Linux News for Feb 28, 2001

• Linux.com: A Brief History of Computer Hackerism (Excerpt Part One) (Feb 28, 2001, 23:50)
  "Now it came to pass that Microsoft had waxed great and mighty among the Microchip Corporations; mightier than any of the Mainframe Corporations before it, it had waxed. And Gates' heart was hardened, and he swore unto his Customers and their Engineers the words of this curse...."


• Caldera Announces Q1 Results: SCO Acquisition Cited as Cause of Greater Losses than Q4 (Feb 28, 2001, 23:33)
  "Caldera held a teleconference today to announce its quarterly financial results. According to the company, net losses for the quarter totalled less than this time last year, and were only higher than last quarter because of the expenses associated with its acquisition of SCO."


• AllLinuxDevices: LynuxWorks' BlueCat Linux Now Available For Intel XScale Microarchitecture (Feb 28, 2001, 22:50)
  "BlueCat to ship with Intel's XScale evaluation kit."


• NewsForge: Opera for Linux: We wish them luck but... (Feb 28, 2001, 21:38)
  "I finally got around to a full day of playing with the (proprietary) Opera Browser 5.0 Linux beta. It's the fastest browser I've ever used in any operating system, but I'm not ready to spend $39 or look at annoying ads in return for using it."


• CNET News.com: Linux catching up to Windows in server market (Feb 28, 2001, 21:07)
  "Although the figures show that Windows shipments increased 20 percent, Linux outpaced it with a 24 percent increase."


• NewsForge: Linux 2.4 hardware support: Several improvements (Feb 28, 2001, 21:00)
  "Not only does Linux 2.4 have increased support for various devices, but it changes the way in which it handles many previous supported devices."


• Linux Documentation Project Weekly News 2001-02-27 (Feb 28, 2001, 20:30)
  "The Linux Documentation Project is developing free, high quality documentation for the GNU/Linux operating system. This includes the creation of HOWTOs and Guides, and collaboration with other documentation groups."


• KDE.org: Printing Mania: New KDE Printing Architecture Unveiled (Feb 28, 2001, 20:17)
  "KDE developer Michael Goffioul today announced that he is actively addressing an area in KDE that warrants improvement: printing. He has committed source code to KDE CVS for a new KDE printing system to replace the limited Qt printing framework."


• searchEnterpriseLinux.com: IBM working to make Linux work; Q&A with IBM's Scott Handy (Feb 28, 2001, 20:10)
  "Yesterday, IBM announced the Linux Lens program, which pays for the education and training costs for business partners to become certified for Linux. The company is also planning a 40-city tour featuring specific training sessions for executive, sales and technical forces at business partners. Speaking from IBM's PartnerWorld in Atlanta, Handy talked about what the company is doing to make Linux a viable alternative to enterprise users..."


• Debian Security Advisory: New version of sudo released (Feb 28, 2001, 20:08)
  "Todd Miller announced a new version of sudo which corrects a buffer overflow that could potentially be used to gain root privilages on the local system. The fix from sudo 1.6.3p6 is available in sudo 1.6.2p2-1potato1 for Debian 2.2 (potato)."


• Enterprise Linux Today: Linux Poised for Breakout Year At Retail Counter - IHL Consulting Group (Feb 28, 2001, 19:32)
  "Retail giants poised to roll out tens of thousands of Linux point of sale (POS) terminals in North America in 2001; large department stores and specialty hard goods retailers taking the lead."


• LinuxPR: CollabCAD, Built with Open CASCADE, Provides Distributed Access for Online CAD Systems (Feb 28, 2001, 18:42)
  "This Web-enabled, distributed software is designed to provide one or more designers with secure, simultaneous access to a CAD model. It can be thought of as a geometry workbench that allows accessing geometry in the STEP, IGES, STL and VRML formats for interfacing with third-party solutions."


• Linux-Mandrake 8.0 Beta 1 "Traktopel" is available (Feb 28, 2001, 17:56)
  "Interested in kernel 2.4.2, in KDE 2.1, in latest GNOME and Nautilus or just eager to install the latest Linux-Mandrake? We are proud to announce that all of this and much more is in the first Beta release of Linux-Madrake 8.0. Here is a quick overview of the main features..."


• CNET News.com: Microsoft could win antitrust appeal, legal experts say (Feb 28, 2001, 17:49)
  "...the whole case essentially hangs on monopoly maintenance, which could collapse if the Court of Appeals decides Netscape posed no competitive threat to Microsoft, or Microsoft's competitive actions did not prevent Netscape from effectively distributing its Web browser. The Court of Appeals dismissing either point would likely lead to a complete reversal in favor of Microsoft..."


• LinuxPlanet: .comment: Can Microsoft Hurt Linux? In a Word, No. (Feb 28, 2001, 17:24)
  All eyes are on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia this week, where Microsoft looks to have the ruling against it overturned. Will the outcome matter to Linux? Not according to Dennis Powell, who says Microsoft's up against something as difficult to pin down as water, and as tough to beat as a hard game of whack-a-mole.


• SJ Mercury: Looking for wisdom and hints of outcome in Microsoft's antitrust appeal (Feb 28, 2001, 16:42)
  "Urowsky... made more than one pair of eyes go wide when he claimed that PC makers aren't the software company's real customers, that the people who buy the computers are the real customers. ... Actually, Microsoft specifically denies that you and I are its customers in other courtrooms."


• The Register: Gilmore, Hedrick differ on anti-CPRM gameplan (Feb 28, 2001, 15:49)
  "Hedrick has issued his own "suggestion" to the T.13 mailing list, promising to give away a command parser that bounces unknown new commands, so obliging a CPRM-vigilant OS to track and reject all such command sets. His threat poses a dilemma for drive manufacturers which may be inclined to sneak CPRM in through the back door: they'll effectively lose the Linux market."


• IT-Director: Linux: Crashes to the ground (Feb 28, 2001, 15:40)
  "When escaping a planet's atmosphere, thrust has to be maintained. Failure to do so will see a vehicle stall and lead to the eventual break-up of the craft. Sections, pilots and equipment will tumble at ever-increasing velocity in descending back to the planet's surface for total annihilation. Much likened to the prospect of Linux, once a momentum of great significance, it is now showing signs of stalling."


• LinuxPlanet: Infocrossing and S/390 Linux: An ASP's Story (Feb 28, 2001, 15:15)
  We've heard all about the high-profile deployments of Linux on IBM's mainframes. Scott Courtney takes a look at Infocrossing, an ASP running Linux on IBM's storied S/390, and learns how it provided something more proven than Microsoft's Win2k Datacenter Edition.


• NewsForge: Linux people don't need to be protected (Feb 28, 2001, 15:14)
  "Linux people are smart, supposedly. We should credit them with enough intelligence to read, examine, digest, consider, and harvest from all the different points of view that exist in our wide world."


• LUGS (Linux Users Group of Singapore) Awards 2001: Call for nominations (Feb 28, 2001, 14:28)
  "The search is now on! The Linux User Group of Singapore will present the annual LUGS Awards at the Singapore Linux Conference 2001, held from 21-24 March 2001 at the Singapore International Convention and Exhibition Centre."


• Bradley M. Kuhn: Free Software in the Land of Opportunity (Feb 28, 2001, 07:35)
  "Thanks to the GNU GPL, I always knew that I could stay competitive in my business, because I would always be able to learn easily about new innovations as soon as they were made. This gave me a unique ability to innovate myself. I could innovate quickly, and impress my employers. I even was able to start my own consulting business. My own business! The pinnacle of the American Dream!"


• Alan Cox: Linux kernel 2.4.2-ac6 (Feb 28, 2001, 07:33)
  


• LinuxPlanet: Lou's Views: Playing Hardball with Microsoft (Feb 28, 2001, 07:32)
  If you thought Jim Allchin's recent comments were bad, Lou Grinzo argues you'd best brace for worse: "Microsoft is not only far better at this game than you imagine, they're far better at it than you can imagine." Need some proof? Consider a Redmond-funded magazine with a stable of pseudonymous writers, or the curious case of Professor Flack.


• searchEnterpriseLinux.com: Mount Linux: Management by subscription (Feb 28, 2001, 07:20)
  "But instead of joining the crowd to create a Linux distribution, the five programmers who founded Mount Linux in 1999 decided to make Linux easy to adopt in another way, by making Linux easier to manage."


• searchEnterpriseLinux.com: IBM pushes Linux education at PartnerWorld 2001 (Feb 28, 2001, 07:07)
  "For Big Blue, Linux is the Big Glue, a ubiquitous operating system that will tie all of IBM's servers together."


• FreeOS.com: Answering machine on your Linux box (Feb 28, 2001, 07:03)
  "Given the right tools, your modem can double as an answering machine too. Linux doesn't leave your modem out in the cold. There is a very good utility that can be used to setup your modem to provide the same functionality."


• Bell Labs: Claude Shannon, Father of Information Theory, Dies at 84 (Feb 28, 2001, 06:55)
  "He then proceeds to so thoroughly establish the foundations of information theory that his framework and terminology remain standard."


• LinuxPR: O'Reilly's Ultimate Tour Guide to Securely Transferring Files (Feb 28, 2001, 06:49)
  "SSH: The Secure Shell: The Definitive Guide" covers the Secure Shell in detail for both system administrators and end users."


• OpenNMS Update v2.9 (Feb 28, 2001, 06:46)
  The mission of OpenNMS.org is to build the world's best Internet infrastructure management system with the assistance of the open source community and to make it free and open.


• Kernel Cousin Wine #84 by Eric Pouech (Feb 28, 2001, 02:44)
  Wine is a free implementation of Windows on Unix.


• ApacheToday: Part VI: Forking and Executing Subprocesses from mod_perl (Feb 28, 2001, 01:10)
  "It's desirable to avoid forking under mod_perl. Since when you do, you are forking the entire Apache server, lock, stock and barrel. Not only is your Perl code and Perl interpreter being duplicated, but so is mod_ssl, mod_rewrite, mod_log, mod_proxy, mod_speling (it's not a typo!) or whatever modules you have used in your server, all the core routines, etc."


• Alan Cox: Linux kernel 2.2.19pre16 (Feb 28, 2001, 00:33)
  


• zez.org: Providing Web Services using WDDX (Feb 28, 2001, 00:14)
  "WDDX is a standard developed to interchange data structures between different programming languages using XML as the payload."


• CNET News.com: MP3 rival attempts to shield developers (Feb 28, 2001, 00:03)
  "The programmers are trying to create a format for online music that will carry none of the patent license fees associated with MP3 and other proprietary technologies."