Linux News for Feb 28, 2002

• LinuxPower.com: Video I/O on Linux: Lessons Learned from SGI (Feb 28, 2002, 23:53)
  "If the linux community is to learn anything from Silicon Graphics (SGI), it's to not design a video API like the SGI Video Library. As described in many pages of the Lurker's Guide to Video, the Video Library makes many well-intentioned attempts to "help" the application by providing high-level primitives and encapsulation, but ends up making the task of writing a usable video app almost impossible."


• Marcelo Tosatti: Linux 2.4.19-pre2 (Feb 28, 2002, 22:22)
  "Here is 2.4.19-pre2: A very big patch (around 13MB uncompressed) due to the architecture (MIPS and IA64 mainly) updates." Changelog, link within.


• GridComputingPlanet.com: Platform Computing To Manage AstraZeneca Compute Farms (Feb 28, 2002, 21:50)
  "Alderley Park, Cheshire, UK: AstraZeneca's Enabling Science and Technology department has invested in 130 Platform LSF licenses to manage its compute farm, consisting of 110 IBM Linux servers and 8 SGI IRIX servers. The computing power created by this farm is used for chemo-informatics, molecular modeling and accelerating high throughput structure-based drug discovery and design."


• IBM developerWorks: OpenSSH key management, Part 3 (Agent forwarding and keychain improvements) (Feb 28, 2002, 21:09)
  "If you can't run ssh-agent on untrusted hosts, then how do you establish secure, passwordless ssh connections from these systems? The answer is to only use ssh-agent and keychain on trusted hosts, and to use OpenSSH's new authentication forwarding abilities to extend passwordless authentication to any untrusted hosts."


• LinuxPower.com: Putting together a complete multimedia architecture for Unix (Feb 28, 2002, 19:48)
  "During November of last year, I visited the Annual Linux Conference in Oakland, California. I spent a lot of time there talking with Erik Walthinsen (GStreamer developer) about what is needed to get really good multimedia support under both GNOME and Unix in general. At this conference, Erik and I also talked about these issues with a lot of other people in the Linux and Unix Multimedia field. This article spotlights the technical issues involved and presents the different efforts underway trying to solve these issues."


• GNOME News: GNOME 2.0 Desktop Snapshot and Garnome Testing/Tweaking Distribution Released (Feb 28, 2002, 18:33)
  "GARNOME 0.7.5 ... is ready for more tire-kicking and bug-bashing. If you're dying to try the GNOME 2.0 Desktop, but don't want to fall into the depraved addictions and co-dependencies of testing from anonymous CVS, then GARNOME is for you."


• internetnews.com: Security Flaws Found in PHP (Feb 28, 2002, 17:44)
  "The Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center (CERT/CC) Wednesday warned of multiple vulnerabilities in the PHP scripting language which would allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the PHP process on a victim's system."


• AMD Announces SuSE Linux Support for Next-Generation Processors (Feb 28, 2002, 17:05)
  SuSE Linux AG has been the primary developer working to add support of AMD's x86-64 technology to the Linux kernel, Linux development tools, and other Linux software. AMD expects the changes to be incorporated into Linux's retail operating systems based on the Linux kernel version 2.6 or later...


• Debian Security Advisory: snmp (Feb 28, 2002, 16:07)
  "Some of the changes made in the DSA-111-1 security fix for SNMP changed the API and ABI for the SNMP library which broke some other applications."


• Linux Weekly News for February 28, 2002 (Feb 28, 2002, 15:25)
  This week: ChillingEffects.org; StarOffice to cost money; NuSphere vs. MySQL AB; Process migration; Doing BK penguin style; more.


• eWeek.com: The Palmisano Game Plan (Feb 28, 2002, 14:05)
  "People want to polarize the debate. It's not about operating systems. To implement a true computing grid, whether it's a shared grid or your own internal grid, you need to work in this heterogeneous world. No one company is going to be able to dictate that the grid will be .Net [or] the grid will be Solaris."


• eSecurityPlanet.com: Updated Open Source Security Testing Manual Available (Feb 28, 2002, 12:17)
  "Created by Pete Herzog, 'director of ideas' at Ideahamster, the OSSTMM is an open-standard methodology for security testing. While Herzog conceived of the idea, the document now contains ideas from more than 150 contributors, 33 of them regular contributors to the project. "


• UnixReview.com: Tool of the Month: The Name Game (Feb 28, 2002, 10:20)
  A collection of tools: Change Suffix, Rename, and a regular expressions wizard: "Have you ever banged your head in frustration trying to remember the syntax for a regular expression in sed or awk? Want an easy way to whip up a regular expression in a Perl script? If so, ^txt2regex$ might be just the tool for getting rid of the regexp blues."


• Politech: John Palfrey's report from Boston in GPL MySQL license lawsuit (Feb 28, 2002, 06:28)
  Though she did not issue any orders on the spot, Judge Saris made it plain that she intended to issue a preliminary injunction against NuSphere's use of the marks in question (likely with 90 days to stop usage of the marks) and that she was not going to issue a preliminary injunction in the more complicated matter of the use of the MySQL code and terms the GPL.


• Red Hat Security Advisory: Updated 2.4 kernel available (Feb 28, 2002, 05:22)
  "The Linux Netfilter team has found a problem in the "IRC connection tracking" component of the firewall within the linux kernel. This problem affects Red Hat Linux versions 7.1 and 7.2."


• Boston.internet.com: NMS Latches Onto Linux (Feb 28, 2002, 04:10)
  "NMS Communications has introduced a new Linux version of its development product to help code writers produce conferencing, unified messaging and other telecom applications on the open source operating system."


• Caldera International Reports First Quarter; Meets Revenue and Lower Operating Costs Expectations (Feb 28, 2002, 01:27)
  "'This is the third quarter the Company has operated within the guidelines of our operating model. We are pleased to have met our revenue projections in each of these past three quarters,' said Ransom Love, President and CEO of Caldera."