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Leading itemsSuSE has announced its financial results through March 31, 1999. See their press release for the details. These results are more interesting than one might think: for the year ending in March, SuSE's revenues were just under $10 million; they have 130 employees. Remember the numbers from Red Hat's SEC filing: just under $11 million and 127 employees. The common perception is that Red Hat is by far the biggest and most successful distributor; these numbers show that SuSE is just as big. SuSE is no longer just a European distribution either: much of their growth is attributed to increases in U.S. sales. The clear conclusion from this release is that the Linux distribution business is not as one-sided as it sometimes seems. Competition is alive and well, and there more than one big player - even before companies like Corel move in. This is, of course, a good thing. A diversity of distributions is one of Linux's biggest strengths; it is encouraging to see that this diversity is alive and well. Report from Linux Expo Paris. Thomas Clouet has sent us a summary of Linux Expo Paris, held on June 17-18. By this account the event was a great success, with over 5,000 attendees. There are also a dozen photos from the event. The latest draft of a license for postfix has been distributed by the author, Wietse Venema. The original clause to which many people objected has been replaced. From our perspective, it looks much better. These comments from Henning Makholm on debian-legal indicates that he agrees. If there are no dissenters, Debian, at least, will acknowledge the license as compatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG), which are equivalent (at least currently) to the OSI Guideslines for Open Source software. Eric Raymond spoke at Microsoft this week. Summaries of the event can be found on the Linux Mall and Linux Resources. As might have been expected, the talk appears to have been a somewhat contentious event. The art of war. Matt Michie sent in an editorial titled "Microsoft and the Art of War." It's all about how Microsoft may respond to Linux and free software in general. "I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that instead of slapping together a Linux distribution they could just as easily put out MS BSD. Think about the advantages for one moment. No so called 'GPL Virus' to contaminate any of Microsoft's crown jewels, a strong developers base, binary compatibility with Linux, superior networking, and it can be modified internally without having to release any source code back." Ten European industry leaders raise concerns about software patents is the title of this communiqué issued last week. Linus Torvalds is on the list of those worried about European software patents. " According to pioneers of the software industry, the use of patents to protect software may actually lead to less innovation, less competition and eventually job cuts in the European Software Industry instead of generating new businesses and stimulating innovation as it is often believed." This Week's LWN was brought to you by:
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June 24, 1999
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Security page. |
SecurityNewsProposed security updates to the POSIX standard which languished in committee and were eventually discarded have been made available for public download in their unfinished form from Winfried Truemper's site, through his effort, with assistance from Mary Shepherd (IEEE) and Casey Schaufler (SGI), the former technical editor of the standard. Redistribution is not allowed, but now the ideas that were included for process capabilities, audit and information labeling are available for review and hopefully development, where appropriate. Open source implementations may provide a base for an unofficial standard, since the official process was unsuccessful. IEEE is to be applauded for their decision to release these materials.Winfried's comments on why the standards remained unfinished and were eventually dropped are very polite. If you are interested in a more complete comment, check out Jason Zions' comments as well. The Security and Freedom through Encryption (SAFE) Act has made it out of the House sub-committee, further than it got last year. ComputerWorld commented on the bill's passage and on the amendments that were slapped onto it before it made it out the door. The most potentially dangerous one they mentioned, "One of the amendments grants the Secretary of Commerce the authority to deny the export of any "custom-made" encryption products designed for "use in harming national security, use in the sexual exploitation of children [or] use by organized crime." The actual bill text we found did not include the text of this amendment, which will be critical to determine whether or not it can be used to restrict products produced for other purposes that could possibly be misused for one of these categories. The LOMAC Loadable Kernel Module (Low Water-Mark Mandatory Access Control) version 0.1 is now available. This is a security enhancement to protect the integrity of processes and data and includes a partially functional prototype for non-SMP Linux 2.0.X systems. For more information, source code and documentation (all available under the GPL), check out ftp://ftp.tislabs.com/pub/lomac. Security ReportsTcpdump was the subject of a bug report on Bugtraq which pointed out that tcpdump would go into an infinite loop upon receipt of a specific mal-formed package. This is not considered to be a large problem, since routers generally drop malformed packets, but it leaves tcpdump vulnerable to packets on a local network. A patch for the problem has been provided.A serious security problem with sdr, the session directory tool for the MBONE, was discovered and reported to the sdr developers by Olaf Kirch. They confirmed the problem and are working on a fix. Until one is available, they recommend that you do not use sdr. UpdatesRed Hat has put out three security-related updates in the past week, including updates for XFree86, PHP and KDE. All of these updates replace packages that had exploitable security problems, so they are essential upgrades for anyone using them.Debian released an updated mailman package to fix a problem in the current package that could be used to forge authentication cookies and get unauthorized access to administration webpages. For more information on the vulnerability, check out this information from the mailman developers. This is a recommended upgrade for anyone using the mailman package. ResourcesGNU autoconf test macros to test for functions from older systems that may emulate secure functions without providing the improved security have been created and made available by Duncan Simpson. For more information, check out his Bugtraq posting.Securing your File System in Linux is the title of this article from Jim Reavis at Security.com. It is a good introduction to people new to the topic and serves as a well-organized review for the more experienced. The Linux Security Audit Project now has a website on which members of the audit project can record what software packages they have found and the result of their audits. For more information, check out the announcement. Note that the website has been created, but there are no entries in the database as of yet. The ISN mailing list, whose archives we list as a resource, appears to have ceased abruptly on June 10th, according to both our records and the archive. Mail to the mailing list address fails with "user unknown". If anyone knows the status of this list, or why it terminated, we would be interested to hear. EventsJune 28th is the deadline for papers for the SANS 1999 Workshop On Securing Linux coming up in December in San Francisco.Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
June 24, 1999
Secure Linux Projects Bastille Linux Khaos Linux Secure Linux Security List Archives Bugtraq Archive Firewall Wizards Archive ISN Archive Distribution-specific links Caldera Advisories Red Hat Errata Debian Alerts Miscellaneous Resources CERT CIAC Crypto-GRAM Linux Security Audit Project OpenSEC SecurityPortal |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Kernel page. |
Kernel developmentThe current development kernel release is 2.3.8 (announcement here). This is still a "be sure you have good backups" release. Many of the worst bugs in the new I/O system have been shaken out in this release, but some still remain. This is a release to be careful with. So what are the massive changes here? Essentially, the filesystem code has been changed to eliminate the use of the buffer cache for write operations. File blocks that had been written to used to be copied first into the buffer cache, then into the page cache, then to disk. Removing the buffer cache step eliminates one copy of the data and reduces memory usage, resulting in faster operations. Access to the page cache has also been threaded, which can lead to much faster I/O on multiprocessor systems. Finally, the file read code has been optimized somewhat. These are all massive changes, so it's not surprising that some glitches remain. Shaking out the remaining problems may take a little while yet - that is what development kernels are for. The actual, observed results from these changes seem to be mixed thus far, with some people reporting impressive speedups and others seeing slight slowdowns. Expect the end result, when all is ironed out, to be a big performance win. It was asked whether this work would be backported to 2.2. The answer seems to be a very strong "no." It's too much of a change to go into the 2.2 series, and the Powers That Be are still claiming that 2.4 will be out sometime in the fall. The credit for this work goes to Linus Torvalds, Ingo Molnar, and David Miller. See this message from Linus for a bit more information on what was done. The current stable kernel release remains 2.2.10, unchanged from last week. Alan Cox has released 2.2.10ac3, which contains a substantial set of fixes and updates. There have been consistent reports of file corruption errors in 2.2.9 and beyond. This is a strange problem - it affects relatively few people, and has proved to be very hard to nail down. It was initially thought to be hardware-related, but enough evidence has come in to strongly indicate the existence of a kernel bug. Alan Cox is hot on the trail of this problem - see his first and secondsummaries of what he has turned up so far. It may well be that the problem will have been nailed down by the time you read this; if so, information can be found in the LWN daily updates page. Is khttpd a good idea? Khttpd, as mentioned in previous LWN kernel pages, is a kernel-based web server which is meant to provide high-speed response to queries for static pages. It can answer simple queries, and has the ability to pass off everything else to a user-space process, such as Apache. There has been a lot of debate over whether khttpd is a good idea or not. Detractors claim that khttpd represents kernel bloat, that it is insufficiently general, and that some userspace servers (phhttpd, for example) can get better performance anyway. Proponents see khttpd as a way to beat Microsoft at the benchmark game, point out that nobody is forced to use it, and dispute the performance claims. Resolution of the debate seems distant, to say the least. Interested people may want to see the comments of Arjan van de Ven (the author of khttpd) on the subject. The status of IEEE-1394 ("firewire") development. The developers of two competing firewire implementations - Emanuel Pirker and Andreas Bombe - would appear to have resolved their differences. This note from Emanuel describes the way forward: Andreas's code, being generally better, will replace much of the earlier code put out by Emanuel. The best parts of Emanuel's system will be merged in, and firewire development will continue with a single implementation and code base. The future of Linux architecture and development became a topic of discussion after Eric Raymond posted this noteextolling the virtues of the Erosexperimental operating system. Expressed (over) simply, Eros provides (1) an integrated, persistent object store instead of a filesystem, and (2) a full capability-based model. Eric suggests that Linux developers may want to consider a similar model for the long term. This suggestion was controversial, to say the least. Prominent kernel developers seem to feel that a lot of the capabilities provided by Eros - garbage collection, persistent object store, etc. - are best provided in user space. Whether you are operating in an object store model or in a more conventional mode, the capabilities needed are about the same: memory allocation and protection. Best to provide only those underlying capabilities and layer the rest in user space. See also Hans Reiser's posting on how current filesystems are inadequate for the future. He proposes bringing in a number of the capabilities provided by database (and other) systems into the filesystem level. Patches and updates posted this week include:
Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
June 24, 1999
For other kernel news, see: |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Distributions page. |
DistributionsDifferences between distributions, or at least between some of the major distributions, are starting to be documented as part of the development work going on at the Linux Professional Institute, in preparation for developing their certification exams. Check out the Distribution Differences Project to find the beginning of information on the Caldera, Debian, Red Hat, SuSE, Slackware, and TurboLinux distributions. If you work with these distributions, or better than that, multiple distributions so that you have some familiarity with some "unique" characteristics, contributing to this project would definitely provide a service to the community. My credit last week to people who sent me notes about missing distributions triggered a windfall of new information this week as well! First, in the mini-linux category, Thomas Lundquist sent me a note about his distribution, floppyfw, which is also a single floppy firewall/router. Then Florian La Roche wrote in to point out that Jurix was also missing from our lists. Jurix has been around since 1993 and, in fact, is the distribution that SuSE was originally based on. Florian still maintains Jurix, as well as now being one of SuSE's core developers. Joining the rank of Linuces with specific language-support, KSI-Linux is aimed at supporting "Russina and Ukrainian' users requirements". KSI-Linux was developed by Global Ukraine, a large Ukrainian ISP that has been working with Linux for over five years. Their comments on why they chose to work with Linux and what they try to provide with their distribution are very interesting as well. [Thanks to Khimenko Victor]. A lawyer told me once that he felt publishing companies were the one industry guaranteed to make money from Linux, even if no one else managed to do so. It seems that MacMillan Software is a publishing company that agrees with him. In addition to announcing new titles for "Quake" and "Civilization: Call to Power", they have now joined the distribution business, with The Complete Linux Operating System 6.0. They've also traced new ground by basing the distribution on Mandrake, which is in turn based on Red Hat. We know a bit about how Mandrake differentiates itself from Red Hat. It would be curious to know whether there is a real difference between Mandrake and Complete Linux, or whether this is a case of just repackaging the original product for greater market appeal. [Thanks to Damon Poole] Additional new distributions are included under their specific title below, along with appropriate thanks. The prize for this week, though, (well, there is no prize, which reminds us that the Linux Weekly News T-shirts haven't been designed or created yet ...), goes to Matthias Kranz, who found a total of 22 distributions that we were not yet listing! That pretty much astounded us, since we listed forty distributions last week and thought we were finally on our way towards a comprehensive list. He mentioned that he found most of them at Woven Goods for Linux, where Lutz Henckel has been maintaining a long list of Linux distributions, along with good basic links for each distribution, including manufacturer, download site and more. Rather than flood this week's edition with good descriptions of these new distributions, we've just added them to the list and we'll introduce a subset of them each week for the next few weeks. CalderaThe OpenLinux Tour 1999 is a free seminar from Caldera, IBM and Oracle for value-added resellers, systems integrators and independent software vendors. It will be touring a total of 15 cities from June 3rd through August 9th. Each seminar is a half-day session and appears to be aimed at people who have not yet added Linux to their portfolio of offerings for clients. See the tour page for itinerary and other details.DebianUpdates from the Debian world comes again this week from the Debian Weekly News. From it, we got to learn about Dale Scheetz' message to debian-private (made publicly available with his permission) in regard to problems with official Debian CDs, which are still getting published without being guaranteed not to be broken. Hopefully his message and suggestions will generate some specific actions to improve the situation.A new version of Apt, version 0.37, has been released. It contains many bug-fixes, should now support the downloading of any package and will happily retrieve source, extract and build the binaries for you. NoMad LinuxFor scientists, engineers and geeks who know what they want and don't want anything additional, NoMad Linux was created. It is not a mini-Linux, in that it isn't designed to be booted from a floppy, but it weighs in on the light stage, with 10.5MB for the primary distribution plus 26MB+ for X Windows. It has been around since the summer of 1997 and uses the encap package management system. [Rudolf Jaksa]Red HatA Signing RPMS HOWTO, or at least a draft version of one, was posted to the redhat.rpm.general by Dan Anderson, who has filed a bug report about the inaccuracies he sees in Red Hat's 6.0 Documentation for RPM 2.0. While we're waiting for a bug fix from Red Hat, he thought he'd pass on his hard-earned knowledge.Rock LinuxA "Pure Server" Linux intended for Linux/Unix experts, Rock Linux is based on a different concept than most distributions. Instead of providing pre-built binaries, it manages the source code for all packages and compiles them for the target platform. Obviously, this is intended to give an automatic performance win. For a bit more information, this note from the Rock Linux maintainer Clifford Wolf mentions that Rock Linux is currently based on glibc 2.1.1, kernel 2.2.10, and may be the only disribution currently using Richard Gooch's devfs patches. [Rudolf Jaksa]SlackwareNo updates since May 17th, 1999.SuSEThe rumor is that SuSE will no longer split upcoming releases into multiple revision, e.g., German versus International, etc. This is an obvious good business decision, given the work that supporting multiple revisions probably is at the current time, plus the disadvantage of having a lag between the initial release and the later "revisions". The difficulty will be to guarantee that the release is stable and dependable in all situations.We also heard that SuSE 6.2 will be glibc 2.1 based, according to this note posted by Thorsten Kukuk. It will use glibc 2.1.1 unless glibc 2.1.2 makes it out in time. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
June 24, 1999
Please note that not every distribution will show up every week. Only distributions with recent news to report will be listed.
Known Distributions:
Apokalypse |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Development page. |
Development toolsCOBOLGNU COBOL is now under development, as a result of Rildo Pragana's decision to release the source code for a COBOL compiler he created for MSDOS years ago. Alan Cox has apparently thrown in some patches, as has Rildo, and now it actually produces GNU assembler (gas). Of course, the goal is actually to get it to produce C code. That would definitely help a lot of old COBOL projects move in the right direction ... [Thanks to David S de Lis]JavaTYA 1.4 has been released. Albrecht Kleine posted the download location and some excepts from the README file in this posting to java-linux.No updates to the JDK 1.2 status have been posted in the last couple of weeks. PerlYet Another Perl Conference (yapc 99) starts today in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. The folks at the Perl News Site have promised good updates from the conference, so keep checking ..Mark-Jason Dominus has made available his Very Very Short Tutorial on Modules for perl. EarthWeb, which recently purchased The Perl Journal (TPJ), posted a letter to TPJ readers. It sounds like they'll try to address some of the complaints they've received, but others, such as the amount of advertising on the on-line site, will not be resolved. "Advertising. We definitely plan to offer advertising on the Perl Journal site. Just as in print, ad revenues keep subscription prices lower than they would otherwise be. We will try to keep the site from being too busy, but we can't restrict ads to Perl-only products. As always, you have the right to not read or click on ads that don't interest you. " PythonFor those waiting for Oliver Andrich's Python distribution on recent distributions (Red Hat 6.0, Mandrake 6.0, SuSE 6.1): he's working on it. According to this note that he posted, he hopes to have an interim distribution available by the beginning of July. Apparently it's a lot of work to pull everything together, and he's running a little behind.Jpython 1.2 beta 2 is out, it's another bug fix release. See the announcement for details. Stackless Python 0.2 is available for those who feel like experimenting with an especially twisted piece of code. Details in the announcement. XML-RPC 0.9.8 is available. This module allows for communication with other processes with Userland's XML-RPC protocol. With Userland's move to Linux (more information in the Commerce section), Zope, too, will soon speak this protocol. More information in the announcement. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
June 24, 1999 |
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Development projectsGanymedeGanymede 0.99.2 is here. This is a bug-fix release, according to the announcement. Ganymede is a network directory management system.GnomeThe latest Gnome news is available in this week's Gnome summary from Havoc Pennington. This week has several items are of particular interest. First, he reports back from the Corel Linux Advisory Council, with lots of good news about coordination and cooperation with Christian Tiberna from KDE. Expect to see the gnome-kde-list@gnome.org start to warm up, hopefully just with creative energy, no flames.Next, he mentions that his request for Visual Basic help was answered by over 30 people ... he got everything he needs and is just now waiting for review from his lawyer before he digs into the Excel IDL. The Gnome Multimedia Framework is now available for review. Havoc comments that, yes, Gnome is moving outside the strict desktop arena and into other areas where development can "make the free Unix clones a nice platform for desktop use". Help closing bug reports has also been requested in this week's summary. If you've reported a bug and notice that it has been fixed, you can help them out by making sure the bug has actually been closed. Sometimes the developers have difficulty verifying that, especially if the bug is difficult to reproduce. And last, Gnome for Kids may be a new project developing, to produce an interface for the computer for kids four years old or younger. If you have an interest in this area, check it out. It is just starting out and, as always, all volunteer. High AvailabilityAlan Robertson has released an updated version of his heartbeat code, including the PPP/UDP bidirectional ring code that has been recently discussed on the linux-ha list.KDEAs usual, Navindra Umanee has sent us an excellent KDE weekly summary.MagicPointMagicPoint is an open-source, text-based presentation tool that has been around for a couple of years. Development on the tool, which has some strengths and some notable weaknesses, has been slow over the past year, so the announcement of magicpoint 1.05a is of more interest than the average alpha release. The latest release contains a "forwarding cache" to improve display performance.MidgardHere is this week's Midgard report, thanks to Henri Bergius.WineDevelopment news for Wine is covered in this week's Weekly News from the Wine project, from Ove Kaaven. He reports that some improvements have gone into exception handling, threading and wine server efficiency.In addition, the Micro-Windows project came to their attention. It might make a good base for a WineCE project. Patrik Stridvall is now working with Micro-Windows author Greg Haerr on a possible merge of Micro-Windows with Wine. For more Wine development news, check out the Wine Kernel Cousin, which summarizes several threads from the wine-devel list.
ZopeZope 1.10.2 RPMs for Red Hat are available, thanks to Jeff Rush. See his announcements for details and download information.A new ZClasses tutorial is available, thanks to Amos Latteier. The tutorialdescribes Zope 2.0, and comes with a warning that it's not quite ready for prime time yet. ZScript 0.5 is available. ZScript is a DTML preprocessor aimed at those (like your editor) who get awfully tired of typing things like: <!--#var foo-->See the announcement for details. (Note that Zope 2.0 will also have a more typist-friendly DTML syntax). And, speaking of 2.0, Zope 2.0 alpha 3 has been released, some information can be found on the Zope 2.0 download page. Folks trying to mix Zope and LDAP may want to look at the Zope LDAP connection object announced by Scott Robertson. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh | |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Commerce page. |
Linux and businessNew HP Linux workstations. Hewlett-Packard has announced a couple of new workstations - with Linux installed. They are relatively high-end systems, apparently aimed at electronic design and similar applications. (Thanks to Christof Damian). New Linux administration course offered Eklektix, Inc., producer of the Linux Weekly News, is proud to announce a new addition to its line of Linux professional training courses. Linux System Administration for Unix Administrators is intended for students who already know how to work with Unix systems. By assuming familiarity with the basic material, this course is able to delve deeply into the issues which are truly Linux-specific in just two days. This course will be taught in Boulder, CO in September; it is also available on site. Userland Frontier moves to Linux - sort of. For the time being, Frontier will continue to run only on proprietary systems, but it is now possible to host Frontier-managed sites on Linux. Their Linux-side code is being released in source form, and the underlying platform will be Zope. See Linux.userland.com for the official story of the beginning of Frontier's move to Linux, and their adoption of Zope. "And Zope is open source, which made it easier to invest. After all, we own it just as much as anyone else does. So we asked the Zope people if they would include our code in the standard Zope distribution and they said yes. Excellent! This is more proof that collaboration is possible, not only across operating systems, but across economic systems." VA supports Linux Demo Day. VA Linux Systems announced a corporate sponsorship of Linux Demo Day, a volunteer oriented project in collaboration with local Linux user groups (LUGs) and corporate sponsors. The goal of the project is to hold an international demonstration of Linux which coincides with the anniversary of Linux, from September 12-18, 1999. Training materials released. Something that slipped through the cracks and didn't get into this week's newsletter: the folks at GBdirect in the UK have announced that they have released some of their Linux training materials under an open license. The materials released thus far make up the first part of a "how to use Linux" course. 800Linux.com announces Linux training. 800Linux has announced a pair of Linux training classes which are aimed at Windows users. Details on the courses may be found on their training page. Open source XML application server released. Planet7 Technologies has announced the release of its XML application server under an open source license. They present the server as a valuable tool in the creation of e-commerce (and other) sites using XML technology. Steve Ballmer on Linux Here's a transcript of Microsoft president Steve Ballmer's speech delivered to the Washington Software Assocition a couple of weeks ago. "I mean, it sounds dumb, but, you know, guys like Sun always missed the boat. They can?t beat us if they don?t ride on the PC platform, because the volume economics are on the side of the PC platform. And I don't know why nobody figured that out, but Linux is -- and SCO did a little bit, but Linux is the first sort of unit that always thought about itself as PC-based and as trying to be kind of -- and has gotten to a critical -- some kind of critical mass of share." (Toward the bottom, in the Q&A). There are also some scary comments about security and other things - an illuminating, if rambling and incoherent, read. (Thanks to Alexander Voinov). PLOC announced its existence this week. PLOC (per-line-of-code) is another attempt to arrange payment for developers of free software. The twist here is that they have set up a scheme (evidently intresting enough to have a patent applied for) wherein each contributor to an open source project will be paid according to how many lines of code they write. There are currently no active projects listed on the PLOC web page. It will be interesting to see if this works at all. The link between lines of code written and the true value of a programming effort is tenuous at best. It is very often the case that higher-quality code is more compact. Creating an incentive for programmers to inflate their line counts does not seem like the way to create quality software. And how should a patch which removes code - and improves the program - be compensated? Press Releases:
Section Editor: Jon Corbet. |
June 24, 1999 |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Linux in the news page. |
Linux in the newsThis week's recommended reading:
Linus in the News:
Microsoft:
Business news:
and finally:
Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
June 24, 1999
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Announcements page. |
AnnouncementsResourcesInformazioni relative a linux e domande ricorrenti. In other words, a new version of the Italian Linux FAQ is available. It includes not only "howto" information, but also has a section on getting Linux into companies.Linux in Business - Case Studies is a new page put up by Bynari Systems. It is quite an impressive list. EventsAtlanta Linux Showcase deadline approaching. The folks from the Atlanta Linux Showcase have sent us a reminder that paper submissions for this October's event are due on July 1. Interested people still have time to pull something together; see the call for papers for details.Pictures of Linux. Marc Merlin has put up a page about Linus's BALUG talk in his usual fashion: lots of information and lots of pictures. Worth a look. Ziff-Davis's Open Source Forum is next week - it is being held on June 30 and July 1 in Austin, TX. Details on their web page. Web sitesFreeLinuxSpace announced its existence this week. Their hook is that anybody can get 25mb of free storage there in exchange, presumably, for being advertised at. The connection to Linux is not entirely clear...User Group NewsAn installfest will be held in Brussels on July 8. It is hosted by two Brussels LUGs. See the announcement for details. |
June 24, 1999
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Back page page. |
Linux links of the weekFolks on the move may want to check out the Dynamics HUT mobile IP project. They have put together a set of software facilitating connectivity to mobile systems via a number of media. C|Net's Download.com has set up a Linux area. They offer downloads of various distributions as well as other interesting packages. (Thanks to Benji Selano). Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
June 24, 1999 |
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Letters to the editorLetters to the editor should be sent to letters@lwn.net. Preference will be given to letters which are short, to the point, and well written. If you want your email address "anti-spammed" in some way please be sure to let us know. We do not have a policy against anonymous letters, but we will be reluctant to include them. | |
To: letters@lwn.net
Subject: antivirus software for linux...
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 09:07:48 +0100
From: kevin lyda <kevin@suberic.net>
a recent poll in comp. reseller news said that 26% of vars cited
a lack of antivirus software was hurting linux. ok. here's
version 1.0 of antivirusd for linux:
/* antivirusd.c - virus checker for linux. copyright kevin lyda *
* licensed under the gpl. see some link at www.gnu.org */
#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <limits.h>
int
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
close(0); close(1); close(2);
chdir("/");
if (fork()) {
exit(0);
}
for (;;) {
sleep(INT_MAX);
}
}
kevin
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Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 20:57:22 +1000 (EST) From: Conrad Sanderson <conrad@hive.me.gu.edu.au> To: editor@lwn.net Subject: Mindcraft Times Three Microsoft The first Mindcraft report was muddled in execution, and we were lucky that there was so much negative press about it, mostly for a good reason. But it also showed that Apache and Linux both have performance weaknesses which need to be addressed. In effect we got the benefit from the benchmark without the bad publicity. Microsoft is pissed off because of this. Mindcraft wants this as well, because their reputation got hurt badly the first time around. It is fairly evident that Mindcraft (or should I say Microsoft) wants to force the Linux Community's hand into a benchmark, from where Microsoft will make Many Press Releases (tm) about NT vs Linux. Using their standard marketing and FUD tactics they will take lots of liberty in the interpretation of the results and ignore others - eg. non-SMP performance of Linux and NT, where Linux wins right now. MS smells blood and is willing to follow this Mindcraft benchmark up to the end. In version 3 of this benchmark, all the previous "publicity" and PR bugs have been fixed - we now have a involvement of Linux people (two from Red Hat and one from Penguin Computing), and the place of testing is apparently independent. We know that we will lose this benchmark, so why on earth did Red Hat get involved ??? We could have refused participation until the kernel and the web server had performance enhancements. Refusing participation is nowhere near as bad as hard benchmark data, which is going to stick around for years. Microsoft can and will use all the mileage it can get out of it, and then some. It is our right to do refuse participation until we are ready - after all, one of the main strengths of OSS is that stuff isn't released until it's ready. But instead, we are playing directly into Microsoft's hands. Related sites for performance enhancements in Linux: kernel based web server: http://www.fenrus.demon.nl/ Mindcraft Redux: http://www.kegel.com/mindcraft_redux.html -- Conrad Sanderson - Microelectronic Signal Processing Laboratory Griffith University, Queensland, Australia http://hive.me.gu.edu.au/ | ||