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LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 16, 2004The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs
Your editor has given a fair number of talks this year in a number of exotic locales, and that trend looks set to continue. So presentation software is an area of interest; it is time to look at the current state of the art. Your editor has found that, while the situation is better than it has ever been, there is still room for improvement. For what it is worth, here are some of the criteria which are to be used when evaluating free presentation systems:
One thing which is not on your editor's list is nine-step special-effects dominated slide transitions, trapeze-act bullet points, bouncing penguins, etc. In your editor's grumpy opinion, such effects can only serve to distract attention from the actual substance of the talk. Good presentations can only be harmed by turning the slides into a cartoon show, and bad presentations cannot be saved that way. There are two fundamental approaches to presentation programs: graphical editors and markup languages. Your editor found two active projects of each type; we'll start with the graphical entries.
KPresenter
KPresenter can import images in numerous formats - including PostScript and
SVG. Tables and charts can be generated with a simple, spreadsheet-like
data editor. It is also possible to import various KOffice objects
directly. If you present a lot of pie charts, this package is for you. If
you want animations and singing, dancing transitions, KPresenter will
provide them for you as well.
There is a basic set of templates which can be used to control the overall formatting of presentations. The first time you use KPresenter, it can be a little hard to figure out how to quickly make it add a new slide with the same template - but it is possible. A "preview" window on the left side can be used to navigate through the slides while editing them. KPresenter works as one would expect when presenting; the output quality is good, and the program is responsive. A quick right-click brings up a list of slides for random movement. KPresenter also offers a "drawing mode," which lets the presenter scribble on the slides with a mouse. As a nice touch, KPresenter makes the pointer disappear while presenting. It's surprising how few presenters think to move the pointer to a corner, and give their entire talk with an unrelated arrow in the middle of their text; with KPresenter, they need not worry about that little detail. Generation of HTML with KPresenter is a matter of stepping through a set of dialogs allowing customization of the output. HTML configurations can be saved, making things easier the second time. The quality of the output is good. Your editor, working with the Fedora Rawhide packaging of KPresenter 1.3.2, encountered a few occasional bugs. Try to create a presentation with the wrong template, and the whole thing just silently quits. There are minor annoyances: when editing presentations, it is nice if the tab key increases the bullet level, but KPresenter does not work that way. The online documentation is spotty, with detailed tutorials on some relatively simple operations, but no help for more obscure topics, such us using the "autoform" feature. Those issues are all minor, however. KPresenter is clearly a mature and capable package for the creation of presentations. If it were the only option available for free systems, we would be in good shape.
OpenOffice.org
If you want to make fancy drawings, OOo is even more feature-rich than KPresenter. It has various types of curve drawing operations, and a set of three-dimensional objects as well. If you are giving a talk which relies heavily on 3D, ray-traced cones and toruses, OOo is the package for you. It can do connections between objects. The graph editor also looks very similar; type your data into the spreadsheet window (or import an OpenOffice spreadsheet) and any sort of 3D plot is available to you. There is a brutally long list of available slide transitions. OpenOffice offers a number of ways of viewing and navigating through a presentation while working on it. A small set of tabs on the bottom of the window is one such view; to make the tabs useful, however, the user must explicitly set the title which appears on each one. There is an "outline view" which lists the bullet points as text, a "slide view" for seeing the presentation in thumbnail format, and a "notes view" which presents additional speaker notes. The presentation mode works mostly as expected. It is possible to pull up the navigator and move to an arbitrary slide, but you must know that F5 is the magic key to hit. Some of the slide transitions and bullet effects, if, for some reason, you choose to use them, can take a long time and do not appear to be interruptible. There is a rehearsal mode which puts a stopwatch on the screen so you can see how long each slide takes - but it does not seem to time the entire presentation. There is no on-screen drawing mode. OpenOffice has a dialog-driven HTML export mechanism which allows customization of almost every aspect of the output and works reasonably well. The program can also export to PDF, but it seems to get confused by animated text effects - yet another good reason to avoid them. The PDF output also seems to lack many of the graphical objects in the slides; instead, it contains only the text. OpenOffice.org differs from KPresenter in one key aspect: how templates are handled. KPresenter generates each page from the template at insertion time; thereafter, the page is disconnected from the template. OpenOffice, instead, derives pages from a "master" page, and keeps that connection. As a result, changes affecting the layout of the entire presentation can by made by editing the master pages. With KPresenter, instead, it is necessary to change each page individually. Anybody who has worked with OpenOffice.org knows that it is a large, unwieldy program. Once it gets going, it responds reasonably well, however. Once again, the online documentation is not all that one might hope for. If you want text with drop shadows, OpenOffice will disappoint you. If you want a capable, graphical presentation package, however, OpenOffice can certainly fill the bill.
MagicPointMagicPoint takes a very different approach to the problem of editing presentations. This tool (along with Pointless, which we will get to shortly) is based on plain text files and a custom markup language. Editing of slides is done with an ordinary text editor; the resulting file must be fed to the utility to see the final result. To many, this approach will seem like something straight out of the 1970's. There are advantages to doing things this way, however: the creation of simple, textual presentations can be done very quickly, and the plain text input file can provide extensive control over how the presentation works. Purists will tell you that the markup approach helps to focus the mind on the structure of the presentation rather than its appearance. That may be true, but presentations are also very much about appearance, so users of markup-based presentation programs usually end up checking the formatting of their slides frequently as they write them. MagicPoint's markup language takes a bit of getting used to. There is a simple template for each page which describes how each line should be formatted. In a typical MagicPoint presentation, the first line of a slide is blank, the second holds the title, the third is blank, and the slide text starts on the fourth line. Bullet levels are determined by the number of tabs at the beginning of the line. The result is that a MagicPoint input file tends to look like an outline of the talk with a bit of markup language thrown in. The markup language is fairly straightforward: %page to start a page, %font to change fonts, etc. MagicPoint can use TrueType fonts for high-quality output. If you change fonts frequently (using monospace fonts for code fragments, for example), MagicPoint's markup can get verbose and cumbersome; otherwise it is pretty unobtrusive. There is simple support for background images or gradients. There are no operations for creating graphics in slides beyond drawing solid rectangles, but MagicPoint can easily display images stored in external files. So, to create a slide with graphics, one need only fire up one's favorite editing tool and export the result as a PNG file. In presentation mode, MagicPoint behaves much like the others. It has an on-screen drawing mode, and supports easy random access to slides. There is an option to put up a footer giving the titles of the next and previous slides - useful for speakers who have a hard time remembering what's coming next. MagicPoint also offers a rehearsal mode where it continually shows how much of your allotted time has been used. Generating an HTML version of a talk is a simple matter of running MagicPoint with the right command line options. There is, however, little flexibility in how that output is formatted. MagicPoint is not a fast-moving project; the last release (1.10a) came out in June, 2003; 1.09 was released in September, 2001. In other words, not much is going on there. The lack of activity is somewhat surprising, given that there are many MagicPoint users out there. This tool has, evidently, reached the point where it is good enough; there is nothing so irritating that it inspires people to tear into the code. MagicPoint does have some bugs, some difficult features, and other issues - for example, fonts can make presentations hard to move between machines. It would be nice if this useful tool were to get some renewed developer attention. (Those interested in MagicPoint input and output can see the editor's OLS 2004 talk and get a tarball with the sources and images that go with it.) Pointless
Users of Pointless end up typing in a lot of markup. Each bulleted line must be marked with =item, =subitem, etc. Plain text lines need =par, or are marked by a =begin-par/=end-par pair. Font and color changes follow a TeX-like style ({=small some-text}), and are a bit easier than the MagicPoint equivalents. Commands exist for importing images, setting tables, importing fonts, etc. There is also a macro definition capability which can be used isolate slide formatting decisions and cut down on the typing. Pointless is written in Python, and it has made Python's module importing capability available to presentation files. The distribution comes with additional modules which can display EPS images or LaTeX source, create plots with gnuplot, or format source code. There is one visual effect supported by pointless - a basic alpha fade out and in. It uses that effect everywhere, however, and it can make the rendering of slides quite slow. Commands exist for controlling the fader, but an attempt to use them (uncommenting the versions in an example presentation packaged with the source) resulted in Python tracebacks. Actually, crashing Pointless 0.5 is an easy thing to do in general. Random access to slides during a presentation is not supported, and there is no drawing mode. Annoyingly, Pointless forces a pause before every bulleted item in each slide, requiring the speaker to lean on the space bar and watch each line fade in separately. This behavior can be changed by putting in =nostep - before every single line. HTML output is supported. The mechanism is flexible; it works from templates and can substitute in many variable describing each slide. There is no "just make me some HTML" operation, however; the user must specify three different templates before Pointless will do the job. Pointless has the potential to be come a highly-capable, extensible presentation system. For the moment, it remains - as stated on its web page - an alpha-phase project. Unless development picks up again, unfortunately, it is likely to remain there.
SummaryAs always, there are some other projects which were not reviewed here, but which are worthy of mention:
So which package would a grumpy editor choose? On the graphical side, OpenOffice.org comes through as being more mature, and its "master page" mechanism can come in handy when one's employer is acquired and all of the page footers have to be changed at once. From the outside, however, KPresenter looks like a more vibrant, fast-moving project. Your editor also likes the feel of KPresenter better; OpenOffice, while being capable of almost anything, has always seemed unwieldy and aggravating to operate. OpenOffice should not be written off by any means, but KPresenter looks like it may be set to surpass it. On the markup-based front, MagicPoint appears to be the only viable alternative at this point. Your editor will likely stick to it despite its slow-moving development and fairly primitive state. It has the features your editor really needs, and it does better at staying out of the way than any other system out there. There seems to be a bit of a gap in the development of free presentation programs. The pointy-haired set, which wants sound effects, dancing bullet points, and easy pie charts, appears to be reasonably well served by the available graphical offerings. There is less available for those who prefer no-nonsense, text-centered presentations, quick talk preparation, easy display of code samples, and who are not afraid of a text editor. And the GNOME project, despite a few attempts (remember Achtung?) has yet to produce a presentation system of its own. Projects in this area seem to have a high probability of stalling before reaching a stable state. Perhaps the problem is more difficult than it seems at the outset. That said, the state of the art is clearly better than it has ever been; anybody wanting to do a presentation with free software has a few alternatives to choose from. There is no longer any need to face the embarrassment of being caught using PowerPoint at a Linux conference. [As a postscript, your editor would like to let it be known that he has not forgotten his promise to complete the email client series with a look at terminal-based tools. That article is still in the works, and will show up, hopefully, before too long.]
Open Source Solaris?As reported by News.com: Sun will release Solaris 10 under an open source license by the end of the year. Sun evidently wants to create a project around Solaris similar to the Fedora effort. There are numerous ways of viewing this announcement; in the absence of much in the way of real details, one might as well succumb to the temptation to apply a significant amount of imagination.From a cynical viewpoint, one can argue that Sun is just acting from commercial desperation. By putting Solaris out there, the company hopes to attract attention, divert some developer and user interest from Linux, and, with luck, dump some of its development and maintenance load onto the community. Such a move would seem destined to failure; Sun's ability to "get" free software has been mixed at best in recent years, and the company is in no position to take a leadership position there now. The paranoid among us wait, with trepidation, for Sun to specify a license for the code it is releasing. At best, they fear, Solaris will be managed like Java; source will be available, but the code will be managed with an iron hand and there will be no opportunity for a true community to come together around Solaris. In a worst-case scenario, the Solaris license will not only forbid any sort of cross-pollination with the truly free operating systems, but it will also "taint" any developer who looks at the Solaris code. A license which attempts to forbid the transfer of code, algorithms, techniques, etc. outside of Solaris could be fodder for the next round of unpleasant lawsuits. Remember that Solaris is based on SCO-owned code, Sun obtained options on SCO stock last year, and Sun dumped several million dollars into the SCO Group for "licensing fees" as well. The relationship between these two companies never has been explained in a satisfactory way. The optimistic observer, instead, will hope that Solaris goes out with a GPL-compatible license. At that point, Solaris becomes another free Unix system, alongside the various BSD projects. Useful code in Solaris can be incorporated into other systems, and Solaris, too, can benefit from code and ideas found in the other free systems. Solaris users will know that their operating system can remain viable well into the future, regardless of what happens to Sun. And the free software community will be that much richer. The gray-bearded True Unix People would still rather have the source for SunOS 4 (or even SunOS 3) and to heck with Solaris. Until Sun tells us exactly what it plans to do, with an emphasis on which code will be released and under which license, it is hard to say with any certainty what the Solaris release will mean. Things could go in almost any direction. We're most curious to see what Sun comes up with; hopefully they will not make us wait too long before filling in the details.
What is KDE e.V. for?Little is known or said about the KDE e.V., the registered non-profit organization that represents the KDE Project in legal and financial matters. Created to deal with various problems faced by a young free software project, the e.V. maintains a low profile and tries to merely protect the project, but is faced with demands for a greater role, as well as accusations of it being too closed. This article sets out to disambiguate the e.V.'s role, and what it means for KDE contributors and the wider free software community, from the point of view of a writer who works with the KDE Project but who is neither a member of the KDE e.V. nor a spokesperson for the KDE e.V. in any way. Since the KDE e.V.'s pages on the KDE web site are relatively uninformative, I took the opportunity to talk to the Treasurer, Mirko Böhm, while attending the KDE World Summit "aKademy". He began by explaining the history of the organization. It started with three people in 1996 to solve two problems faced by the KDE Project: the need for legal validity when taking donations, and the concerns about the Qt licensing model that, at the time, wasn't Free and could have seriously damaged KDE. To cut a long story short, by late 1997, some German members of the project registered the KDE e.V. with the German Association Registry. In 1998 the KDE e.V. and Trolltech created the KDE Free Qt Foundation whose purpose was "to secure the availability of the Qt toolkit for the development of Free Software". So from its start the key goals of KDE e.V. were to provide legal and financial representation for the project. But it is more proactive than those simple aims suggest. They provide an avenue for donations, they help promotion efforts, they organize conferences, and just as Linus Torvalds registered the trademark for Linux, so the KDE e.V. took control of the KDE trademark, to protect and promote the identity of the project. For KDE contributors, this means that they can use the legal and financial backing of the KDE e.V. to pursue trademark disputes. For the wider world this means that the KDE Project can force you to remove references to their trademarks from your work from them if they don't like it. Of course the KDE e.V. only intends to attack those who seek to damage the KDE Project through trademark infringement - it isn't going to stop people saying their work is a KDE application for the sake of it - but with this power comes the need for clarity regarding who is responsible and accountable. Aware of the problems this might cause in a community based upon individual and community freedom, KDE e.V. claims to operate as an open membership organization. Rather than being run by companies and sponsors, as many other similar organizations are, the KDE e.V. is controlled by contributing members (i.e. contributors, documenters, artists, etc.). The idea is that the organization is run for free software contributors by free software contributors. Yet the membership process is still not entirely open, requiring that one existing member nominate you, and two further members support your nomination, which the Board of Directors then accepts. Enthusiastic users who feel they have a stake in the KDE e.V.'s decisions are excluded, as may be unpopular contributors. Furthermore the membership mailing list is closed, as are membership meetings, meaning that the free software community can only learn of the proceedings of the KDE e.V. through officially sanctioned channels. For Rob Kaper, a KDE contributor who claims his views are not uncommon in the community, these closed channels are not always necessary nor useful. Whilst he recognizes that some matters such as financial reports should be kept private, he told me that the KDE e.V. membership should be calling "for a distinction between truly private matters and the aspects of true open source development". In particular he objects to the private-by-default membership mailing list, subscription moderated development mailing lists (he gave the example of khtml-devel) and the closed KDE.News editors, kde-security and kde-packager mailing lists. He sees a trend that he told me "is largely being ignored by the eV membership".' Both the KDE e.V. Board of Directors, who are elected by the membership with terms of three years, and the membership itself might well reject some of these claims. Each decision to close an area of the project from the public is made by the contributors concerned, not the KDE e.V., and so the closed areas represent the concerns of the contributors. Of course Kaper would contend that contributors should be making things more open, not more closed, but then that becomes a separate matter of how free software projects manage themselves. As Mirko pointed out to me, it isn't the place of the KDE e.V. to dictate how development and PR efforts ought to be conducted. One of the guiding principles of the KDE e.V. is to separate politics from development, although Mirko acknowledged that this isn't always possible. In this year's membership meeting at aKademy, for example, the membership voted to have the Board of Directors adopt a position on software patents that will allow contributors to stick to their work without worrying that KDE is sitting on the fence on such a crucial issue. And in the matter of closed mailing lists, whilst the e.V. membership can discuss the issue, it is more a matter of pragmatism. For Kaper though "the e.V. should protect KDE from efforts to control that kind of free flow of information", which "it can only do ... when it adopts more open policies itself". Doing this would mean a major expansion in the scope and power of the e.V. over contributors. These minor disputes put the KDE e.V. in an awkward position. It wants to leave the project to develop according to the regulation of the GPL and their policy of letting the best code decide. Yet there seem to be issues where consensus will not arise naturally, where the project requires a space in which these issues can be debated and consensus can be built. When I asked Mirko about the future of the organization, he admitted that they don't have a clear idea of how it might evolve - that is up to the membership. Whether it is appropriate that the KDE e.V. expand its current role beyond that of protecting and promoting the project is undecided, as is whether or not its current activities and policies properly fulfill that role. For KDE contributors it is a debate that needs to be engaged, and one that will hopefully result in a democratic vision of the organization's future. All contributors should understand and be part of that process. For KDE users and the wider free software community there is little scope for input, except through public debate that might influence the KDE e.V. membership. It is nonetheless an interesting experiment in running a formal entity that can represent a fairly anarchic community project, and so we will continue to benefit from their experiences.
Security Brief items cdrecord troubleMaking sweeping statements about the security of a particular program can come back to haunt you rather quickly as the recent case of a local root exploit in cdrecord demonstrates. During a discussion of recent changes in the 2.6 Linux kernel (as covered by LWN), Jörg Schilling, the author of cdrecord, made a comment about the security of that program:
Judging from the number of reports, I would guess that the Linux kernel is
much more insecure than cdrecord.
That statement could well be true, but in making it, Jörg may have inspired someone to take a closer look at cdrecord. Max Vozeler recently found that cdrecord fails to drop privileges when it executes an external program, and that users can specify which external program is run via the RSH environment variable. If cdrecord is installed setuid root, any local user can exploit this vulnerability to gain root access; multiple exploits have already been posted on bugtraq. Jörg recommends installing cdrecord as a setuid root. cdrecord uses the elevated privileges to lock its buffers into physical memory and to request real-time scheduling, both of which reduce the chances of a buffer underrun. In addition, cdrecord opens the SCSI device before dropping privileges back to that of the user who executed it. In the case of a remote device, it executes the command to access that device, but prior to this bug being fixed, it did that with elevated privileges. Other means for allowing non-root users to burn CDs do exist, but they are less secure, according to Jörg:
What some people did (chmod on /dev/ entries) was definitely always a bigger
security risk than running cdrecord suid root.
Another alternative, which is used by some distribution vendors (notably Red Hat and SuSE), is to disallow non-root users from burning CDs; clearly this is the most secure choice, but can be inconvenient for users and system administrators. Many administrators and some CD burning front end programs override this choice and, in this case, that could lead to a large security hole that may not be patched by the distribution. To avoid this possibility, some distributions have issued cdrecord updates even though they do not install the program in a setuid mode; see the LWN vulnerability entry for the current list. Jörg has fixed this bug in the most recent version of his cdrtools package (2.01a38, available from his cdrecord page).
Mozilla, Firefox, and Thunderbird security issuesThe announcements for the new releases from the Mozilla project discussed new features at length, but were silent on one other point: those releases include fixes for a number of security vulnerabilities, some of which can lead to remote code execution. See this list of fixed vulnerabilities for several good reasons to upgrade.
New vulnerabilities apache2: IPv6 denial of service
cups: denial of service
gtk2, gdk-pixbuf: buffer overflows
OpenOffice: information disclosure
Samba: Denial of Service vulnerabilities
SUS 2.0.2 local root vulnerability
Webmin, Usermin: Multiple vulnerabilities in Usermin
Updated vulnerabilities Apache mod_proxy: denial of service
apache2: stack-based buffer overflow in ssl_util.c
aspell: bounds checking problem
cdrecord: failure to drop privilege
eGroupWare: cross site scripting vulnerabilities in modules
Filename disclosure vulnerability in fam
flim: insecure file creation
Gaim: remote code execution vulnerability
gallery: temp file vulnerability in upload code
glibc: Information leak with LD_DEBUG
gnome-vfs: backend script vulnerabilities
gtkhtml: malformed messages cause crash
httpd: mod_ssl input filter denial of service vulnerability
imlib2: buffer overflows
iproute: local denial of service
kdebase: multiple vulnerabilities
kernel allows unauthorized changes to the group ID
kernel information leak
kernel-utils: setuid vulnerability
krb5: double-free and ASN.1 parsing
lha: stack-based buffer overflow
libpng: multiple vulnerabilities
libxml2 - arbitrary code execution
logcheck: symlink vulnerability
Midnight Commander: extfs vfs vulnerability
mikmod: buffer overflow
mod_python: denial of service vulnerability
mpg321: format string vulnerability
multi-gnome-terminal: Information leak
neon: buffer overflow
netpbm: insecure temporary files
openssh: timing attack leads to information disclosure
OpenSSL: denial of service vulnerabilities
pavuk: buffer overflow
php: remotely exploitable memory errors
PuTTY: pre-authentication arbitrary code execution problem
python: buffer overflow
qt3: BMP image parser heap overflow
rsync: path-sanitizing bug
ruby: insecure file permissions
sox: buffer overflow
SpamAssassin: Denial of Service vulnerability
squid: buffer overflow
SquirrelMail cross site scripting vulnerabilities
star: failure to drop privilege
Subversion: Remote heap overflow
sysstat: temporary file vulnerability
File overwrite vulnerability in tar and unzip
tcpdump: ISAKMP payload handling denial-of-service vulnerabilities
Multiple vendor telnetd vulnerability
wv: buffer overflow
XChat 2.0.x SOCKS5 Vulnerability
xine-ui - insecure temporary file creation
xv: image handling buffer overflows
zlib: denial of service
Resources September CRYPTO-GRAM newsletterBruce Schneier's CRYPTO-GRAM newsletter for September is out. Covered topics include Beyond Fear, travel security, olympic security, and the attacks against MD5 and SHA. "The techniques described by the researchers are likely to have other applications, and we'll be better able to design secure systems as a result. This is how the science of cryptography advances: we learn how to design new algorithms by breaking other algorithms. Additionally, algorithms from the NSA are considered a sort of alien technology: they come from a superior race with no explanations. Any successful cryptanalysis against an NSA algorithm is an interesting data point in the eternal question of how good they really are in there."
New CERT keyCERT has gone through its annual PGP key change; click below for the new public key.
Page editor: Jonathan Corbet Kernel development Kernel release statusThe current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.9-rc2, announced by Linus on September 13. There is a lot of new stuff in this release, including some infrastructure for catching illegal use of I/O memory addresses (see below), the NETIF_F_LLTX interface feature flag (discussed in last week's Kernel Page), the removal of the ancient, unused "busmouse" driver, infrastructure for cluster-wide file locking, a number of DRM subsystem cleanups, the out-of-line spinlock patch, AMD dual-core support, more filesystem conversions to the new symbolic link resolution code (which will eventually allow an increase in the maximum link depth), a new waitid() system call implementing the POSIX call by the same name, a "fake NUMA" mode for x86-64 testing, a small-footprint tmpfs implementation, the base KProbes patch, a set of IDE updates, support for scheduler profiling (seeing where context switches come from), automatic TCP window scaling calculation, a kobject change (it uses kref now), a USB gadget interface update with "On The Go" support, a big ALSA update, the removal of the Philips webcam driver, numerous network driver updates, some random number generator fixes, a fix for the audio CD writing memory leak, some VFS interface improvements, executable support in hugetlb mappings, the Whirlpool digest algorithm, some virtual memory tweaks, a number of asynchronous I/O fixes and improvements, a User-mode Linux update, the "flex mmap" user-space memory layout (covered here last June), a number of scheduler tweaks, the removal of the very last suser() call, and lots of fixes. See the long-format changelog for the details.Linus's BitKeeper repository contains the "string" I/O memory access functions, support for more than eight partitions on BSD-labeled disks, some User-mode Linux cleanups, a tunable "max sectors" limit for block I/O requests (a latency reduction feature), a new prctl() option allowing programs to change their name, some shared memory scalability improvements, and a change in TCP ICMP source quench behavior (such messages are simply ignored now). The current prepatch from Andrew Morton is 2.6.9-rc1-mm5. Recent additions to -mm include some software suspend improvements, the return of a functioning lockmeter patch, some ext3 reservation improvements, some scheduler tweaks, a completely reworked "completely fair queueing" I/O scheduler, and implementations of atomic_inc_return() for various architectures. The current 2.4 prepatch is 2.4.28-pre3, which was released by Marcelo on September 11. This patch is mainly "a bunch of scattered fixes"; there is also the Whirlpool digest algorithm, and an XFS update.
Kernel development news Quotes of the week
What makes you think kernel developers have a deep understanding of
the value of connectivity in the OS? They don't. The average kernel
developer is not particularly bright.
-- Hans Reiser.
But hey, the fact that I have better taste than anybody else in the
universe is just something I have to live with. It's not easy being
me.
-- Linus Torvalds.
Announcing the Kernel Page indexWe managed to pull together a bit of time to hack on the LWN site code over the last week. The result is the LWN Kernel Page index, which can be used to find LWN's kernel-oriented articles for a given topic. This mechanism will probably be extended to other parts of LWN's content in the future.As of this writing, all articles published in 2004 have been indexed; earlier articles will be added as time permits. We'll also fix the case-sensitive sorting when we get a chance. Even without that, however, we hope that the new index will be helpful.
A new I/O memory access mechanismMost reasonably current cards for the PCI bus (and others) provide one or more I/O memory regions to the bus. By accessing those regions, the processor can communicate with the peripheral and make things happen. A look at /proc/iomem will show the I/O memory regions which have been registered on a given system.To work with an I/O memory region, a driver is supposed to map that region with a call to ioremap(). The return value from ioremap() is a magic cookie which can be passed to a set of accessor functions (with names like readb() or writel()) to actually move data to or from the I/O memory. On some architectures (notably x86), I/O memory is truly mapped into the kernel's memory space, so those accessor functions turn into a straightforward pointer dereference. Other architectures require more complicated operations. There have been some longstanding problems with this scheme. Drivers written for the x86 architecture have often been known to simply dereference I/O memory addresses directly, rather than using the accessor functions. That approach works on the x86, but breaks on other architectures. Other drivers, knowing that I/O memory addresses are not real pointers, store them in integer variables; that works until they encounter a system with a physical address space which doesn't fit into 32 bits. And, in any case, readb() and friends perform no type checking, and thus fail to catch errors which could be found at compile time. The 2.6.9 kernel will contain a series of changes designed to improve how the kernel works with I/O memory. The first of these is a new __iomem annotation used to mark pointers to I/O memory. These annotations work much like the __user markers, except that they reference a different address space. As with __user, the __iomem marker serves a documentation role in the kernel code; it is ignored by the compiler. When checking the code with sparse, however, developers will see a whole new set of warnings caused by code which mixes normal pointers with __iomem pointers, or which dereferences those pointers. The next step is the addition of a new set of accessor functions which explicitly require a pointer argument. These functions are:
unsigned int ioread8(void __iomem *addr);
unsigned int ioread16(void __iomem *addr);
unsigned int ioread32(void __iomem *addr);
void iowrite8(u8 value, void __iomem *addr);
void iowrite16(u16 value, void __iomem *addr);
void iowrite32(u32 value, void __iomem *addr);
By default, these functions are simply wrappers around readb() and friends. The explicit pointer type for the argument will generate warnings, however, if a driver passes in an integer type. There are "string" versions of these operations:
extern void ioread8_rep(void __iomem *port, void *buf,
unsigned long count);
All of the other variants are defined as well, of course. There is actually one other twist to these functions. Some drivers have to be able to use either I/O memory or I/O ports, depending on the architecture and the device. Some such drivers have gone to considerable lengths to try to avoid duplicating code in those two cases. With the new accessors, a driver which finds it needs to work with x86-style ports can call:
void __iomem *ioport_map(unsigned long port, unsigned int count);
The return value will be a cookie which allows the mapped ports to be treated as if they were I/O memory; functions like ioread8() will automatically do the right thing. For PCI devices, there is a new function:
void __iomem *pci_iomap(struct pci_dev *dev, int base,
unsigned long maxlen);
For this function, the base can be either a port number or an I/O memory address, and the right thing will be done. As of 2.6.9-rc2, there are no in-tree users of the new interface. That can be expected to change soon as patches get merged and the kernel janitors get to work. For more information on the new I/O memory interface and the motivation behind it, see this explanation from Linus.
The Philips webcam driver returnsThe removal of the Philips webcam driver from the kernel set off a long and sometimes inflammatory discussion. Its return has, instead, been greeted with almost total silence. Once people take a look, however, they might see something worth yelling about.The new maintainer is Luc Saillard. He has posted a patch which restores the PWC driver to the kernel, but without the problematic hook for the proprietary compression module. As an added bonus, the driver can deal with compressed streams from some cameras (those using chipsets 2 or 3), in some modes. Work still needs to be done for chipset 1 and the Bayer mode. The final result is yet to be seen, but it would appear that the whole PWC episode is heading toward a best-case conclusion: a 100% free driver. It would be hard to see that outcome as anything but a good thing.
The Big Kernel Semaphore?Much of the latency reduction work spearheaded by Ingo Molnar is reaching a state of completion; a lengthy set of patches has been posted which breaks up long lock hold times and adds "voluntary preemption" points at strategic places. With these patches in place, most of the worst latency problems in the 2.6 kernel have been addressed, even when kernel preemption is not enabled. That is good news for multimedia users and others who feel that their needs have been passed over in the 2.5/2.6 development period.One issue remains, however: there are some old parts of the kernel which still rely on the Big Kernel Lock (BKL) for mutual exclusion. Code which uses the BKL is not performance critical itself (all such uses have been fixed for a while). But the BKL is a lock, and code which holds the BKL will not be preempted. That can mean long latencies if a code path holds the BKL for a long time - and there are a few such paths. Interest in eradicating use of the BKL has waned in the last year or two, for a few reasons. Any code whose performance was seriously impacted by the BKL has been fixed. And, perhaps more to the point, much of the remaining code is ancient, crufty, and brittle. Finally, as Alan Cox (who holds the dubious fame of having created the BKL) points out, the BKL is not a traditional lock:
The BKL turns on old style unix non-pre-emptive sematics between
all code that is within lock_kernel sections, that is it. That also
makes it hard to clean up because lock_kernel is delimiting code
properties (its essentially almost a function attribute) and
spin_lock/down/up and friends are real locks and lock data.
Fixing the remaining code is not an exercise for the timid. In most cases, the prudent course has been to simply leave things alone. The latency problem may just force this issue, however; by increasing latency, BKL-protected code is harming the higher-performance parts of the kernel. The BKL has one very interesting property which distinguishes it from an ordinary spinlock: code holding the BKL can call schedule() at any time. When that happens, the kernel releases the lock until the scheduling thread is returned to the processor. If code holding the lock can schedule, it ought to be preemptible as well - at least under some circumstances. Ingo Molnar has decided to mitigate the BKL problem by turning it into the Big Kernel Semaphore. As seen in his patch, the BKS is a special sort of semaphore; it is recursive (as is the BKL), and it is released when the thread holding it voluntarily schedules. The key difference from the BKL, however, is that a process holding the BKS can be preempted - but the semaphore is not released in that case. So code which uses lock_kernel() is still protected against other such code, just like it is now. But that code can be preempted (as long as it does not take any spinlocks). That change should be sufficient to address the latency problems caused by long BKL hold times. Whether this patch will be accepted remains to be seen. Linus doesn't like it, but Ingo has reasonable responses to his objections. Including Ingo's patch would mitigate the current problems caused by the BKL, which may have an undesirable effect: once again, there will be little motivation to truly fix users of the BKL. Some developers may prefer to simply bite the bullet and eliminate those final BKL users for real.
Patches and updates Kernel trees
Core kernel code
Development tools
Device drivers
Documentation
Filesystems and block I/O
Janitorial
Memory management
Networking
Architecture-specific
Security-related
Miscellaneous
Page editor: Jonathan Corbet Distributions News and Editorials The Athene Operating SystemWith so many new Linux distributions being launched every month, you will be forgiven to give most of them nothing but a passing glance. Usually based on Debian GNU/Linux or Fedora Core, they often provide little new besides a different application set and a pretty wallpaper on the otherwise standard KDE or GNOME, or less commonly, XFce or Fluxbox desktops. That said, every once in a while there is a new distribution that makes an honest effort to depart from the standard fare. One of them is Rocklyte Systems' Athene, a new commercial Linux distribution from New Zealand.Three notable characteristics differentiate Athene from other Linux distributions: fast boot times, integration of the SNAP Graphics technology (in place of XFree86 or X.org), and the desktop look and feel. The boot times are impressive - on this author's 1.6 GHz Pentium 4 machine it took 32 seconds to get from GRUB to Athene's graphical login prompt and another 1 - 2 seconds to get to the full graphical desktop, ready for user input. Shutdown times were equally striking, with about 11 seconds needed to halt the system. SciTech SNAP Graphics is a commercial cross-platform driver architecture, originally developed for OS/2 and DOS, but now also supporting Windows and Linux. The major advantages of SNAP over XFree86 or X.org are ease of installation and auto-configuration of most graphics cards, including many of the latest NVIDIA and ATI cards. The company's web site also claims substantial speed achievements and provides benchmarks to prove them. However, a noteworthy disadvantage of SNAP is its lack of support for the XVideo extension and GL direct rendering, which makes it less acceptable on the home desktop market where video playback and gaming represent a fairly common PC usage. But the low cost of support and maintenance might make the $20 SNAP (trial editions are available for download) an adequate solution for many businesses. Athene's desktop environment is unlike anything else on the market. It comes in three themes: Wintel, Indigo and Omega Workbench, each of which has been developed by Rocklyte Systems. They contribute towards that pleasant feeling of novelty and excitement that normally accompanies any new purchase. The desktop is complemented by a central configuration utility designed to perform basic tasks, such as desktop and system configuration, as well as installation and removal of applications from the system. Then there is a custom file manager, a custom media player, a custom text editor, a custom picture viewer, etc., but otherwise the available applications set is very limited - perhaps on par with MS Windows, but certainly a lot scantier than what one finds on a 4-CD Fedora Core set. The good news is that the installation CD contains additional applications in binary format to complement the Athene OS. Both Qt and GTK+ libraries are available, together with many of the best open source applications that make use of these libraries. Almost all of KDE, including KOffice, are on the CD, as well as the GIMP, OpenOffice.org, Firefox, and MPlayer - just to name a few of the more interesting software packages. Development tools are available too and menu entries are automatically populated with icons upon installation. Because of these extra packages, Athene can be easily turned into a full-featured desktop, ready for every-day use. Unfortunately, the Athene OS is still in its infancy and as such, it has unrefined edges, especially considering that the product seems to be designed for non-technical persons. As an example, networking is not configured during the initial installation. A quick trip to Athene's forums revealed that the correct way to set up networking was to install DHCP (available on the CD, but not installed by default), then read the DHCP documentation to learn how to configure /etc/dhcpd.conf and what to add to /etc/boot to bring networking up at boot. Hardly something that your average aunt Tilly would be thrilled doing! Furthermore, creation of user accounts is not enforced during or after installation as Athene seems content to provide just one root account for all. There are usability issues that take the pleasure out of using some of Athene's otherwise pretty-looking utilities. Take the application installer, called QikInstall; it not only fails to auto-resolve dependencies of installed applications (nowadays the only major distribution that doesn't do this is Slackware), it merely displays the name of the first immediate dependency. The user is then left to navigate the application directories on the installation CD to find it! Another problem is inconsistent interaction with icons throughout the system - while the desktop icons require a single click to activate, those in the file manager and QikInstall need a double click. Since accidental double clicks are not detected, it is easy to end up with a very messy desktop! Overall though, Athene is an innovative and fun distribution, with speed and stability as its most noticeable features. It is not difficult to see how it could become a standard OS in some small company where most work is accomplished in an office suite. Whereas users of RPM- or DEB-based distributions could be tempted to install additional applications and introduce potential instability into the system, Athene's non-standard packaging and a limited set of applications ensure that the operating system remains in its pristine and stable state, thus reducing administration costs. If Rocklyte can fix a few annoyances in Athene and design an effective marketing strategy, the obvious talent of Athene's developers could be transformed into a financial success for the entire company. The Athene OS is available from Rocklyte Systems' online store, starting at $47.95, while Athene's desktop component (to be installed on top of an existing Windows or Linux installation) is available as a free download from the distribution's download page.
Distribution News Progeny Debian 2.0 Developer Edition Beta 2 releaseThe second beta of Progeny Debian 2.0 Developer Edition has been released. Progeny Debian 2.0 DE is based on Debian sarge (with some components derived from Debian sid) and includes features (click below for list) from Componentized Linux.
"Stateless Linux" projectFedora Core has become a test bed for something called "Stateless Linux". Stateless Linux aims to provide a "best of both worlds" hybrid between thin and fat clients among other things. The project is still young, and currently seeking some feedback, particularly from those who have gone through the HOWTO. Click below for the complete announcement from the Fedora-devel list.
Desktop/LX 1.4 Goes GoldLycoris Desktop/LX has announced that it has commenced shipping Desktop/LX 1.4 to customers. Desktop/LX 1.4 is now available in Personal, Deluxe and PowerPak editions.
Debian Weekly News 2004/36The Debian Weekly News for September 14, 2004 looks at the new Debian GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide, the preparation of Sarge CD and DVD images, using Debian in commercial environments, the GNOME 2.6 transition, and more.
Fedora CoreThe release of Fedora Core 3 Test 2 has been delayed until September 20, 2004, according to the schedule. Fedora Legacy will begin supporting Fedora Core 1 after FC3t2 has been released.
Slackware LinuxMany packages have been upgraded in the slackware-current tree, including cdrtools, dvd+rw-tools, mysql, proftpd, reiserfsprogs, ccache, gdb, gnumeric, libpng, taglib, dnsmasq, getmail, samba, imagemagick and gcc.
DistroWatch WeeklyThe DistroWatch Weekly for September 13, 2004 looks at release schedules for Fedora, Mandrakelinux (both have slipped) and FreeBSD, and has several other topics.
New Distributions Ubuntu 4.10 Preview releasedUbuntu is a new, Debian-based distribution which features a "focused" subset of packages, a six-month release cycle, and 18 months of promised security support for each release. Despite the fact that it is new, Ubuntu has just released the "4.10 preview." Features include GNOME 2.8 and a single-CD installation process; click below for the details.
KlinuxKlinux is a modified version of Slackware Linux 9.1 with the Zipslack kernel. It can be installed on a FAT 32 file system with any version of Windows (9x, NT, 2000, XP). It comes on one CD-ROM (563MB) and requires at least 2.5 GB of free space on the hard drive. The drive does not need to be partitioned. The system will be accessible from Windows, appearing to be another folder, or you can run Linux by booting from a floppy. (Thanks to Sareei Alsareei)
Minor distribution updates Devil-Linux v1.2-RC1 released !Devil-Linux v1.2-RC1 is available for download. The kernel has been updated to 2.4.27 and many other progams have been updated as well. Click below to see the change log.
Fli4lFli4l has released v2.1.8. "Changes: The kernel is now patched with some parts of grsecurity. More flexible boot handling was added, which should make it possible to support more different boot media. Routers can be switched off automatically if APM is supported. The packet filter has a more flexible configuration. A new time server package using chrony was added. Support for Fritz!Card DSL USB, Fritz!X USB, and Fritz!Card USB was added. There are software updates and several bugfixes."
New Quantian release 0.5.9.4 availableQuantian 0.5.9.4 adds more packages, including 50 new CRAN/BioConductor packages for R, pcb, gpsim, gnucap, xcircuit, transcalc, xd3d, QtiPlot, the Alliance VHDL and more. Click below for more details.
ThinTUXThinTUX has released v0.17, adding support for the ThinTUX Terminal Server Project (TTSP). TTSP allows an organization to use centralized server based computing and thin clients. The system has support for server autodiscovery, high availability, load sharing, single sign on, encryption, hot desking, plug-and-work and central administration management.
Newsletters and articles of interest Running Linux on an iPAQ (IBM developerWorks)IBM developerWorks installs Familiar Linux on an iPAQ. "Familiar is available for download in three distinct user flavors (a fourth, developer-only, flavor with no GUI is also available). Each of these flavors consists of the same kernel and base system but with different GUIs. The analogy in the desktop Linux world is installing a distribution such as Red Hat or Mandrake and getting a choice of desktop environments, such as KDE or GNOME. Indeed, once you start to look at the options, you can see that the similarities to different desktop environments run even deeper."
Building a BSD Netboot Server (O'ReillyNet)In this O'ReillyNet article the author describes one method of installing FreeBSD-5.2.1-Release as a server for diskless clients. "As I've confined myself to a single alternative, it's important to lay out some conditions. First, the method here differs from the canonical version in the way it uses rc files in the FreeBSD distribution. For example, diskless stations won't put their file systems in virtual memory; instead, they will use NFS to mount file systems as read-only (/ and /usr) and read-and-write (/etc and /var)."
Distribution reviews Yoper Linux v2.1 Review (LinuxForums)LinuxForums.org has a review of the latest Yoper Linux. "Yoper's claim to fame is the speed at which it runs, out of the box. Yoper is a distro that targets the desktop Linux user from a brand new convert to the legendary guru. The latests release (2.1) improves upon the the installer, making it more user friendly and now includes non-destructive partitioning." (Thanks to Jason Lambert)
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol Development GNOME 2.8 is releasedVersion 2.8 of the GNOME desktop was announced this week.
Released on schedule, to the day, it is the culmination of six months effort
by GNOME contributors around the world: hackers, documentors, usability and
accessibility specialists, translators, maintainers, sysadmins, companies,
artists, users and testers. Due to their hard work, we have another great
release to be proud of - thanks very much to every contributor!
![[GNOME]](/images/ns/gnome2.jpg)
The Release Notes provide an overview of the current state of the project:
"GNOME runs on a variety of platforms, including GNU/Linux (commonly called Linux), Solaris, HP-UX, BSD and Apple's Darwin. GNOME includes powerful features such as world-class smooth text rendering, a first-class accessibility infrastructure, and a complete internationalization infrastructure that includes support for bi-directional text."
The What's New page details most of the improvements. The GNOME file manager has numerous new capabilities. These include a new standardized file-type system that adds KDE compatibility, default handlers, and support for opening alternate applications. DNS-Based Service Discovery allows network resources to be visible locally. CDs, DVDs, memory sticks, and digital cameras are now automatically mounted. Multi-session CDs are now supported. The GNOME desktop has a new Glider theme which is: "simple, smooth, and aesthetically pleasing". The GNOME control center adds a keyboard layout preview screen that lights up when keys are pressed to show the key interpretations. The GNOME Panel Applets have had several improvements. The panel applet chooser application has been clarified. The calendar now connects to the Evolution email client. The network monitor adds support for wireless interfaces and features a signal strength meter. The battery monitor has improved battery life estimation and more visible warnings. The weather applet has support for more locations. GNOME 2.8 features several updated applications. Version 2.0 of the Evolution integrated Email and Groupware client is included. It adds support for Novell Groupwise and Microsoft Exchange, S/MIME authentication and encryption, calendar improvements, offline IMAP support, Usenet support, spam filtering, and user interface improvements. The Epiphany web browser has numerous bookmark improvements, popup blocking, an offline mode, and online calendar connectivity through Evolution. System Administration improvements in GNOME 2.8 include a new virtual network computing client for remote desktop control. The gnome system tools, network tools, and configuration editor have undergone numerous improvements. Improvements to the GNOME 2.8 Development Platform include an expanded API and official language bindings for Python, C++, Java, and Perl. Internationalization is improving in GNOME 2.8. "GNOME 2.8 offers support for 40 languages (at least 80 percent of strings translated)." For a visual tour of GNOME 2.8, take a look at some of the user submitted screenshots. In all, this looks like an exciting new GNOME release with many usability improvements, and features that should make the average desktop user happy. Congratulations to the GNOME developers!
System Applications Database Software Durus object database version 1.2Version 1.2 of Durus is available. "Durus is a Python object database. It offers an easy way to maintain a consistent persistent collection of Python object instances used by one or more processes." Changes include a new command line tool, a BTree class, and bug fixes.
FlameRobin 0.1.3 releasedVersion 0.1.3 of FlameRobin, a database administration tool for Firebird DBMS, is out. Change information is somewhat sparse, the documentation in the source code refers to a missing changes.txt file.
pgAdmin III v1.2 Beta releasedVersion v1.2 Beta of pgAdmin III has been released. "Hot on the heels of the PostgreSQL 8 betas, the first beta release of pgAdmin III, the popular administration tool for PostgreSQL, has been released for testing." Several bug fixes are included.
PostgreSQL Weekly NewsThe September 13, 2004 PostgreSQL Weekly News is out with information about the PostgreSQL 8.0 beta release and other database news.
ZODB 3.3 release candidate 1 releasedVersion 3.3c1 of ZODB, the Zope Object DataBase, is available. "3.3c1 incorporates a slew of small fixes, and one major incompatibility: when a transaction commit fails, all previous versions of ZODB aborted the transaction and implicitly began a new transaction. As discussed on the zope-dev and zodb-dev mailing lists, that can be damaging if one in a sequence of subtransaction commits mistakenly suppresses a commit exception."
Interoperability Samba 3.0.7 Available for DownloadStable version 3.0.7 of Samba is out with some important security fixes. "This is the latest stable release of Samba. This is the version that production Samba servers should be running for all current bug-fixes. There have been several important issues fixes since the 3.0.6 release."
Libraries liboggz 0.8.4 ReleasedVersion 0.8.4 of liboggz, a C library for reading and writing Ogg compressed audio files and streams, is out. Changes include expanded --help output, valgrind test support, a single packet network read test, and more.
libogg-1.1.1 releasedVersion 1.1.1 of libogg has been released. "Changes include several platform and build fixes, documentation for multiplexed streams, and other goodies."
libxml++ 2.8.0 releasedVersion 2.8.0 of libxml++,a C++ wrapper for the libxml XML parser library, is out. "This is the first stable release on the 2.8 branch." Changes include code cleanup, bug fixes, and new Validator and DtdValidator functionality.
Networking Tools moodss 19.0 announcedJean-Luc Fontaine has announced version 19.0 of Moodss, a graphical monitoring application with plug-in support for various operating systems, databases, and networking applications. "This new release add the capability to create mathematical formulas f[r]om any module (locally or remotely monitoring), and use the resulting data as any other, in graphical viewers, thresholds, or archiving in database, ..."
Printing Common UNIX Printing System 1.1.21Version 1.1.21 of CUPS, the Common UNIX Printing System, is out. "CUPS 1.1.21 is primarily a bug fix and performance tuning release and includes fixes for the IPP, LPD, parallel, serial, and USB backends, authentication and status processing issues in the CUPS API, and various PostScript and PDF printing issues. The new release also adds support for Zebra label printers and IPP device URI options."
Security chroot_safe 1.2 released (SourceForge)Version 1.2 of chroot_safe, a tool for replacing chroot and friends, is available. "Version 1.2 is an update to increase portability. The software is now verified on Solaris on addition to Linux and FreeBSD and is expected to run on mostly any UNIX like system with LD_PRELOAD support."
Web Site Development ACal 2.2.2 Released (SourceForge)Version 2.2.2 of ACal, a web-based event calendar, is available. "ACal 2.2.2 was released to fix two bugs. First of all a bug when clicking on single digit days in the month view to get into the day view and second, a bug where after installing you can login with a blank username and password."
Bricolage 1.8.2 ReleasedVersion 1.8.2 of Bricolage, a Perl-based web content management system, is out. "This maintenance release addresses quite a large number of issues in Bricolage 1.8.1. The most important changes were to enhance Unicode support in Bricolage. Bricolage now internally handles all text content as UTF-8 strings, thus enabling templates to better control the manipulation of multibyte characters. Other changes include better performance for searches using the ANY() operators and more intelligent transaction handling for distribution jobs."
ZopeMag Weekly NewsThe September 1-10, 2004 edition of the ZopeMag Weekly News is online with the latest Zope and Plone articles.
Documentation Collaborative Document Editing with svk (O'ReillyNet)Chia-liang Kao uses svk to keep documentation in different languages in sync. "If you've ever tried to write a document collaboratively, you know the pain of tracking multiple edits. Programmers face the same difficulties with source code, so why not borrow their version control solutions? Chia-liang Kao demonstrates how to use svk, a distributed version control system, to manage changes to translations and other collaborative documents."
Standards The Open Group & FSG announce LSB 2.0 certificationThe Free Standards Group and The Open Group have announced the readiness of certification efforts for the Linux Standard Base 2.0 Specification (LSB 2.0). Developers can work with The Open Group on certifying their applications to the global standard for Linux.
Miscellaneous GNOME System Tools 1.0 have been releasedVersion 1.0 of GNOME System Tools is available, changes include numerous updated translations.
PIKT 1.17.0 releasedVersion 1.17.0 of PIKT, the Problem Informant/Killer Tool, is out. "PIKT is a cross-categorical, multi-purpose toolkit to monitor and configure computer systems, organize system security, format documents, assist command-line work, and perform other common systems administration tasks." Changes include support for new preprocessor directives, a backup restore option, piktf: a configuration find utility, command-line item macros, and bug fixes.
Desktop Applications Audio Applications Marlin 0.7 has been releasedVersion 0.7 of Marlin, a sample editor, is out. Changes include a new a progress window icon, undo/redo functionality, bug fixes, and more.
Patchage 0.0.4 ReleasedVersion 0.0.4 of Patchage, a modular patch bay for Jack audio with planned alsa sequencer capabilities, is out. Changes include some bug fixes.
qjackctl 0.2.11 releasedVersion 0.2.11 of qjackctl, the Qt GUI Interface to the JACK Audio Connection Kit, is available. Changes include a fix for the Input/Output channels settings and user control of a shiny display effect.
Timemachine 0.2.5 is outVersion 0.2.5 of Timemachine, a JACK application for recording sounds that have just happened, is out. Changes include command line recording format and port selection, a new desktop icon, and more.
Desktop Environments KDE CVS-Digest (KDE.News)The September 10, 2004 edition of the KDE CVS-Digest is online with the following content summary: "Speedups in khtml javascript, Kate, Kmail and Kcminit. Macros and headers added to compile Kdelibs on win32. UI Recovery ToolKit (uirtk) improved. Support for building Smoke library on Mac OS X."
Metacity 2.8.5 releasedVersion 2.8.5 of Metacity, a window manager for GNOME, is available. "This is a stable release for Gnome 2.8. Only translations and some new developer documentation were added since the last unstable release. This release boasts improved standards-compliance and a number of bug fixes since the last stable release."
Electronics New Open Collector releasesThe Open Collector site mentions the release of TkGate 1.8.5, an event driven digital circuit simulator with a tcl/tk-based graphical editor, and Alliance 5.0-20040909, a CAD framework for designing VLSI chips.
Financial Applications Compiere Release 2.5.1f (SourceForge)Version 2.5.1f of Compiere, an ERP+CRM business application, is available. "The emphasis of this release was the improved Server infrastructure. You can now monitor the (accounting, request, workflow, alert) processors and their logs from the web."
Games Bygfoot 1.6.1 and 1.7.1 available (SourceForge)New stable and development versions of Bygfoot, a graphical soccer game, are available. "The new releases correct an extremely annoying bug that caused the game to hang. There's also an online update script in the source packages that helps you keep your Bygfoot version up-to-date without downloading new packages manually."
gnome-games 2.8.0 releasedVersion 2.8 of gnome-games, a collection of games for GNOME, is out. "This is the first stable release of the 2.8 series. It should compile happily in a GNOME 2.6 or GNOME 2.8 environment although a recent librsvg is recommended."
gnome-games-extra-data 2.8.0 releasedVersion 2.8.0 of gnome-games-extra-data, the overflow graphics for gnome-games, is out. "The only change since 2.7.0 is the addition of the old gnometris backgrounds."
Takeover 0.96 (Pygame)Version 0.96 of Takeover has been released. "Takeover is a turnbased strategy board game for two players. It could be described as a cross between Chess and Checkers. Each player starts with one "Leader" and six "Unit" pieces, centered around its own base, that has to be protected."
GUI Packages gtkmm 2.5.0 announcedVersion 2.5.0 of gtkmm, a C++ interface to GTK+, is out. "gtkmm 2.5 wraps new API in GTK+ 2.5, and is API/ABI-compatibile with gtkmm 2.4. The new API is unstable, until this become the API/ABI-stable gtkmm 2.6 when GTK+ 2.5 becomes the API-stable GTK+ 2.6."
Gtk2-Perl 2.8.0 announcedVersion 2.8.0 of Gtk2-Perl, the Perl bindings to GTK+, is out. This is the stable release for GNOME 2.8.0.
Instant Messaging IRC Text to Speech with Java (O'ReillyNet)O'Reilly is running an article on converting IRC into synthesized speech. "Paul Mutton creates a multi-platform IRC bot that uses the FreeTTS Java speech synthesizer library to convert IRC messages into audible speech. Why would you want to use an IRC text-to-speech system? By reading out messages as they arrive, you can keep working, diverting your attention to IRC only when necessary." Now, imagine working in a cubicle farm loaded with talking IRC clients.
Interoperability Wine TrafficThe September 10, 2004 edition of Wine Traffic is online. Take a look for happenings in the Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) world.
Mail Clients Thunderbird 0.8 releasedThe Mozilla project has made Thunderbird 0.8 available. New features include better POP support, an RSS reader, a master password for login information, and more; see the release notes for details.
Medical Applications OpenEMR with Advanced Document Management (LinuxMedNews)LinuxMedNews has an announcement for a new version of OpenEMR, an electronic medical records system. Here is the list of improvements: "Advanced document storage capabilities for scanned documents; New user reporting interface - a separate interface from the phpMyAdmin to obtain reports; Improved calendaring; Support for specialty codes for billing; Support for multiple X12 partners - the ability to submit X12 claims to different payers or clearinghouses; and Many display and logic enhancements."
Music Applications Hydrogen v0.9.0 ReleasedVersion 0.9.0 of Hydrogen, a versatile drum sequencer application, is available. Changes include support for multiple layers and patterns, FLAC file support, control of instrument pitch and gain properties, export to standard MIDI files, and other improvements.
jMax-SDIF 0.8 releasedVersion 0.8 of jMax-SDIF, the jMax 4.1 Sound Description Interchange Format package, is out. "I just finished the jMax-SDIF package version 0.8 for jMax 4.1 CVS. You can now import SDIF files into a track of matrices, and export a track to SDIF. There is also an sdifinfo object that reads and outputs information about the contents of an SDIF file."
News Readers Liferea 0.6.0 announcedVersion 0.6.0 of Liferea. the Linux Feed Reader, is out with numerous improvements and bug fixes.
Office Applications criawips 0.0.7 ReleasedVersion 0.0.7 of criawips, a presentation application for GNOME, is out. "After almost 2 months a new version of criawips is released. This version includes several new translations". Also included are bug fixes, resolution independent slide rendering, and a redesigned main window.
PDA Software Guikachu 1.5.3 releasedVersion 1.5.3 of Guikachu, the GNOME Resource editor for PalmOS projects, is out. "This release is part of the 1.5 development branch, so it's all about crazy experimentations and not about providing a polished, well-tested product -- so don't quite replace your 1.4 Guikachu just yet."
Video Applications Dirac 0.4.2 (alpha) releasedAlpha version 0.4.2 of the Dirac general-purpose video codec is available, it features a number of bug fixes.
Web Browsers Epiphany 1.4.0 is outVersion 1.4.0 of Epiphany, the GNOME web browser, is out. "Epiphany 1.4.0 is the first stable release in the GNOME 2.8 series."
Epiphany Extensions 1.4.0 ReleasedVersion 1.4.0 of Epiphany Extensions, the extensions to the Epiphany browser, is out. "Epiphany Extensions 1.4.0 is the first stable release for use with the stable 1.4.x series of Epiphany with GNOME 2.8."
Epiphany 1.2.9 ReleasedVersion 1.2.9 of Epiphany is available. "Epiphany 1.2.9 is the last release in stable the GNOME 2.6 series."
Firefox 1.0 preview releasedThe Firefox 1.0 preview release is now available. The release notes show that a fair number of new features have been added: "live bookmarks" which generate a bookmark folder from an RSS feed, better popup control, incremental find, a "master password" to guard login information, and more.
Mozilla 1.7.3 Released (MozillaZine)Version 1.7.3 of Mozilla has been announced. "mozilla.org today released Mozilla 1.7.3, which patches some minor security holes".
aKademy Hackers Port Mozilla to Qt/KDE (KDE.News)KDE.News reports on yet another outcome from aKademy: a port of the Gecko rendering engine to Qt. "Within four days (and before the end of the marathon) the two had a working port: Gecko running on Qt. They credited the speed of implementation to the maturity of the respective technologies and KDE's component architecture (though the caliber of the hackers certainly didn't hamper the effort). In their implementation, Qt is just another platform for Mozilla, parallel to the drawing and widget layer for Mozilla's other platforms like GTK, Win32, or MacOS X."
Miscellaneous gnome-applets 2.8.0 releasedVersion 2.8.0 of gnome-applets, "the little programs you run in your panel", is out with improved documentation, bug fixes, and compatibility with GNOME 2.8.
gcalctool v4.4.18 stable releasedStable version 4.4.18 of gcalctool, the default GNOME desktop calculator, has been released for GNOME 2.8. It features some localization changes.
Languages and Tools C GCC NewsletterThe September 15, 2004 edition of the GCC Newsletter is available with the latest Gnu Compiler Collection news. Take a look to read about the upcoming GCC 3.5 release.
Caml Caml Weekly NewsThe September 7-14, 2004 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with this week's Caml language articles.
Java JDemo: Interactive Testing Refactored (O'ReillyNet)Markus Gebhard demonstrates JDemo on a dice display application. "The nature of GUI development doesn't lend itself to test-oriented methodologies very well. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't test your components! Markus Gebhard has an alternative: JDemo, a tool patterned after JUnit, for displaying and verifying GUI components."
Perl This Week on Perl 6 (O'Reilly)The September 9, 2004 edition of This Week on Perl 6 is online with the latest Perl 6 development discussions.
Lightning Articles (O'Reilly)Simon Cozens has assembled several small Perl articles on O'Reilly. "While preparing perl.com one week, I was editing an article on how to give lightning talks by Mark Fowler and at the same time I was dealing with another author who said he was having difficulty stretching out an article -- a very good article, on a topic I wanted to see covered -- to a full 2,500-words-or-so length. I then realized there were probably a load of people out there with interesting things to say about what they're doing with Perl, but who couldn't or didn't want to write a full-sized article."
PHP Gubed PHP Debugger 0.1.1 releasedVersion 0.1.1 of Gubed PHP Debugger, a cross platform program for debugging PHP scripts, has been released. "Improvements are mostly in the areas of session handling, documentation, packaging and windows compatibility."
PostScript GGV 2.8.0 ReleasedVersion 2.8.0 of GGV, GNOME GhostView, is out. "Featuring updates to Welsh (Dafydd) and Turkish (Baris) translations and nothing more."
Python Python Imaging Library 1.1.5 alpha 4Version 1.1.5 alpha 4 of PIL, the Python Imaging Library, has been released. "This release contains a major change to the build procedure; instead of the old configure/make/setup dance, there's now a single setup.py file that does it best to do everything in one operation."
Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! for September 14, 2004 is available. Take a look for another round of Python language articles.
Tcl/Tk Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! for September 14, 2004 is available with the week's Tcl/Tk articles.
XML Inside the XForms validator (IBM developerWorks)Micah Dubinko works with XForms validation on IBM's developerWorks. "Performing validation on mixed-namespace documents can be more art than science. XForms 1.0, which is used as a component inside arbitrary host languages, introduces some new questions about how a validator should process such documents. This article discusses some of the challenges that the author encountered while writing an online XForms validator tool, and techniques for overcoming these problems."
Automated Tree Drawing: XSLT and SVG (O'Reilly)Jirka Kosek draws tree diagrams automatically with XSLT and SVG. "But if you need dozens of trees, you would do well to use a compact text syntax for describing trees that can later be turned into nice pictures. In this article I'll show you how to parse simple text notation by means of XSLT and turn it into SVG graphics."
Wrestling HTML (O'Reilly)Uche Ogbuji uses Python to clean and convert HTML to XML. "Lately I've seen HTML parsing problems everywhere. One project needed a web crawler with specialized features provided through Python code that processed arbitrary HTML. There have also been several threads on mailing lists I frequent (including XML-SIG) featuring discussions of mechanisms for dealing with broken HTML by converting it to decent XHTML."
Editors gedit 2.8.0 releasedStable version 2.8.0 of gedit, the official GNOME text editor, is available. "Among others, it features full UTF-8 support, syntax highlighting and a powerful plugin system." A new plugin allows the case of highlighted text to be changed.
Profilers OProfile 0.8.1 ReleasedVersion 0.8.1 of OProfile, a code profiler, is available. "A new utility, oparchive, has been included. This allows you to save all or part of a profile session, including the profiled binaries; the archive can be processed later via the "archive:" profile specifier. The profile specifiers "sample-file:" and "binary:" have been removed; oparchive is a more flexible solution to the problem. Objective C debug info is now handled."
Page editor: Forrest Cook Linux in the news Recommended Reading Improving Linux Driver Installation (O'ReillyNet)O'ReillyNet wants to improve Linux driver installation. "When compiling the kernel, you can select the drivers you want to use. Linux also has the capability to compile most drivers into special modules that it will load only when you use the device. These loadable modules allow the kernel to load certain drivers only when needed. This is particularly handy with rarely used devices and removable USB peripherals. Although loading drivers on the fly is flexible, the user experience of dealing with drivers has required that users know how to deal with modules, mount disks and devices, and low-level device information. These requirements have acted as a barrier to Linux adoption for nontechnical users."
Speech code from IBM to become open source (News.com)News.com carries a NY Times article on IBM's plans to release speech-recognition software to two open-source software groups. "IBM is donating code that it estimates cost the company $10 million to develop. One collection of speech software for handling basic words for dates, time and locations, like cities and states, will go to the Apache Software Foundation. The company is also contributing speech-editing tools to a second open-source group, the Eclipse Foundation."
Penguin Europe: The EuroLugs network project (NewsForge)NewsForge covers an FFII effort to organize European LUGs. "Last April, many GNU/Linux users, organized by the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII), met in Brussels to demonstrate before the European Parliament (EP) against the introduction of software patents in the European Union. During the event, further protests were coordinated for the following month in many European cities. Eventually, the guys in Brussels found themselves asking, why don't we do this systematically? More precisely, why don't we create EuroLugs, a permanent network of all European LUGS and FLOSS associations, so we can act faster, all together and more effectively?"
Trade Shows and Conferences Novell sees a 'both-source' future (News.com)News.com covers Novell's Brainshare Europe conference in Barcelona. "Shortly after Messman finished justifying Novell's proprietary heritage, though, Novell European President Richard Seibt said that businesses should move away from a closed approach to their internal software development and adopt open-source methods in order to cut costs and improve efficiency."
The SCO Problem Keeping Today's SCO-IBM Motions Straight (Groklaw)There has been a serious flood of motions leading up to the September 15 hearing in SCO v. IBM. Groklaw has put together a convenient list for those who are having trouble keeping the whole thing straight.One of the more amusing recent filings is the reply memo opposing IBM's attempt to strike the declarations from SCO's non-expert witnesses. "Is SCO out of its mind? Not trying? Trying to lose elegantly? I have been debating it every which way, and my current hypothesis is that the only thing they fight hard for is delay. I think, therefore, that they don't mind losing, as long as they can preserve their opportunity to go after end users."
Companies IBM opens Linux center in Brazil (InfoWorld)InfoWorld covers a new IBM LTC in Brazil. "IBM Corp. will spend more than $1 million to help fund a Linux technology center in Brazil. The center, created in conjunction with the Brazilian government, aims to train 700 public service professionals on the use of Linux by year's end."
'Independent' report used MS-sourced data to trash OSS (Register)The Register uncovers the funding of a supposedly independent report used in a decision to use Microsoft software by the London borough of Newham. "According to Microsoft's press release of last month, "Newham's decision to partner with Microsoft follows an extensive platform evaluation at the Borough, in which the merits of, and overall value offered by Microsoft's software were rigorously assessed by Capgemini. Capgemini were selected to conduct the evaluation by Newham, and ran the evaluations as an independent third party. Fact One: None of this is untrue, as such, but a study by Capgemini, funded by Microsoft, was Microsoft's offer during pricing negotiations with Newham last autumn. Note that Cap Gemini's brief was to assess value offered by Microsoft software, and that it ran its evaluation as an independent third party. The Beast chooses its words carefully here.""
Novell chooses streamlined Linux desktop (vnunet)vnunet looks forward to SUSE's upcoming desktop release. "Nat Friedman, Novell vice president of R&D for desktop development, told vnunet.com that this was what enterprise customers wanted. 'Large organisations tell us they want a well-integrated and supported product, not [things such as] text editors,' said Friedman, one of Ximian's founders."
Sybase releases 'first free production database for Linux' (ZDNet UK)ZDNet UK covers the release by Sybase of the Express Edition Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) database for Linux. "Simon Riggs, a PostgreSQL developer, said on Thursday that he is not worried about the impact that ASE could have. Instead, he sees it as another sign that companies are worried about the impact of open-source databases. "It is not a threat at all," said Riggs. "In fact, it is a good sign. Companies obviously see free, open-source databases such as PostgreSQL as such a serious threat that they are going out of their way to produce a free database.""
Linux Adoption Linux poised for move from data centre to desktop - report (Register)The Register covers a Butler Group report that finds the Linux is ready for the data center. "Butler recommends Novell/SuSE and Red Hat as the distributions most worth considering for the data centre, but gives others a look-in on the desktop. Which is a conservative stance, but probably a sensible one if you're talking to people and companies without a great deal of open source knowledge and technical expertise."
Linux can work wonders for India (Sify.com)Sify.com is running an interview with Jyoti Satyanathan General Manager of Linux for IBM, India."Q: What, according to you, prompts the governments to adopt Linux in their day-to-day functions with citizens? What are the prime factors?" "A: Linux is cost-effective. This is one of the factors. More than this, it is freedom one can get from single ownership and freedom from architecture attracting many governments to go for Linux. Adoption of Linux is prime time in government."
The Best Tips from the Great Linux Desktop Migration Contest (O'ReillyNet)O'ReillyNet announces the results of its Great Linux Desktop Migration Contest. "The Great Linux Desktop Migration Contest asked for entries in three categories: write an essay on the Benefits of Migrating to Linux; present an example of a Phased Migration Plan; and give us three Tips for Migrating."
Linux at Work Linux cluster goes Orbital (NewsForge)NewsForge looks at Orbital Sciences' use of Linux clusters for solving fluid dynamics problems. "Orbital began to consider investing in its own high-power cluster. Fluent was using big Linux Networx clusters to do computations for Orbital and its other clients. A Linux cluster would be horizontally scalable, able to expand as Orbital's business grew. "We looked at some Sun clusters, but finally decided to go with Linux Networx because of the lower costs involved," Holst said. So in October 2003, Orbital bought and installed one of Linux Networx' "Evolocity" clusters, equipped with 24 Intel Xeon processors and Fluent 6.1 CFD software."
Interviews HP Delivers KDE on Laptops (KDE.News)KDE.News talks to Thomas Schneller about HP's nx5000 laptop, which is available with Linux pre-installed."Does power management and the winmodem work on the nx5000 as they do under Microsoft Windows?" "Yes, basically all hardware is working. ACPI is fully supported, so hibernating your Linux laptop is possible and also the winmodem works on this model. I also want to stress the fact that we welcome any feedback as we are eager to hear people's experiences with our product."
aKademy Interview: Lars Stetten About Unix Accessibility (KDE.News)KDE.News presents an interview with Lars Stetten on Unix accessibility. "Dear Mr. Stetten, you study computer science in Giessen. How do you estimate the situation for handicapped working with computers?The current situation with Linux is not so good. Sure, the SUSE installation kernel has had support for the braille line for many years, but you can't operate a graphical user interface with this feature alone."
Linspire me: Michael Robertson talks to vnunet.com (vnunet)Vnunet interviews Michael Robertson, founder of Linspire. "One of the myths of open source is that, well, you just put the free software out there and then it ends up on computers. It just doesn't work that way. The original equipment manufacturers need someone they can call, and they need to have an economic incentive. The source code might be freely floating around on the internet, but that doesn't mean it's free for the end consumer."
Resources Linux MIDI: a Brief History, Part 1 (Linux Journal)Linux Journal presents an overview of the creation and evolution of MIDI, from early standalone equipment to an all-in-one computerized composition environment. "The ALSA sequencer API is a most welcome evolution in Linux MIDI support. Compliant programs may be connected freely, with multiple inputs allowable on a single port. Graphic patch bays are available that display and edit the send/receive status of the available clients. Incidentally, ALSA's virmidi (virtual MIDI) ports appear to the system as though they are real ports, and their data may be routed to and from any other port, real or virtual."
Running Linux on an iPAQ (IBM developerWorks)Martyn Honeyford explains how to get Linux running on an iPAQ PDA. "Installing Linux on your iPAQ can be a great way to breathe new life into aging hardware or make an existing tool even better, particularly if you are a fan of Linux on the desktop. You can leverage your existing knowledge and enjoy the benefits of familiar (pun intended) free and open source software on the move. In this article, learn how to turbocharge your HP-Compaq iPAQ PDA with Linux."
How to Use ZenTest with Ruby (Linux Journal)Linux Journal introduces ZenTest, with examples of how to use it on Ruby code. "Ryan Davis has written a great tool called ZenTest, which creates test suites for existing bodies of code. Because a lot of people are new to refactoring, unit testing and ZenTest, this article serves as an introduction to this trio of tools."
Reviews Can open source software free your mind? (NewsForge)NewsForge looks at FreeMind. "How do you organize all those little notes and ideas that you have spread out all over the place in a way that you can actually use them and make have them make some sense? That's one of the goals of a class of software known as mind mapping. Once the realm only of high-priced commercial applications, there is now at least one open source option. It's called FreeMind and it's licensed under the GPL."
An Introduction to GraphViz (Linux Journal)Linux Journal reviews GraphViz. "GraphViz is a collection of tools for manipulating graph structures and generating graph layouts. Graphs can be either directed or undirected. GraphViz offers both graphical and command-line tools. A Perl interface also is available, but it is not covered here for reasons of generality. Graphical tools are not going to be discussed in this article either. Instead, this article focuses on using GraphViz from the command line."
IBM does Linux-only dance on Power (Register)The Register takes a look at IBM's new Power 5 Linux servers. "The first system in this new line will be the OpenPower 720, which arrives later this month. The four-processor box will run on either 1.5GHz or 1.65GHz Power5 chips and support up to 64GB of memory. IBM will offer both Red Hat and SuSE's enterprise Linux operating systems on the new box."
What's New in SpamAssassin 3.0 (O'ReillyNet)O'ReillyNet takes a look at SpamAssassin 3.0. "Naturally, SpamAssassin 3.0.0 includes many new static rules, and changes the definitions and scores of several old ones to reflect the changing nature of spam. For example, many rules focused on pharmaceutical spam are now included--drugs seem to have caught up with mortgages and pornography in the distribution of spam."
What's Next for X? (O'ReillyNet)Edd Dumbill reviews some of the upcoming capabilities coming to the X window system in an O'Reilly article. "I attended the talks given by X Window System wizards Keith Packard and Jim Gettys at the recent Linux Symposium and a got a taste of what's coming soon."
Miscellaneous To Evil!: Evil of August 2004 (O'ReillyNet)Danny O'Brien seeks out the evildoers in the open source world in what appears to be the first of a series of O'ReillyNet columns. "Now, we know that the furthermost pits of hell are reserved for those who break licensing agreements (unless its clickthrough, where you get put in purgatory until the law can be clarified). But we should also give pause before we place the epaullettes of satan on someone who, let's be fair, learnt the intricacies of the SCSI bus so that we do not. Anyone who has played with SCSI knows that the interface is, frankly, Lovecraftian. A few terminators and DIP switches in, and you're constantly running saving throws for your sanity. Jörg [Schilling's] moment of alleged evil was fleeting, and he removed the restriction in the subsequent increment of cdrecord. Let's say that he was possessed by some old ide-scsi bug, and speaking in tongues at the time."
Is Sender ID Dead in the Water? - No MARID Working Group Consensus (Groklaw)Groklaw looks at some of the controversy behind the Sender-ID mail standard.""'The broadest adoption possible and the most consistent standards are in the interests of not just senders, not just ISPs, but of consumers,' said Trevor Hughes, executive director of the ESPC. "Hughes also points out that even if it doesn't become a standard, Sender ID will still be a factor if the major ISPs adopt it. "'Where we stand is that Sender ID is going to be a reality for large senders,' he said. 'We don't question the sincerity of the folks who are raising concerns over open source compatibility. We just haven't come up with the same concerns.'"" "Hmm. Did he just say the ESPC doesn't care about compatibility in a standard? Yes. I believe he did."
How to fight software patents -- singly and together (NewsForge)Richard M. Stallman has written an article on NewsForge in which he compares software patents to land mines. "fighting patents one by one will never eliminate the danger of software patents, any more than swatting mosquitoes will eliminate malaria. You cannot expect to defeat every patent that comes at you, any more than you can expect to kill every monster in a video game: sooner or later, one is going to defeat you and damage your program. The U.S. patent office issues around 100,000 software patents each year; our best efforts could never clear these mines as fast as they plant more."
Linux standard gains big-name backers (News.com)News.com covers LSB supporters. "A number of software makers and well-known IT vendors have agreed to endorse the Free Standards Group's latest Linux standard to help create common ground for companies building open-source technologies, the organization said Monday. The San Francisco-based nonprofit reported that open-source software makers around the world have already adopted the guideline, known as Linux Standard Base 2.0. In addition, the Free Standards Group said a handful of high-profile vendors already working with Linux technology are backing the standard, including Advanced Micro Devices, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Intel."
Page editor: Forrest Cook Announcements Non-Commercial announcements OSDL/FSG announce collaborationThe Free Standards Group (FSG) and the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) have announced a collaboration to accelerate enterprise adoption of the Linux Standard Base (LSB) with new services to support software vendors developing applications for Linux.
Commercial announcements IBM Rolls Out New Linux Server Using Power5 ChipIBM has announced a new computer server using its Power5 microprocessor tuned for the Linux operating system. "The OpenPower 720 server will be available Sept. 24 and can be powered by as many as four Power5 chips, IBM said. In the first half of next year, the company will start selling OpenPower servers using two Power5 processors."
Intel NetStructure Host Media Processing Software announcedIntel has announced a new telecom software package for Linux. "The Intel NetStructure Host Media Processing Software release 1.2 for Linux is the first high density, commercially supported software offering the flexibility and value of open platforms. This software-only building block for communications providers eliminates the need for specialized telephony boards with digital signal processors, but still provides the media processing power to develop applications such as interactive voice response, voice mail, unified messaging and conferencing."
Modulus Video Introduces Real-Time MPEG-4 AVC Encoding and Decoding SystemsModulus Video, Inc. has announced a new Linux-based video encoder/decoder. "Built on an open Intel Linux platform, Modulus Video products leverage the entire MPEG-4 AVC standard to offer an easily deployable, highly scalable and cost-effective solution for reliably delivering broadcast-quality video using significantly less bandwidth than legacy MPEG-2 systems."
MySQL Appoints Maurizio Gianola Vice President of Software EngineeringMySQL has announced the appointment of Maurizio Gianola as Vice President of Software Engineering at its Silicon Valley Office.
Bernard Liautaud Joins MySQL Board of DirectorsMySQL has announced the appointment of Bernard Liautaud to its Board of Directors. "Liautaud is one of the most highly respected software executives in Silicon Valley and Europe. He co-founded Business Objects in 1990 and has built it into a nearly $900 million enterprise software vendor with more than 26,000 customers in over 80 countries. He took the company public on NASDAQ in September 1994, making it the first French software company listed in the United States."
Navicat 5.0.2 (MySQL tools)Navicat has released Navicat MySQL tools version 5.0.2, now with Stored Procedure and Batch Job Scheduling.
Linux-based telemarketingThe next time a telemarketer interrupts your dinner to try to sell you something, you can take some comfort in the fact that they are likely to be running on Linux. SER Solutions, Inc. has announced the availability of Call Processing System 8.0, with lots of great features like "third-party quality monitoring," and "sophisticated predictive dialing." "By utilizing Novell SUSE LINUX, SER is able to take advantage of new hardware and software available on the platform and leverage the reliability, security, scalability, and support Novell and SUSE LINUX are known for."
Sleepycat/MontaVista provide open source software for Motorola a780 in U.S.Sleepycat and MontaVista have announced that their embedded solutions have been chosen for the Motorola A780 smart phones.
Open Source Applications Leader SugarCRM Debuts Sugar Sales ProfessionalSugarCRM Inc. has announced the release of Sugar Sales Professional, a LAMP based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application.
New Books "CSS Cookbook" Released by O'ReillyO'Reilly has published the book CSS Cookbook by Christopher Schmitt.
"PDF Hacks" Released by O'ReillyO'Reilly has published the book PDF Hacks by Sid Steward.
"Managing Security with Snort and IDS Tools" Released by O'ReillyO'Reilly has published the book Managing Security with Snort and IDS Tools by Kerry Cox and Christopher Gerg.
No Starch Press releases "The Web Programmer's Desk Reference"No Starch Press has published the book The Web Programmer's Desk Reference by Lazaro Issi Cohen and Joseph Issi Cohen.
New Book: Foundations of Python Network ProgrammingAPress has published the book Foundations of Python Network Programming by John Goerzen.
Resources IOSN Releases Draft Primer on Free/Open Source Software LicensingIOSN has released a draft version of a primer on free/open source software licensing. The primer is available for review and feedback.
LDP Weekly NewsThe September 15, 2004 edition of the Linux Documentation Project Weekly News is out with the latest documentation releases.
LPI July/August NewsletterThe July/August edition of the Linux Professional Institute newsletter is online.
Advances in Samba4Volker Lendecke's paper Advances in Samba4 is available in PDF format. "The paper offers a nice overview of the reasoning behind creating Samba4, and outlines four areas of code where Samba4 is an improvement over Samba 3."
Contests and Awards Linus wins Economist awardThe Economist has announced the winners of its 3rd annual "Innovation Awards." The victor in the computing area is Linus Torvalds.
KTurtle Won 3rd Prize in Dutch Educational ContestKTurtle, a Logo programming language interpreter for KDE, has won third prize in a Dutch Educational contest. "The technical jury was very pleased with the looks of KTurtle, good configuration options and a very nice manual and the educational jury said "Some renewed attention to LOGO is very much welcome.""
Fred Trotter Receives 2004 Linux Medical News Achievement Award (LinuxMedNews)Fred Trotter has been awarded the 2004 Linux Medical News Achievement Award. "Trotter is the founder of the Free Medical Billing (FreeB) project as well as working on the FreeMed poject."
Event Reports Open source at medinfo2004 (LinuxMedNews)LinuxMedNews covers the open-source activity at the medinfo2004 conference. "The joint meeting of the IMIA, IMIA-NI and AMIA Open Source Working Groups was held yesterday, 8 September, at medinfo2004. We had a good attendance (40-50 people), with presentations on the 3 groups and then a discussion and session of interactive digital voting."
Upcoming Events Italian Code JamThe Italian Code Jam will be held on October 9, 2004 in the center of Engineering Department of Ferrara's University. "Some of the speakers that will take part are: Andrea Arcangeli, Moshe Bar, Francesco Ciriaci, Dave Cross, Alex Martelli, Allison Randall, Michele Simionato, Simo Sorce, e Larry Wall."
Events: September 16 - November 11, 2004
Web sites LinuxQuestions.org Wiki Reaches 2000 Article MarkThe LinuxQuestions.org Wiki has reached the 2000 article mile mark. "Released in February 2004, the LQ Wiki allows users to collaboratively build a free, complete and up-to-date Linux knowledgebase and aims to become the largest general-knowledge Linux repository on the web. It is free to join or use the LQ Wiki and any user can add or edit content. All content is licensed under a Creative Commons license, ensuring that it remains freely redistributable."
Software announcements This week's software announcementsHere are the software announcements, courtesy of Freshmeat.net. They are available in two formats:
Page editor: Forrest Cook
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