Mandrake Linux Community Newsletter — Issue #67

[ Thanks to Phil
Lavigna for this link. ]

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           Issue #67    Thursday,  7 November 2002

Welcome to the Mandrake Linux Community Newsletter -- dedicated to 
keeping you up-to-date with the latest Mandrake-related news & info.

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This Week's Summary: New "CLIC" Distribution Launched; Mandrake in the 
News; Top Ten "freshest" RPMs from MandrakeClub; Business Case of the 
Week; Website Watch; Tip of the Week; Software Updates; Headlines from 
MandrakeForum


Top Story
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MandrakeSoft & partners launch "CLIC" Clustering Linux Distribution.
On October 30th, 2002, MandrakeSoft announced the first release of a 
new Linux Clustering Distribution named "CLIC", a project publicly 
funded by the French Agency for New Technologies (RNTL).

The goal of the CLIC project is to provide a powerful, simple and easy 
to install Linux Clustering system. One week after the initial 
announcement, a new version was released which contains additional 
features from Mandrake Linux 9.0, a parallelized version of URPMI 
(MandrakeSoft's automated software management utility), plus numerous 
improvements and bug fixes.

Learn more about this exciting new product.


Mandrake in the News
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Many news and discussion sites reported on the new "CLIC" distribution:

CNet.com -- Linux firm promises low-cost clusters.
"MandrakeSoft announced the release of a version of the open-source 
operating system that it says is optimized for creating low-budget 
supercomputers."

Slashdot.org -- Mandrake Announces Turn-Key Clustering Distribution.
"According to their website, Mandrake and partners (Bull, 
INPG/INRIA...) have launched an 'easy-to-deploy easy-to-use Linux 
Clustering solution,' that has already been tested on a 40-node 
cluster. Of course, it's published under the GPL, comes with parallel 
applications, and is available for download as an ISO." 


MandrakeClub
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You want 'em, you got 'em. This week's Top Ten "fresh" RPMs include:

 * fluxbox 0.1.10 (PPC) (8.2/ppc) -- The fluxbox window manager
 * mldonkey (9.0/i586) -- file sharing utility
 * acroread 5.0.6 (8.2/i586) -- Adobe Acrobat Reader
 * gtkcdlabel (9.0/i586) -- GTK interface for creating CD labels
 * SimpleCDR-X 1.2.1 (9.0/i586) -- nice frontend for burning CDs
 * mjpegtools (9.0/i586) -- Tools for creating various MPEG
   streams
 * gnome file manager (9.0/i586) -- Fast file manager for GNOME2.
 * gnupg 1.0.7 (8.2/ppc) -- gnupg encryption tool
 * Nessus (8.2/i586) -- Open Source Security Scanner
 * DotGNU Portable .NET (8.2/i586) -- GNU implementation of C#

Not yet a Mandrake Club member? To learn more, please visit:
http://mandrakelinux.com/en/club/


Business Case of the Week
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Mandrake powers our DNS and mail servers as Windows just kept failing.
A frustrated network manager wanted to replace their "ridiculously 
unreliable" MS-Windows email and DNS servers with Linux, but the 
powers-that-be claimed Linux was unproven.

'cabletastic' explains:
"So, without their knowledge I changed our DNS servers. Armed with this 
fresh confidence and getting steadily more peeved with a mail server 
that needed fixing every day, we casually slipped a postfix box in 
which has had absolutely no problems at all since it went live. All 
without sanction from the aforementioned powers that be who have now 
commented on how the mail appears to be a lot quicker and how it never 
needs fixing! That showed em. Mandrake is now the distro of choice for 
the mail servers for all of our offsite mail/DNS servers and is used in 
one of our Firewalls (ipchains) to protect the clients on our internal 
network."

For many more examples of Mandrake in the workplace, see MandrakeBizCases.com.


Website Watch
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MozillaQuest.com -- Using LinNeighborhood to Create a Network 
Neighborhood for Linux.
This introductory tutorial provides a nice overview of how a Mandrake 
system can be used to access shared resources on remote, networked, 
Windows-based computers.

"Today, we will add a Windows-like, Network-Neighborhood area to a 
Linux-based computer -- in a peer-to-peer network environment. That 
will give us full access to all the shared resources on all the 
computers connected to our LAN."



Tip of the Week
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Command-line equivalents for Mandrake utilities.
Did you know that all of those handy utilities in the Mandrake Control
Center can also be used from a terminal or console? Let's say for some 
reason your mouse stops working, and you can't click the mouse 
configuration utility in the Mandrake Control Center. What do you do?

You can switch to a virtual console (Alt-Ctrl-F2), login as root, and 
enter 'mousedrake' to launch a command-line version of the mouse 
configuration tool. Then when that's done, switch back the desktop by 
pressing 'Alt-Ctrl-F7' to see if the rodent problem is fixed.

Some other command-line equivalents include:
 * XFdrake -- for configuring/reconfiguring the video
 * mousedrake -- for configuring/reconfiguring the mouse
 * drakgw -- Internet connection sharing
 * draknet -- configure/reconfigure the network connection
 * keyboarddrake -- configure/reconfigure the keyboard
 * printerdrake -- configure/reconfigure a printer
 * drakconf -- the whole shebang in one convenient interface


Software Updates
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9.0 software updates have been released for:

initscripts -- fixes wireless problems
printer-drivers -- fixes various printing issues
krb5 -- fixes remote root vulnerability

View the complete list at MandrakeSecure.net.


Headlines from MandrakeForum
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LinuxWorld flashback.
Denis returns from the Frankfurt LinuxWorld Expo and files this report.

Mandrake now preinstalled on computers in New Zealand.
'dlynch' talks about Dick Smith Electronics, a company based in New 
Zealand that sells reasonably priced PCs pre-loaded with Mandrake.

Mac-on-Linux: PPC users got us on this one!
Deno discusses the latest version of 'Mac-on-Linux', an Open Source 
program that allows PPC Linux users to run Mac OS 9 -- and now Mac OS X 
-- in Mandrake PPC.

Read these and other stories at MandrakeForum.