a practical advantage too, of getting more money more easily. Proprietary software developers are all doing something wrong, but this doesn't meant they are all incompetent."


• LinuxProgramming: Python-URL! - weekly Python news and links (Sep 24) (Sep 24, 2001, 17:13)
  All that's new in the Python world.


• Alan Cox: Linux 2.4.9-ac15 (Sep 24, 2001, 15:56)
  "Update the VM to Rik's latest bits, Merge asorted minor bugfixes, Merge initial speakup hooks." Changelog, links within.


• Kernel Traffic #134 by Zack Brown (Sep 24, 2001, 15:44)
  Mailing list threads from the Linux Kernel Development Team.


• Bloomberg: IBM Sells 1,000th Mainframe Model; Promotes `Virtual' Servers (Sep 24, 2001, 14:11)
  "Some companies are cutting costs by eliminating ``farms'' of smaller server computers that run Web sites and network printers. Instead, they are installing one mainframe and partitioning it into scores or even hundreds of ``virtual'' servers running the free Linux operating system, said David Mastrobattista, an analyst at Giga Information Group, a computer-industry research firm."


• NewsBytes: 'Happy Hacker' Drops A Bomb On Security Experts (Sep 24, 2001, 13:17)
  "On Wednesday, the 14,300-strong subscribers to a popular security list known as Vuln-Dev received what may have appeared a rare treat: a message to the list containing source code to a program that gave the user full control of a remote Unix system...But as some Vuln-Dev readers, many of whom are system administrators for businesses, painfully learned, the program was a Trojan horse, and if compiled and run, could delete most of the files on the user's computer."


• Kur05hin: Virtual Fireside Chat With Miguel De Icaza (Sep 24, 2001, 12:00)
  ".NET seemed to me like an upgrade for Win32 developers: they had the same problems we had when dealing with APIs that have been designed over many years, a great deal of inconsistency. So I want to have some of this new "fresh air" available for building my own applications."


• Kernel Cousin Debian Hurd #108 by Paul Emsley (Sep 24, 2001, 11:04)
  Highlights from the Debian-Hurd development mailing lists for the previous week.


• Linus Torvalds: Linux 2.4.10 (Sep 24, 2001, 05:50)
  "Ok, I released a real 2.4.10, let the fun begin.. This is an uncomfortably large changeset, largely because I was away in Finland twice during the 2.4.9->2.4.10 development, and partly of course because I've tried to aggressively sync up especially with Alan ... Give it hell."


• LinuxWorld.com: How to create a Linux-based network of computers for peanuts (part 3) (Sep 24, 2001, 05:50)
  "There are few technical reasons not to use twisted-pair and 10- or 100BaseT Ethernet if that is what you prefer, and don't mind spending the money. Any up-to-date book on networks explains the advantages of this newer technology. My advice is for 50 or fewer devices, don't rip out an existing Thinnet installation and upgrade to new NICs and cabling thinking this will increase performance. For 50 or more PC X terminals, however, the equation tilts in the other direction."


• Debian Security Advisory: slrn command invocation (Sep 24, 2001, 05:48)
  "Byrial Jensen found a nasty problem in slrn (a threaded news reader). The notice on slrn-announce describes it as follows: When trying to decode binaries, the built-in code executes any shell scripts the article might contain, apparently assuming they would be some kind of self-extracting archive."


• Debian Security Advisory: squid FTP PUT problem (Sep 24, 2001, 05:42)
  "Vladimir Ivaschenko found a problem in squid (a popular proxy cache). He discovered that there was a flaw in the code to handle FTP PUT commands: when a mkdir-only request was done squid would detect an internal error and exit. Since squid is configured to restart itself on problems this is not a big problem."