Linux System Administration :: Resources :: Ldp LDP LGNET Issue92 Lg Bytes

...making Linux just a little more fun!

News Bytes
By Michael Conry

July 2003 Linux Journal

The July issue of Linux Journal is on newsstands now. This issue focuses on Hardware. Click here to view the table of contents, or here to subscribe.

All articles older than three months are available for public reading at http://www.linuxjournal.com/magazine.php. Recent articles are available on-line for subscribers only at http://interactive.linuxjournal.com/.

Legislation and More Legislation

Patents

It looks like the flawed system of software patenting that has become entrenched in the United States is on its way to Europe, amidst clarion calls of "harmonise!" and "encourage innovation!". Not everybody is so keen. Richard Stallman and Nick Hill have written a brief but thorough critique of the plans, published in The Guardian. Ultimately, each side claims that the introduction of software patents will have opposite effects. Will they encourage innovation or stifle it? Will software development thrive in a more certain environment, or become bogged down in a morass of litigation? Ultimately you have to look at the evidence and make your own mind up. It is this columnist's opinion, however, that if you look at people like Richard Stallman, and then look at the people supporting increased patents and asks "who seems to support genuine innovation?" you will get some way towards the answer.

Arlene McCarthy, a British MEP who has played an important role in the development of software patenting plans, certainly knows where she stands. She also knows what those of us who advocate free software should do...

It is time some of the "computer rights campaigners" got real... We have an obligation to legislate not just for one section of the software industry who seeks to impose its business model on the rest of industry, which moreover is not "free", but is actually a different form of monopoly by imposing a copyright licence system on users.

To be honest, this smacks of the "TINA" doctrine (There Is No Alternative) promulgated by Margaret Thatcher & Co. during the 1980's. McCarthy does not even appear to appreciate the irony that the pro-patent lobby seeks to impose a business model on the rest of industry: a business model based on government-backed artificial monopolies. The Register has criticised those that rail against people like Arlene McCarthy as being ineffective, and ultimately self indulgent. Although the criticisms have some validity, they are ultimately cheap and convenient rather than insightful, and are not necessarily a true measure of the reality of opposition. Perhaps a truer indication of the reality being faced in Europe, and maybe especially in the UK, is the British Government's handling of the public consultation with regard to ID cards. In an effort to maintain a result which could be used to provide positive spin and reduce debate, thousands of submissions made by members of the public via the STAND.org.uk website have been amalgamated into a single vote. Clearly the UK Government is not keen to have the terms of engagement defined by the public, no matter how flattering we are. The interests that are defining the terms of engagement are perhaps illustrated by proposals to include biometric data on European passports.

Nonetheless, there is still work that can be done. Even though The European Parliament's Committee for Legal Affairs and the Internal Market (JURI) has voted on a final list of proposed amendments to the planned software patent directive, the proposals still have to pass the European Parliament. Following attempts to rush the directive through the Parliament stage it has been rescheduled to its original date, September 1st 2003. This allows some time for concerned parties to lobby their MEPs, though with upcoming holidays, there is not as much time as one might think.

EULA

Infoworld reports that the US Supreme Court has refused to hear a reverse-engineering case, thus allowing a lower court ruling to stand. The lower court ruling was against a company that had imitated a product's look and feel (as opposed to recreating similar code) in violation of the product's EULA. The case is significant because it's outside the UCITA states (Virginia and Maryland, which expressly make EULAs enforceable), where EULAs are of questionable legal value. But now more valuable, apparently. The court also apparently accepted the plaintiff's contention that the defendant "must have" examined more than just the user interface, with no direct evidence. This case goes back several years, with previous suits between the companies.
(Analysis by Mike 'Iron' Orr)

SCO

There is little point in going through the details of the SCO case once again. Instead, you can peruse the sco.iwethey.org collection of documents relating to lawsuit. If you want further reading, Eric Raymond has released an updated version of his SCO vs. IBM position paper which reflects some of the changes in the case over the past weeks. Hopefully the doubt surrounding this whole affair will be dispelled soon. As Richard Stallman has commented, the media bears some blame for the depth of the FUD generated by this case.

Linux Links

The E-zine LinuxFocus: has for July/August the following articles:

Some links of interest from the O'Reilly stable:

Introduction to Netcat "the Swiss Army Knife of networking".
Eight Questions for George Dyson, Director's Visitor of the Institute for Advanced Study and a historian.
Video Playback and Encoding with MPlayer and MEncode.
Snort Security Holes and Strategies for Safe Network Monitoring.
Almost 2,000 ephemeral films (industrial, educational, and advertising) from the early 1900s through the 1960s are available for free on the Net, thanks to film archivist Rick Prelinger.
Running Arbitrary Scripts Under CVS.
Python Success Stories: eight true tales of flexibility, speed, and improved productivity.

Some interesting links from NewsForge:

Automatic Astronomy, how computers help spot hard to see phenomena.
SCO staff join Linux protests.
Using Slackware as a Live CD.
Inside the Linux kernel debugger.
The Brazilian Public Sector to Choose Free Software It has been reported that the Brazilian public sector plans to migrate from Windows to Linux on 80% of computers in state institutions and state-owned businesses.

Some interesting links from Linux Today:

US Department of Defense rates Open Source [pdf].
Wired reports that the developing world can benefit from GNU/Linux.
Forbes magazine on the limitations of Linux.
Welsh speaking computer users have created their own Linux distribution.
Building a DIY TiVo

SSC, publisher of Linux Journal, recently announced the launch of a new on-line publication, WorldWatch. It offers readers a comprehensive daily digest of articles from publications around the world about topics concerning Linux and open-source software.

Modern SCO Executive, apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan. Everybody join in for the chorus.

Slashdot discussion on the release of Linux 2.4.21

Some Linux Journal links:

Linux Journal has reported on a Finnish study on FLOSS (free/libre and open-source software) in developing countries.
Working with OpenSSH.
VGA for the Ultimate Linux Box.

Interesting Linux Weekly News look at Open-Source content management systems. Many of the talkbacks have good information too.

Mike Crawford has written a fine selection of articles on the general topic of quality in Free Software. Titles include Why We Should All Test the New Linux Kernel , Using Test Suites to Validate the Linux Kernel and more.

Upcoming conferences and events

Listings courtesy Linux Journal. See LJ's Events page for the latest goings-on.


O'Reilly Open Source Convention	July 7-11, 2003 Portland, OR http://conferences.oreilly.com/

12th USENIX Security Symposium	August 4-8, 2003 Washington, DC http://www.usenix.org/events/

HP World	August 11-15, 2003 Atlanta, GA http://www.hpworld.com

Linux Clusters Institute Workshops	August 18-22, 2003 Yorktown Heights, NY http://www.linuxclustersinstitute.org

LinuxWorld UK	September 3-4, 2003 Birmingham, United Kingdom http://www.linuxworld2003.co.uk

Linux Lunacy Brought to you by Linux Journal and Geek Cruises!	September 13-20, 2003 Alaska's Inside Passage http://www.geekcruises.com/home/ll3_home.html

Software Development Conference & Expo	September 15-19, 2003 Boston, MA http://www.sdexpo.com

PC Expo	September 16-18, 2003 New York, NY http://www.techxny.com/pcexpo_techxny.cfm

COMDEX Canada	September 16-18, 2003 Toronto, Ontario http://www.comdex.com/canada/

IDUG 2003 - Europe	October 7-10, 2003 Nice, France http://www.idug.org

Linux Clusters Institute Workshops	October 13-18, 2003 Montpellier, France http://www.linuxclustersinstitute.org

LISA (17th USENIX Systems Administration Conference)	October 26-30, 2003 San Diego, CA http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa03/

HiverCon 2003	November 6-7, 2003 Dublin, Ireland http://www.hivercon.com/

COMDEX Fall	November 17-21, 2003 Las Vegas, NV http://www.comdex.com/fall2003/

Linux Clusters Institute Workshops	December 8-12, 2003 Albuquerque, NM http://www.linuxclustersinstitute.org

News in General

SGI Announces first Altix Customers on Madison

SGI has announced the first of its customers receiving the new Intel Itanium 2 'Madison' processor in recent sales of the SGI Altix 3000 system. The Altix system combines SGI's fourth generation NUMAflex shared memory architecture with Intel Itanium 2 processors and the 64-bit Linux operating system for a uniquely balanced system. Each supercluster node runs a single Linux operating system image with up to 64 Itanium 2 processors and 512GB of memory. With the new processor immediately available on Altix systems. Among the first SGI customers to deploy Altix 3000 systems based on the new processors are:

SARA Computing and Networking Services: 416 Intel Itanium 2 processors (1.30 GHz, 3M) and 832GB of memory.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory: SGI Altix 3000 installation running 256 Intel Itanium 2 processors (1.50 GHz with 6MB L3 cache) with 2TB of system memory and 1.5 TFLOPS of computational power.
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory: SGI Altix 3000 system powered by 128 Intel Itanium 2 processors (1.50 GHz, 6MB).

SGI has been doing very well in terms of performance benchmarks with systems based on the new Itanium 2 processor. The entry-level server starts at $70,176 (U.S. list) at four processors with up to 32GB of memory and scales to 12 processors and 96GB of memory.

Distro News

Debian

Robert Millan announced that he has managed to get GNU/FreeBSD installed self-hosting. The kernel runs init, which initialises swap and filesystems, and spawns 8 nice gettys. He has built a new base tarball (26.9 MB), with only the minimal utilities plus APT. He has also set up an APT repository for his GNU/FreeBSD packages, including the toolchain and XFree86. ( Courtesy Debian Weekly News)

Will Debian survive Linux's popularity? Discussed on Slashdot.

Knoppix

Quantian Scientific Computing Environment. Dirk Eddelb&yyml;ttel announced Quantian, a remastered version of Knoppix. Quantian differs from Knoppix by adding a set of programs of interest to applied or theoretical workers in quantitative or data-driven fields. It still retains all of Knoppix' impressive features in terms of automatic configuration of virtually all available hardware features. If there is sufficient interest, this project may become a Debian subproject. (Courtesy Debian Weekly News)

Slashdot report on the new bootable arcade emulator (MAME) with hardware detection from Knoppix.

Libranet

Extremetech has reviewed Libranet 2.8

Red Hat

The Register has reported that Red Hat has turned a profit once again.

SuSE

SuSE has announced the availability of SuSE Linux Desktop, which it claims is the first Linux desktop for large IT infrastructures.

Software and Product News

Eset Unveils NOD32 Antivirus For Linux Mail Servers

Eset Software, a provider of Internet software security solutions, announced today the debut of NOD32 Antivirus for Linux Mail Servers, extending NOD32 antivirus detection software to the Linux email server environment. The MTA (Mail Transport Agent)-independent solution runs on most Linux distributions including RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, Debian, and others; it also supports Sendmail, Qmail, Postfix, and Exim, among other email server software.

VariCAD

VariCAD has announced the recent release of its mechanical CAD system - VariCAD 9.0.1.0. The compact CAD package includes many tools for 3D modeling and 2D drafting, libraries of mechanical parts, surface development (unbending), calculations of standard mechanical components, tools for working with bills of materials (BOM) and title blocks. It is a compact system featuring all necessary tools that the mechanical engineering designers need to make their work comfortable and effective. The system is distributed "fully-loaded", with all features included. Free 30-day trial version is available for download from http://www.varicad.com

Linux Distro Distribution in Ireland

JMC SOFTWARE has announced that it has been appointed Irish distributer for FreeBSD as well as the Linux distributions from Red Hat, SuSE and Mandrake. These are available throughout Ireland at www.thelinuxmall.com or tel 01 6291282.

Big Medium

Big Medium is claimed to be an easy-to-use tool for Linux and other UNIX systems that allows non-technical staff to edit and maintain websites while providing a wide range of features. The software is a suite of Perl scripts designed for web servers running the UNIX operating system, including Linux, Mac OSX, Solaris and FreeBSD. Big Medium is licensed for $129, and a free online demo is available.

Zend Performance Suite released/PHP scripting

Zend Technologies, the designers of the PHP scripting engine, has announced the release of the Zend Performance Suite (ZPS) 3.5. Zend Performance Suite enables both enterprises and service providers to overcome scalability issues and to deliver high performance Web sites, increasing server throughput by up to 30 times - without upgrading their hardware.

Zend has also announced that it will team with Sun Microsystems to initiate specification for PHP and web scripting access to Java technology.

QuickUML 1.1

Excel Software has begun shipping QuickUML 1.1 for Windows and Linux. QuickUML is an object-oriented design tool that provides tight integration and synchronization of a core set of UML models. QuickUML Linux 1.1 adds improved font handling, an enhanced Contents view for class and object models, and a toolbar to access code manager commands. QuickUML Linux has the same features as the Windows edition and also uses QuickHelp to provide context sensitive application help.

Excel Software has also announced the availability of QuickHelp for Linux. QuickHelp is a development tool for creating and deploying application help to Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, Windows 95 through XP and virtually all Linux distributions.

Contents: