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LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 13, 2005Review: Linux Application Development, Second EditionIn the late 1990's, Linux began to attract large-scale attention beyond the relatively small, hacker community which had been working on it for some![[LAD cover]](/images/ns/linux-application-development.jpg)
time. With all that attention came many new developers who liked what they
saw and wanted to be a part of it. The book that many of those developers
kept next to their keyboard was the classic Linux Application
Development (LAD), by early Red Hat hackers Michael K. Johnson and Erik
W. Troan. LAD was published in 1998, meaning that, at this point, it is
vastly out of date. The Linux world does not stand still, and does not
make life easy for those who would publish technical reference books.
Trust your editor on this.
So it was a pleasant surprise to see a new edition of LAD show up in the mail. This core text, it turns out, has not gone out of maintenance after all. According to the preface:
You can now browse and search the entire content of this book at http://ladweb.net to make this book even
more useful to you.
As of this writing, the web site has not caught up with that claim - it still discusses the first edition (and with no "entire content") to browse. One assumes that situation will be rectified in time. If the book is being released under some sort of free license, however, that is not stated explicitly. The structure and content of the book has not changed all that much from the first edition: LAD still concerns itself with low-level Linux programming, system calls, and some C libraries. The updates are to be found in the details: the text now matches, for the most part, the interfaces provided by the 2.6 kernel and glibc 2.3. Some new interfaces (such as epoll()) have been covered, and there is a new chapter on security pitfalls and how to avoid them. The discussion of the socket interface covers IPv6, the regular expression discussion has been expanded, real-time signals are covered, etc. With these changes, LAD is, once again, the definitive reference for the low-level Linux C API. Whether you need to learn about memory allocation debugging facilities, the details of process management, file descriptor magic, or more, you're likely to find what you need in this book. Much of that information is also available in generic Unix texts; the difference is that LAD looks at exactly what Linux offers. While Linux follows the relevant standards to a great degree, there are many places where Linux diverges from the standards or offers extra capabilities. A reference book which documents the Linux way of doing things is a good thing. That said, your editor does have some quibbles with the second edition. One is that the update appears, in many places, to have been done in a hurry. The LGPL is called the "Library General Public License" - but it has not had that name for quite a few years now. The recommended system administration book is Sobel's A Practical Guide to Red Hat Linux 8. The (new) documentation of strace claims that it writes to the standard output, which is not true (it writes to stderr). Passwords, it claims, are usually stored in /etc/passwd. Many flags to the clone() system call are missing; a number of mmap() flags are absent as well. Your editor may have been willing to forgive all of this if the authors, while being nice enough to mention Linux Device Drivers, had noticed that a new edition has come out since 1998. Perhaps more to the point, however, LAD may be falling behind the way that applications are being developed for Linux. Your editor has certainly done his time writing ioctl() calls to control TTY parameters - but not recently. The chapters on virtual consoles and S-Lang seem rather quaint. While a great deal of Linux software is still developed in C, quite a bit is not. After reading LAD, one might almost conclude that graphical applications simply do not exist under Linux. The authors clearly had to limit their scope, and they cannot be faulted for failing to document, say, the GNOME and KDE libraries. But the second edition could have been an ideal vehicle for pointing developers toward the sorts of tools being used for new code, and away from writing TTY-oriented applications. That said, application developers still need to understand how to manage memory, create processes, handle signals, work with files, etc. The second edition of Linux Application Development fills that need and more; it is a most welcome update. It will, beyond doubt, find a location very near the keyboards of a great many Linux application hackers.
Debian and Mozilla - a study in trademarksThe Mozilla Foundation is the keeper of a number of increasingly important projects, including the Firefox web browser and the Thunderbird mail client. These programs are free software, licensed under the Mozilla Public License. Thus, one would think, distributors would have no trouble including these packages in their distributions. As the Debian Project's experience shows, however, free software can still come with certain kinds of strings attached.The issue at hand is trademarks. Mozilla Foundation software comes with trademarked names, and the use of those names is governed by the Mozilla Trademark Policy. If you want to distribute software called "Mozilla Firefox" or "Mozilla Thunderbird," you must adhere to a strict policy which includes signing an agreement with the Foundation and making almost no changes to the software. No extensions may be added, the list of search engines cannot be changed (they paid to be there, after all), etc. This highly-restrictive policy was never going to work with the Debian Project's needs. Another approach is the "community edition" policy. A wider (but still narrow) range of changes is allowed, and the distributor can use the names "Firefox Community Edition." The commands can be called firefox and thunderbird. The Foundation maintains a veto right over uses of the "community edition" names, however:
Community members and organizations can start using the "Firefox
Community Edition" and "Thunderbird Community Edition" trademarks
from day one, but the Mozilla Foundation may require individuals or
teams to stop doing so in the future if they are redistributing
software with low quality and efforts to remedy the situation have
not succeeded.
So anybody distributing a "community edition" must live with the possibility of receiving a "takedown notice" from the Mozilla Foundation at any time. The Foundation's goals are certainly understandable:
...we need to keep enough control over our trademarks to make sure
they are a sign of quality and safety. It needs to be impossible,
for example, for someone to release a product called 'Firefox' that
has added spyware. We want to avoid someone building a
highly-optimized but unstable build and passing it off as
official.
Most readers will agree that a spyware-enabled Firefox is a bad idea, though whether purveyors of spyware will have much respect for trademarks is an open question. The Debian Project insists on shipping nothing but free software, and freedom certainly includes the right to modify the code. Debian currently includes patches which may go beyond the trademark policy's guidelines - an extension manager which understands multi-user systems, for example. A strict reading of the community edition guidelines suggests that not even security patches could be distributed without prior approval from the Mozilla Foundation. The Debian Project certainly wants to be able to distribute modified versions of the code; the Project is also known for a close and literal reading of licenses. So the Debian developers are concerned about the whole trademark issue. The Mozilla Foundation wants to work with Debian to get past these issues:
We want people to use Thunderbird in Debian, and to know they are
using Thunderbird, and to get the high quality experience people
get from using our Thunderbird. And we want to come to some
arrangement with Debian to make that possible.
This arrangement could possibly include allowing Debian to apply its own patches to Firefox and Thunderbird and still use the community names. The Foundation seems to have a fairly high level of trust in Debian's ability to keep the quality up. Debian's users are another story, however:
However, you guys want the freedom to ship software that sucks -
or, more to the point and more likely, want to be able to easily
give your software to other people and allow them to make it suck
and then ship it. If that software ships using our trademarks, then
that is incompatible with our trademark goals. So if we can't come
to some arrangement that lets Debian use them but asks
redistributors to contact us or remove them, then it's increasingly
looking like we can't square this circle.
So it looks somewhat like the Foundation would like to make a special policy exemption for Debian. The problem there is that Debian-specific licenses violate section 8 of the Debian Free Software Guidelines. Those guidelines apply to software licenses, not trademark policies, but the principle remains the same. The Debian Project is unlikely to accept a policy which does not extend to its users. The discussion has quieted - it may have gone into a non-public mode - so it is difficult to say where things stand now. If an agreement cannot be found, Debian will still be able to distribute Firefox and Thunderbird - they are free software - but different names will have to be chosen. "Iceweasel" has been the working code name for this scenario; many other names have been suggested as well. This outcome would not be pleasing to any of the parties involved, however; one assumes it will be avoided if at all possible. Mozilla is unlikely to be the last project that decides that it wants to achieve some sort of quality control through its trademarks. That wish is understandable, but it is also very much at odds with the spirit of free software, which involves letting go of the code. One has to accept that not everybody will have the same idea of what makes "high quality." Incidents of free software projects being harmed by distribution of poorly-done modifications have been rare, and, perhaps, are not worth the worry that is being put into them here. Mozilla has done an outstanding job of creating powerful and useful software; now, perhaps, the Foundation may want to relax and trust its users just a little more.
IBM's patent pledgeOn January 11, IBM announced that it would make 500 patents available for use in projects using Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved licenses. The list of patents and IBM's pledge is available as a PDF. According to the statement, IBM has indicated it will not assert any of the 500 patents against distributors of open source software, so long as the distributing party does not file lawsuits using patents or other intellectual property rights against open source software.The list of patents ranges from a "Method and apparatus for batching the receipt of data packets" (U.S. Patent Number 5,260,942) to a "System and method for ensuring QoS in a token ring network" (5,642,421). Given that IBM has listed 500 patents, this reporter has not had time to read each patent, but suffice it to say that the patents cover a wide range of applications from human language processing to web services and data processing. Reaction to IBM's move has been mixed. OSDL's Stuart Cohen is apparently in support of IBM's pledge, and Larry Lessig was also quoted as saying that it was "exciting." Others were not so impressed. Florian Mueller points out that "We're talking about roughly one percent of IBM's worldwide patent portfolio. They file that number of patents in about a month's time." Mueller also called it a "diversionary tactic, which may be accurate given IBM's support of the European Patent Directive that has been denounced by many of the leading members of the open source community. There is ample room for skepticism. IBM's move offers up only a small portion of its patent portfolio for use by open source projects. To put it another way, IBM is withholding the remainder of its patent portfolio, without any assurance that open source projects (with the exception of the Linux kernel) are safe from potential litigation. We spoke to IBM's manager of worldwide Linux marketing strategy, Adam Jollans, about the patents. Jollans said that IBM was "seeing a shift from innovation in commercial companies to cooperative innovation," and that the patent pledge was a way to support that. We asked why IBM picked 500 rather than 50 or 5,000, or simply giving open source a pass altogether. Jollans said that IBM "has to start somewhere" and that 500 was a number that would prove it was a significant announcement. No reason was given for holding back the majority of IBM's patent portfolio. Jollans did say that IBM's choice of patents was not random, and were picked because they were "500 that we believe will be useful" to open source. IBM's move could also be seen as an attempt to take some of the steam out of the anti-software patent movement in Europe as the EU considers a motion to start over with the software patent directive. We also asked why IBM had not chosen to take a stand against software patents altogether. Jollans said that IBM supported patents, but that "patents should reflect innovation rather than just a general idea." Jollans said that IBM is encouraging other companies to step up and offer the use of their patents for open source as well. Whether or not any companies will do so is yet to be seen. By offering only a small sample of its patent portfolio, IBM is well-positioned to take offensive action should it ever decide to do so. If there were an open source project that IBM wanted to quash, there are more patents where the first 500 came from. IBM has shown no interest in launching patent attacks against free software, and the company certainly understands what such an attack would do to its standing in the community. Even so, there's no guarantee that IBM will always be so well-intentioned. Ultimately, IBM's "patent pledge" is a good PR move, but little more. IBM has little to gain from asserting its patents against open source projects, and stands to benefit from the continued development of Linux and other open source projects. By offering a non-aggression pact towards open source projects, IBM effectively says it's OK to develop programs that might infringe on (some of) its patents, so long as those programs are available to IBM under open source terms. That's a far cry from the desired outcome of barring software patents altogether, but it's still a step in the right direction.
Security Linux kernel securityThere has been a surprising series of kernel security problems reported over the last week. These include:
Fixes for the first two vulnerabilities have been merged into the pre-2.6.11 BitKeeper repository; the last set will be fixed as well, but with less urgency. Fixes can also be found in the -ac tree and in the updated kernels being issued by distributors. One concern that has been raised by these disclosures is that the new kernel development model, by encouraging such large changes between releases, is allowing the creation of more security problems. While that worry could yet prove to be justified, all of the vulnerabilities listed above, with the exception of the RLIMIT_MEMLOCK denial of service problem, are present in the 2.4 kernel as well. They were not introduced or enabled by the new development model. Another concern is more valid, however: the kernel development project does not have an official security contact or process for handling security problems. Developers who know how the kernel process works have no trouble getting consideration for security-related problems and patches, but the whole process looks far more opaque to the rest of the world. There is a clear need for an easily-found contact for kernel security issues. Chris Wright, who has done a fair amount of security-related kernel work, is pushing for improvements in this area, and, most importantly, has volunteered to do much of the work. So chances are this problem will not last much longer.
New vulnerabilities bmv: insecure temporary file
dillo: format string vulnerability
exim: buffer overflows
hylafax: weak hostname and username validation
kdelibs: unsanitzied input
kernel: race condition, privilege escalation
Konqueror: Java sandbox vulnerabilities
lintian: insecure temporary directory
mailman: cross-site scripting
namazu2: cross-site scripting vulnerability
nfs-utils: arbitrary code execution
o3read: buffer overflow during file conversion
phpgroupware: information disclosure vulnerability
poppassd_pam: unauthorized password changing
TikiWiki: arbitrary command execution
UnRTF: Buffer overflow
vilistextum: buffer overflow vulnerability
Updated vulnerabilities a2ps: input validation error
cdrecord: failure to drop privilege
cups: multiple vulnerabilities
cyrus-sasl: remote buffer overflow
debmake: insecure temp directories
dhcp: format string vulnerability
ethereal: multiple vulnerabilities
Filename disclosure vulnerability in fam
Foomatic: Arbitrary command execution in foomatic-rip
FreeRADIUS: denial of service
gaim: buffer overflow in MSN protocol
Gallery: cross-site scripting vulnerability
gtk2, gdk-pixbuf: buffer overflows
gettext: Insecure temporary file handling
ghostscript: symlink vulnerabilities
glibc: Information leak with LD_DEBUG
glibc: tempfile vulnerability in catchsegv script
gnome-vfs: backend script vulnerabilities
groff: insecure temp file
groff: insecure temporary directory
gtkhtml: malformed messages cause crash
htmlheadline: insecure temporary files
imlib: buffer overflows in image decoding
imlib2: buffer overflows
iptables: missing initialization
kdelibs: unwanted email origination
kerberos5: execution of arbitrary code by authenticated user
kernel: 32bit emulation privilege escalation
kernel-utils: setuid vulnerability
libgd2: buffer overflows in PNG handling
libpng: multiple vulnerabilities
libtiff: buffer overflow
libxml2 - arbitrary code execution
libxml2: multiple buffer overflows
libxpm4: stack and integer overflows
LinPopUp: buffer overflow in message reply
lvm10: creates insecure temporary directory
Midnight Commander: extfs vfs vulnerability
mikmod: buffer overflow
mozilla products: arbitrary code execution and other vulnerabilities
mpg123: buffer overflow bug
mpg321: format string vulnerability
MPlayer: multiple overflows
mysql: several vulnerabilities
nasm: Buffer overflow vulnerability
netkit-telnet: invalid free pointer
netkit-telnet-ssl: format string vulnerability
nfs-utils: denial of service
openssl: der_chop script temp file vulnerability
OpenSSL: denial of service vulnerabilities
pcal: buffer overflows
perl information leak
php: remotely exploitable memory errors
php: multiple vulnerabilities
PHProjekt: PHP code execution
ProZilla: Multiple vulnerabilities
qt3: BMP image parser heap overflow
rp-pppoe, pppoe: missing privilege dropping
ruby: infinite loop
samba: integer overflow vulnerability
sharutils: arbitrary code execution
shoutcast server: buffer overflow
sox: buffer overflow
SpamAssassin: Denial of Service vulnerability
Subversion: Remote heap overflow
sudo: environment variable sanitizing
File overwrite vulnerability in tar and unzip
tetex: insecure temp files
tiff: buffer overflows
unarj: buffer overflow vulnerability
vim: modeline problems
wv: buffer overflow
XChat 2.0.x SOCKS5 Vulnerability
xine-lib: arbitrary code execution
xine-lib: buffer overflows
xine-ui - insecure temporary file creation
xorg-x11: integer overflows
xpdf: buffer overflow
xpdf: integer overflows
xzgv integer overflows
zip: arbitrary code execution
zlib: denial of service
Resources Metasploit Framework v2.3 releasedVersion v2.3 of the Metasploit Framework is out. "The 2.3 release includes three user interfaces, 46 exploits and 68 payloads."
Page editor: Jonathan Corbet Kernel development Brief items Kernel release statusThe current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.11-rc1, announced by Linus on January 11. This massive patch set includes a new CPU time abstraction, AMD dual-core support, a memory technology device/JFFS update, an ALSA update, some CPU scheduler tweaks, a number of latency-reduction patches, a buddy allocator rework (removal of the bitmap to make life easier for hotplug memory implementations), the unified spinlock initialization patch, SMP support for the ARM architecture, debugfs (which, it seems, is meant to be mounted on /sys/kernel/debug), a big USB update, an ATA-over-Ethernet driver, mmap() support for binary sysfs attributes, some power management work, the big kernel semaphore patch, the four-level page table patch, a VIA PadLock crypto engine driver, a new SKB allocation function, ACPI hotplug support, the full InfiniBand patch set (covered here last November), a big direct rendering manager (DRM) rework, a new and simplified file readahead mechanism, a set of user-mode Linux patches, a big set of input patches, a new set of "sparse" annotations, an NFS update, an iptables update, support for the Fujitsu FR-V architecture, in-inode extended attribute support for ext3, some SELinux scalability improvements, and lots of fixes. See the long-format changelog for the details.Note that 2.6.11-rc1 breaks on x86-64 NUMA systems. Linus's BitKeeper repository contains, as of this writing, a fix for the page fault handler security hole, a fix for the x86-64 NUMA problem, and a few other small patches. The current prepatch from Andrew Morton is 2.6.10-mm2. Recent changes to -mm include multiple AGP support and a number of fixes. The current 2.4 prepatch is 2.4.29-rc2, released by Marcelo on January 12. The -rc releases include a number of new security fixes and some driver updates. For 2.2 users, Marc-Christian Petersen has released 2.2.27-rc1 with the latest security fixes.
Kernel development news Quote of the week
Unfortunately, the stabilization you're talking about was
essentially too late; distros had long-since wildly diverged, they
had frozen on older releases, and the damage to Linux' reputation
was already done. I'm also unaware of major commercial distros
(e.g. Red Hat, SuSE) using 2.4.x more recent than 2.4.21 as a
baseline, and it's also notable that one of the largest segments of
the commercial userbase I see is using a distro kernel based on
2.4.9.
Circular pipesOne of the many changes slipped quietly into BitKeeper over the last week was this patch from Linus changing how pipes are implemented internally. For a long time, pipes have used a single page to buffer data between the reader and the writer. If a process writes more than one page, it will block until the reader has consumed enough data to allow the rest to fit within the buffer. The 2.6.11 pipe implementation will be rather different.Pipes now use a circular buffer, as inexpertly shown in the diagram below:
![[Circular pipe diagram]](/images/ns/kernel/circular-pipe.png)
The curbuf pointer (it's an integer index, actually) indicates the first buffer in the array which contains data; nrbufs tells how many buffers contain data. The page structures are allocated when needed, and do not hang around when not in use. Since both readers and writers can manipulate nrbufs, some sort of locking (the pipe semaphore, in this case) is needed to serialize access. The pipe_buffer structure includes length and offset fields, so each entry in the circular buffer can contain less than a full page of data. Linus says that the new implementation gives a "30-90%" improvement in pipe bandwidth, with only a small cost in latency (since pages must be allocated when data passes through the pipe). The performance improvements are entirely attributable to the larger amount of buffering; readers and writers will block less often when passing data through the pipe. It is a way of speeding things up by throwing memory at the problem. Better pipe performance was not Linus's main purpose in making this change, however; he has a longer-term plan in mind. The mechanism used to implement circular pipes will evolve into a general mechanism for passing data streams through the kernel. Quite a few changes will be required to get there, and there seems to be no hurry, but there is clearly a long-term goal in mind. Among other things, the buffers within the circular structure will gain a reference count, allowing there to be multiple readers or writers. The idea here is to implement a sort of in-kernel tee operation which would let data streams be split without additional copying. The example given by Linus is some sort of video capture device which would feed its data into one of these buffers. A process could obtain data from the buffer and display it in an on-screen window; meanwhile, another process would be capturing the stream and writing it to a file somewhere - perhaps with little or no user-space intervention. The circular buffers will also gain the usual structure full of method pointers which would allow specific users to change how the basic operations are performed. Once that is in place, two new system calls would be added:
Longtime followers of Linux kernel discussions will notice a strong similarity between all of the above and Larry McVoy's splice proposal. Linus's implementation works at a lower level, however, and avoids many of the problems he saw with Larry's approach. Those who are curious about where all this is going may want to look at this explanation from Linus, where he goes into detail and concludes:
I'm clearly enamoured with this concept. I think it's one of those
few "RightThing(tm)" that doesn't come along all that often. I
don't know of anybody else doing this, and I think it's both useful
and clever. If you now prove me wrong, I'll hate you forever ;)
There is a remaining practical issue with the current implementation. No coalescing of data written into a circular buffer is performed. Linus did things that way because he wants to make life easy for high-bandwidth, zero-copy streams using these buffers. To that end, nothing touches a page once it has added to a buffer. The problem is that, in the worst case, a process writing a single byte at a time to a pipe can consume 16 pages of memory (with the default configuration) to hold 16 bytes worth of data. Linus initially noted that nobody doing single-byte I/O should expect good performance, and suggested that people not do that. It turns out, however, that this behavior breaks a crucial application - highly parallel kernel compiles. So coalescing of writes is likely to be added in the near future.
Merging the realtime security moduleThe Linux audio development community has a longstanding problem: many audio applications require very short latencies to avoid losing data, but the Linux kernel makes it hard to get the sort of response times needed. Over time, the audio hackers have developed a solution which works reasonably well for them, and which they would like to see merged into the mainline kernel. There has been strong opposition, however, leaving the audio community feeling, once again, that its needs are being passed over by the kernel developers.The code in question is the realtime security module, which was covered briefly here last September. This module, when loaded, makes a simple change to the Linux protection mechanism: any process running with a designated group ID is given the CAP_SYS_NICE, CAP_IPC_LOCK, and CAP_SYS_RESOURCE capabilities. Thus, any user who has membership in the special group can raise priorities, lock pages into physical memory, and exceed resource limits. With these capabilities, a suitably aware audio application can ensure that it will be able to respond to events within the required time. A couple of objections have been raised to the inclusion of the realtime module. One is that it is a specialized hack for a specific set of users which has no place in a general-purpose kernel. The GID-based mechanism is seen as being ugly and hard to administer in the long term. A few kernel hackers have been quite vocal in their opinion that, until these issues have been addressed, this module should not be merged. They have been less vocal, however, on just how audio users should satisfy their needs without offending the sensibilities of the kernel community. Nonetheless, some progress has been made. The memory locking issue has been solved via the new resource limits which were added in 2.6.9. By setting the limits appropriately, a system administrator can allow otherwise unprivileged users to lock a bounded number of pages into physical memory. A bit of PAM configuration work should suffice to deal with that part of the problem. The other issue, however, is response time from the CPU scheduler. Ingo Molnar has noted that the kernel's handling of regular "nice" levels is much improved in 2.6.10. Audio hacker Jack O'Quin checked it out and found that things had improved, though the maximum response time was still far worse than can be had by running in the SCHED_FIFO class. The reasons for this behavior are still being investigated; interference from high-priority kernel threads may be part of the problem. Even if the response were adequate, however, raising priorities is still a privileged operation. That issue could, perhaps, be addressed via yet another resource limit which would allow individual users to raise their priorities within an administrator-set of bounds. If the remaining response time issues could be addressed, this new limit could be part of the overall solution, though it would take some time for updated utilities to get into the hands of the users who need them. Another approach which has been mentioned would be to generalize the realtime module to address a wider range of needs. If it could be set up to hand out any set of capabilities to given users or groups, it would at least be useful to more people. It could, for example, replace the current group-based hack which gives access to the "hugetlb" mechanism. It would still be setting policies in the kernel by way of user and group IDs, which is not a popular idea, but it would not be quite the niche tool that it is now. A first pass at such a module has been posted by Olaf Dietsche; it takes an interesting approach by having much of the relevant information stored in the form of group ownership on sysfs attributes. A more comprehensive solution would be to make capabilities work properly. After all, that is what capabilities are supposed to be for: to allow precisely-defined bits of privilege to be granted in the situations where they are needed. The problems there are that Linux capabilities are currently broken, fixing them is a tricky job that nobody seems to want to take on at the moment, and, in any case, administering a truly capability-based system is an exercise in complexity. Capabilities seem unlikely to be part of the solution anytime soon. One interesting aspect of the discussion is what has not been mentioned. SELinux should be able to solve this problem; it exists to provide ultimate control over what every user and program can do. Nobody, however, has wanted to see what happens when musicians attempt to administer SELinux, it would seem. The realtime preemption work has also been strangely absent from the discussion - and from the kernel mailing lists in general. As of this writing, no real solution seems to have been found. There are enough kernel hackers sympathetic to the needs of audio hackers, however, that some sort of resolution should be possible. Linux should be the ultimate playground for audio developers; it would be a shame if the kernel continued to get in their way. (For more background, see this history of the realtime LSM by Jack O'Quin).
The abrupt un-exporting of symbolsThis seems like a conversation we have seen before: Paul McKenney is asking to have an exported symbol restored for use by an proprietary IBM module. This time around, Paul has submitted a patch requesting that two symbols (files_lock and set_fs_root()) be exported to all modules. It is proving to be a hard sell.files_lock is a spinlock used within the VFS layer; set_fs_root() is used to change the root directory for (one process's view of) a filesystem. They were used by IBM's MVFS to a novel end: MVFS implements a revision control system internally, and allows each process to see a different revision of the file tree. By using these symbols, MVFS was able to make the filesystem behave differently for each process. With 2.6.9, that worked great, but those symbols are no longer exported in 2.6.10. Paul has asked that they be restored so that the MVFS module can work again. The export was removed because the kernel developers feel that no code outside of the VFS layer should be making changes in the filesystem namespace. The tricks that MVFS is performing with set_fs_root() would be better done with bind mounts - in user space. It is also felt that any code using set_fs_root() or files_lock can only be a fundamental part of the kernel, and thus a derived product; there is no legal way, according to the relevant kernel developers, that a proprietary module can legally use them. For these reasons, the exports were removed, and there is strong resistance to restoring them. Nobody disagrees with the reasoning behind the change. Not everybody thinks that it was appropriate to remove the symbols with no notice, however. In particular, Linus thinks there was no reason to break things so abruptly:
I'm known for happily breaking binary modules, but I think we
should do it only if we have a reason _other_ than "let's break a
module".
Andrew Morton also thinks the exports should be restored for a period of time - a position which gained him an accusation of supporting IBM's position as a payback for IBM's funding of OSDL. Despite Linus's and Andrew's position, as of this writing, the exports of those symbols have not been restored. This whole episode restarted the discussion of what the proper way is to remove deprecated features when there is no unstable kernel series in sight. Andrew proposed the creation of a file (feature-removal-schedule.txt) in the Documentation directory which would list things slated for removal, and the relevant dates. That file has been created; as of this writing it lists devfs and some CPU frequency files in /proc. This file will be helpful for some users, but it probably will not make life easier for people maintaining out-of-tree code; Christoph Hellwig and others have made it clear that they will continue to remove "unneeded" exports without notice as they are identified. Life will continue to be difficult, it seems, for code maintained outside of the mainline tree.
Patches and updates Kernel trees
Core kernel code
Development tools
Device drivers
Documentation
Filesystems and block I/O
Janitorial
Memory management
Networking
Security-related
Miscellaneous
Page editor: Jonathan Corbet Distributions News and Editorials SUSE LINUX 9.2 on AMD64SUSE has been making a 64-bit edition of SUSE LINUX since version 8.2, released in April 2003. Originally, only the product's main components, such as the kernel and essential libraries were 64-bit enabled, but as the developers gained experience in porting applications to AMD64, the distribution became much more complete in terms of 64-bit support. Up until version 9.1 the 64-bit edition of SUSE LINUX was sold separately (at a slight premium), but starting with 9.2, the commercially distributed Professional edition now includes both i586 and x86_64 variants of SUSE LINUX. Last week, two months after the official release, a 3.1GB DVD image with SUSE LINUX 9.2 Professional was made available for free download and we took the opportunity to give the 64-bit edition of SUSE's flagship product a closer look.We installed SUSE LINUX 9.2 on a system with the following specifications: AMD64 3500+ processor (2.2GHz), K8N Neo2 (Socket939) mainboard from Micro-Star International, 2 GB of DDR SDRAM, 2 x 120 GB Maxtor hard disks, Plextor PX-712A DVD/CD rewritable drive, and NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 graphics card. The monitor was a standard 19 inch LCD from Mozo International. We downloaded the DVD image from one of SUSE's FTP/HTTP mirrors. Although the main 'suse' directory is split into separate i386 and x86_64 subdirectories, the 9.2 directory under x86_64 is just a symbolic link to the same directory under i386, which is then further subdivided into i586, i686 (only a handful of libraries are optimized for i686), noarch and x86_64 directories. Similarly, the DVD image includes separate directories containing 32-bit and 64-bit applications. Compared to the boxed edition of SUSE LINUX Professional, the freely downloadable DVD only contains a subset of the available RPM files, but these are complete enough for most users. If missing applications are desired, it is easy to configure YaST's package installation module to point to one of the mirrors and download and install missing applications and their dependencies directly from an FTP or HTTP server. For those who don't own a DVD writer, SUSE also provides a traditional network installation ISO image, which can be used to initiate a SUSE installation from any of the available mirrors. There is not much to say about the installation process other than it was smooth and fast. Some users claim that YaST is confusing in some places, but since we have previously completed many SUSE installations, we found our way around the maze of options easily. More importantly, YaST correctly detected and configured all our hardware, without exception. As for package installation, we selected a complete graphical workstation with KDE and GNOME, but despite the large number of packages that had to be copied from the DVD to hard disk, the installation was over in about 15 minutes. The only nitpick we had with the installer was the fact that it did not give us a choice between a 32-bit or a 64-bit system - the installer simply assumed that since the processor was of a AMD64 variety, we would automatically want a 64-bit operating system. One interesting observation: unlike in SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9, Novell's name and logos are not particularly obvious in SUSE LINUX 9.2. The installation screen claimed that this release was designed for "technically skilled home users and Linux enthusiasts" (a term popularized by Red Hat when it was trying to convince corporations using its free distribution to migrate to Red Hat's subscription service), which perhaps indicates that we are beginning to see a more clear product separation between Novell Linux and SUSE LINUX (in a fashion resembling the split of Red Hat Linux into Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Core). Although it seems unlikely that Novell will move towards a completely open, Fedora-style development model in the foreseeable future, the fact that the networking giant is now providing the popular SUSE distribution in the form of a freely downloadable ISO image and that it has GPL-ed the YaST configuration utility, is an indication that Novell is finding Red Hat's business and development model attractive enough to borrow ideas from. As was the case with Fedora, Mandrakelinux, and other 64-bit distributions we reviewed earlier, SUSE also provides several 32-bit applications and corresponding libraries and their dependencies. Besides the usual culprits, such as OpenOffice.org (rumor has it that the upcoming version 2.0 will have its code cleaned up and it will be possible to compile OpenOffice.org 2.0 for 64-bit architectures), other applications that were 32-bit only were the demo editions of some of the commercial programs supplied by SUSE, including MainActor (video editing software), Moneyplex (home banking software), Textmaker and Planmaker, but also RealPlayer, Acrobat Reader, Eclipse (a Java-based IDE) and FlashPlayer. Interestingly, after installing FlashPlayer (the plugin was found in /usr/lib/browser-plugins), Flash animations were displayed correctly in Konqueror, but not in Firefox. SUSE LINUX 9.2 for x86_64 turned out to be an enjoyable distribution. It was much less buggy than Mandrakelinux 10.1, and as solid as Fedora Core 3, with an additional advantage of having included several multimedia and useful non-free applications (or scripts for easy installation of non-free applications, such as the NVIDIA driver or MS TrueType fonts) that are not distributed with Fedora Core. On checking out third-party repositories for SUSE LINUX, we were surprised to find that APT for SUSE now distributes an amazing range of RPM packages for x86_64, including multimedia stuff, as well as the latest KDE and Mozilla builds, all available through APT and Synaptic, and signed by their respective package maintainers. In fact, the number of available 64-bit third-party RPMs for SUSE was higher than that for Fedora Core or Mandrakelinux! And although the development of SUSE LINUX is still done mostly behind closed doors, it is amazing to see that the 64-bit edition of SUSE LINUX is now available for free download, while the 64-bit edition of Mandrakelinux is not. Quite a turnaround of events, compared to a few years ago.
Distribution News Ubuntu Hoary live CD availableFor those of you wondering where the Ubuntu 'Hoary' distribution is going: an experimental live CD is now available. There are still some rough edges to be aware of; read the announcement (click below) for the details.
SUSE Security Summary Report SUSE-SR:2005:01SUSE has fixed a number of minor security issues in the kernel, acroread, iproute2, namazu, mpg123, subversion-viewcvs, postgresql, libxml2 and xpdf. Click below for details.
Discontinued SUSE Linux Distributions: 8.1With the release of the SUSE Linux 9.2 FTP edition, SUSE Security has announced that the SUSE Linux 8.1 version for home users will be discontinued soon. Having provided security-relevant fixes for more than two years, vulnerabilities found in SUSE Linux 8.1 after January 31st 2005 will no longer be fixed. Click below for more information.
Fedora Core updatesFC3 updates: man-pages-ja (updates and bug fixes), ruby (new upstream release), gpdf (minor security fix), hotplug (fix usb remove events), system-config-samba-1.2.25 (brown paper bag release for 1.2.23), sane-backends (resolves issues concerning device permissions for USB scanners), gtk2 (fix some threading lockups in the file chooser), selinux-policy-targeted (allow ldconfig to run with full privileges), policycoreutils (backport restorecon and fixfiles from rawhide), selinux-policy-targeted (require policycoreutils for selinux-policy-targeted), yum (new yum release fixes many small bugs), system-config-samba (bug fixes), system-config-services (throw away stderr), cups (fixes a small regression), subversion (latest release of Subversion 1.1, including bug fixes), vim (fixes a modeline vulnerability), system-config-samba (more bug fixes), selinux-policy-targeted (allow dhcpd to read certs files).FC2 updates: man-pages-ja (updates and bug fixes), gpdf (minor security fix), cups (fixes a small regression), initscripts (fix the mounting of usbfs on boot), epiphany-1.2.7-0.2.0 (rebuild because of Mozilla API changes), epiphany-1.2.7-0.2.2 (rebuild because of Mozilla API changes), vim (update vim to version 6.3 with many bug fixes).
Mandrakelinux updatesMandrakelinux 10.1 updates: xscreensaver (bug fix), g-wrap (fixes a compilation error in g-wrap which prevented gnucash from running on Mandrakelinux 10.1/x86_64), kde (a variety of bug fixes for various components of kdeaddons, kdebase, kdelibs, kdenetwork, and kdepim).
New Distributions Pingo LinuxPingo Linux is a Slovenian Linux distribution intended for a complete home desktop, including office tools, system administration utilities and full multimedia support. The packaging is RPM based. Historically, it started as an offspring of Red Hat Linux and is currently based on Fedora Core. The distribution is intensively localized in the Slovenian language and provides the KDE desktop as the default environment. Pingo is installed as second boot system on computers provided by the Ministry of education in Slovenian schools, giving it a base of over 12,000 users. The distribution is accompanied with printed books aimed at the novice user. From its beginnings in 1999, this free distribution regularly releases one to two upgrades per year. Pingo activists are organizing well attended Install Fests all over Slovenia. Pingo v3.1 was released December 30, 2004. (Thanks to Ales Kosir)
LinEspaLinEspa has been added to the list of Spanish distributions. Currently at version 0.22, LinEspa comes with XFCE4 and a 2.6.8.1 kernel. (Thanks to Julian Coccia)
Distribution Newsletters Debian Weekly NewsDebian Weekly News for January 11, 2005 is out with a look at Knowing Knoppix, an interview with Debian project leader Martin Michlmayr, KDE 3.3 in testing, and much more.
Gentoo Weekly NewsletterThe Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of January 10, 2005 covers the use of a visual registration confirmation to prevent forum abuse, the availability of a stable 2.6.10 kernel package, and several other topics.
Mandrakelinux Cooker Weekly NewsThe Cooker Weekly News for January 8, 2005 looks at the last month in Mandrakelinux development, including iso images for 10.1 Official, a cooker snapshot on ftp, and more.
Ubuntu Traffic #16Ubuntu Traffic #16 is out; it looks at the Matarò conference, support for non-free software, kernel security updates, and more.
DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 82The DistroWatch Weekly for January 10, 2005 is out. "Welcome to this year's 2nd edition of DistroWatch Weekly! If you haven't had a chance to try out SUSE LINUX 9.2, now is your chance as the entire Professional edition is now available for download on a mirror site near you. We'll also talk about the new product line from MandrakeSoft and introduce ASP Linux as the featured distribution of the week. Enjoy!"
Minor distribution updates Bio-Linux 4 announcedVersion 4 of the Bio-Linux distribution has been announced. "As of version 4.0, Bio-Linux is based on the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Bioinformatics-related customisations include the inclusion of a large number of bioinformatics programs and programming libraries, the addition of graphical menus for much of the bioinformatics software, and links from the desktop to key documentation and applications. The system also includes a comprehensive, categorised and searchable documentation system for bioinformatics software."
FrazierWall No MoreFrazierWall Linux has been removed from our Distributions list. For now the web site still exists with some reasons why Ken Frazier has decided to withdraw the distribution. (Thanks to Nigel Arnot)
Newsletters and articles of interest Gentoo for All the Unusual Reasons (Linux Journal)Andrew Cowie writes about Gentoo Linux on production systems, on Linux Journal. "I have a confession to make. I use Gentoo Linux. My colleagues at the various Linux User Group meetings I attend think I'm nuts. Everyone knows that Gentoo is a source-based Linux distribution. Gentoo's reputation (in large measure pushed by the people who develop the distribution) is that it's for people who want super crazy optimizations, and it really is suitable only for those who use desktops. In truth, Gentoo is ideal for a whole bunch of other, unexpected, reasons. Much to my surprise, people actually are using Gentoo in production environments for these very reasons."
Linux Netwosix One Year Later (LinuxSecurity.com)LinuxSecurity.com has an article by Vincenzo Ciaglia about Linux Netwosix. "Linux Netwosix is a powerful and optimized Linux distribution for servers and Network Security related jobs. It can also be used for special operations such as penetration testing with its big collection of security oriented software and sources. It's a light distribution created for the requirements of every SysAdmin and it's very portable and highly configurable. Its philosophy is to give greater liberty for configuration to the SysAdmin. Only in this way he/she can configure a powerful and stable server machine. Linux Netwosix also has a powerful ports system (Nepote) similar to the xBSD systems but more flexible and usable."
New Site For SUSE Beginners (LinuxMedNews)LinuxMedNews introduces the new SUSEroot web site. "SUSEroot just went live, a site designed to help new SUSE Linux users get acquainted with their new operating system."
Distribution reviews My workstation OS: SUSE Professional (NewsForge)NewsForge hears from a SUSE Linux enthusiast. "Long-time Linux users know that the kernel and most of the programs are the same across distributions, but different implementations vary in their hardware detection, default choices of basic software, package management system, availability of extra packages, third-party software, and bundled management tools. I was looking for a single distribution I could rely on as both a server and a desktop OS, and one that I could install and support remotely for clients and use at home for work and play. What I found was the powerful SUSE Professional."
Product Review: Novell Linux Desktop heads to the office (Computerworld.au)Computerworld.au looks at Novell Linux Desktop. "Is NLD ready for the corporate desktop? Our answer is a qualified yes. Handling routine office chores using Open Office for word processing, Evolution for e-mail and Firefox for Web browsing works great. However, connecting to Windows networks still needs some work to become seamless."
SUSE Linux 9.2 Professional edition review (Linux Tips for Free)Linux Tips for Free is mostly devoted to Mandrakelinux. This review of SUSE Linux 9.2 Pro also compares the SUSE release to Mandrakelinux 10.1. "I will naturally look at SUSE 9.2 from a Mandrakelinux point of view, due to my Linux experience. I will try to stay objective nonetheless. I have used SUSE 9.2 for over 5 weeks now, on this machine I have only booted to Mdk10.1OE a few times to compare some things (video playback with xine and mplayer and CPU load during such actions), other than that I have made it a point to get SUSE 9.2 to the same point of usability (the way I want to use it - strictly personal). I don't want to give away too much, but I'll say that I have no big trouble to use SUSE instead of Mdk, the differences can easily be handled if one invests a bit of time and effort. Naturally, one has to start by accepting that there are differences - which I will point out in detail as far as I have come across them and find them relevant."
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol Development Industrial Control With Qt4LabThe new Qt4Lab project is a cross-platform open source toolkit for laboratory applications that has been built on with Trolltech's Qt application framework. It is currently in an early state of development, version 0.1.0 was recently released, the project's introductory page shows the latest developments.![[Qt4Lab]](/images/ns/qt4lab.png){kind=small}
Qt4Lab provides widget plugins and utilities for Rapid Application Prototyping and for developing
SCADA
(Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition)
application in the automotive/aerospace field.
Widgets plugins are available for GNU/Linux and Windows NT/2000/XP.
The current list of available widgets is limited to a toggle button, a switch, an LED, a thermometer gauge, and a tank level gauge. See the screenshots and demo pages for examples. Widget development appears to be moving ahead at a rapid pace, many more widgets could certainly be added. Qt4Lab is not alone in the open-source industrial control space, the ProcessViewBrowser is a more mature project (Version 2.6) with a large number of working widgets and some fairly advanced features. A bit of parallel development and competition is never a bad thing in the open-source world, hopefully the infant Qt4Lab project will evolve into another powerful free application. For more information on Qt4Lab, see this recent KDE Review.
System Applications Audio Projects Planet CCRMA ChangesThe latest changes from the Planet CCRMA audio utility packaging project includes a large update to a number of Common Lisp applications, new versions of Snd and Ardour, and the deprecation of Red Hat 7.3 and 8.0 packages.
Database Software PostgreSQL 8.0.0 Release Candidate 5 is outRelease Candidate 5 of PostgreSQL 8.0.0 has been announced. "Due to several small, and one fairly large, bugs that were found in Release Candidate 4, we have been forced to release our 5th Release (and hopefully last) Candidate so that we can get some proper testing in on the changes before release."
JDBC programming with Groovy (IBM developerWorks)Andrew Glover uses the Groovy language to work with databases on IBM developerWorks. "Take your practical knowledge of Groovy one step further this month, as Andrew Glover shows you how to use GroovySql to build a simple data-reporting application. GroovySql combines closures and iterators to ease Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) programming by shifting the burden of resource management from you to the Groovy framework itself."
Interoperability Samba 3.0.11pre1 Available for DownloadSamba version 3.0.11 pre 1 has been announced, it features bug fixes and a few new capabilities. "This is a preview release of the Samba 3.0.11 code base and is provided for testing only. This release is *not* intended for production servers. However, there have been several bug fixes since 3.0.10 that we feel are important to make available to the Samba community for wider testing."
Libraries Dissecting shared libraries (IBM developerWorks)Peter Seebach explores Linux shared libraries on IBM developerWorks. "Shared libraries use version numbers to allow for upgrades to the libraries used by applications while preserving compatibility for older applications. This article reviews what's really going on under the book jacket and why there are so many symbolic links in /usr/lib on a normal Linux system."
Networking Tools PIKT 1.18.0 for Linux releasedVersion 1.18.0 of PIKT is available. "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." Several new capabilities and bug fixes are included in this release.
PowerDNS 2.9.17 releasedThose of you looking for an alternative DNS server may want to check out the recent PowerDNS 2.9.17 release - click below for the details. PowerDNS is becoming less "alternative," though; the announcement includes a claim that PowerDNS now serves information for over two million domains.
Spread Module 1.5 alpha 1 releasedVersion 1.5 alpha 1 of the Spread Module for Python is available with bug fixes. "This package contains a simple Python wrapper module for the Spread toolkit. It wraps Spread mailboxes and messages in Python objects with appropriate methods and attributes, and turns Spread errors into Python exceptions. Virtually all Spread features are accessible from Python.""Spread is a toolkit that provides a high performance messaging service that is resilient to faults across external or internal networks.
Web Site Development Bricolage Configuration Directives (O'Reilly)David Wheeler explains configuration of the Bricolage web content management platform in an O'Reilly article. "This article provides a guided tour of all of the configuration settings in bricolage.conf to enable you to configure things exactly the way you need them, so that you can manage your sites more effectively with Bricolage."
MediaWiki 1.4beta4 released (SourceForge)Version 1.4beta4 of MediaWiki is available. "MediaWiki 1.4beta4 is an experimental release, to help flush out remaining major problems in the code prior to a final public 1.4.0 release."
Infrae pre-announces Silva 1.2Version 1.2 of the Silva Content Management Framework has been announced. "This release contains three major new features: expanded version management for XML documents, subscription functionality for all versioned content, and an internationalized Silva user interface, including Dutch and German translations. Infrae is actively seeking volunteers to translate Silva into other languages."
Miscellaneous moodss 19.5 released (SourceForge)Stable version 19.5 of Moodss, a GUI-based system monitoring application, is available. "This new version adds the delta(), diff() and last() functions to user defined formulas, which allows the calculation of growth rates, for example. Of course, the minor improvements and bug fixes are present as usual..."
Desktop Applications Audio Applications Ardour 0.9beta23 releasedThe Ardour multi-track audio recorder project is making progress toward the 1.0 release with the announcement of version 0.9beta23. "This release is another milestone: it marks the end of all bugs that were slated to be solved before the 1.0 release. The plan from here is to wait for about a few days to allow testing of this release and minor (cosmetic) bug fixing to continue, and then ardour 0.99 will be released. After that, release engineering (install process, new user experience) will be all that stands between us and release 1.0rc1, which will hopefully be the last release before 1.0."
GLAME 2.0.0 announcedStable version 2.0.0 of GLAME, the Gimp for audio processing, is available for download. Working features in this release include a wave editor, a filter network editor, Scheme language scripting, plugins, a swapfile backing store, and more.
Desktop Environments GNOME Software AnnouncementsThe following new GNOME software has been announced in the last week:
GNOME Journal Issue 2The latest issue of The GNOME Journal has been published. This regularly published online magazine features original content and commentary for and by the GNOME Community. This second issue covers some technical articles, including CD/DVD creation, connecting to remote resources, how to get help from the GNOME community, and more..
KDE Software AnnouncementsThe following new KDE software has been announced in the last week:
KDE CVS-Digest (KDE.News)The January 7, 2005 KDE CVS-Digest is out with the following content summary: "Gwenview adds support for animated pictures. Digikam adds more image editing plugins: Sheartool, anti-vignetting, lensdistortion. KWin adds dynamic keybindings. PwManager adds Smartcard interface"
Electronics Smart Gnome Control v0.3 (SourceForge)Version 0.3, the initial beta release, of Smart Gnome Control has been announced. "Smart Gnome Control is a graphical user interface to multiple communications receivers via the Hamlib library. The specific purpose is to let you control your communications receiver from a personal computer, and to simplify the hobby of shortwave radio listening."
XCircuit 3.3.6 releasedVersion 3.3.6 of XCircuit, an electronic schematic drawing package, is out. Here's the CHANGES file info: "Corrected a fatal error in library copies if no valid object is selected. Corrected a compile error (C++-like syntax fails on many compilers). Added option to print or not to print the ".end" statement at the end of a SPICE deck."
Open Collector ReleasesThe latest new electronics applications on Open Collector include Confluence 0.10, "a declarative functional programming language for the design and verification of synchronous reactive systems".
Electrical Engineering Comes to KDE with KTechLab (KDE.News)KDE.News mentions the electronic simulator KTechlab and points to a review article. "While only at version 0.1 it already contains a lot of functionality for developing and simulating electronic circuits. Currently KTechLab can create circuit diagrams for electronics and flow diagrams for PIC chips (a family of programmable chips). It can even compile and run your flow diagrams in a circuit."
Games DeadlyCobra 0.7.0 announced (SourceForge)Version 0.7.0 of the game Deadly Cobra has been announced, this version features multiplayer support. "Deadly Cobra is an SDL based game similar to the classic Nibbles or snake game. The point is to eat as many "Men" as possible without eating yourself or hitting a wall. Features include single & multiplayer modes, cool 2-D graphics and great music."
Eris 1.3.2 ReleasedVersion 1.3.2 of Eris has been released. "Eris is a client-side sessions layer for WorldForge that automates many common operations, and greatly simplified creating and maintaining a client. This is the second unstable release of the current development work that will become Eris 1.4. A large number of bugs have been fixed since the previous release, in all areas of the code. The API has evolved slightly, so that more failures can be reported to the client application (for example, failure to create a character)."
the Lightweight Game ToolkitThe Lightweight Game Toolkit (LGT) is a new cross-platform Python-based game platform. "LGT is a Python package which uses pygame and PyOpenGL to provide simple hardware accelerated 2D graphics and other game operations."
Imaging Applications GIMP 2.2.2 Released (GnomeDesktop)Version 2.2.2 of the GIMP is available. "This is a bug-fix release in the stable GIMP 2.2 release."
Multimedia GStreamer announcements (GnomeDesktop)GnomeDesktop has an announcement for new versions of the GStreamer streaming media framework and some associated packages. "The GStreamer team has made three new releases recently in the ongoing quest to provide high quality playback support. GStreamer Core 0.8.8, GStreamer ffmpeg 0.8.3 and GStreamer plugins 0.8.7. All these 3 releases contain significant playback related bugfixes and additions."
Music Applications Ceres V0.42 and Mammut V0.18 announcedA dual release of Ceres version 0.42 and Mammut version 0.18 has been posted. Bug fixes and installation improvements are included. "Ceres is a simple program for displaying sonograms and for sound effects in the frequency domain.""Mammut will FFT your sound in one single gigantic analysis (no windows)."
MusE 0.7.1pre3 has been releasedVersion 0.7.1pre2 of Muse, a MIDI and audio sequencer application, has been released. "This will be the last prerelease for 0.7.1, there "should" be no further functionality added this time around, apart from fixing found bugs."
Office Applications theKompany.com Releases Version 1.2 of Aethera (KDE.News)KDE.News covers the release of Aethera 1.2, a a personal information management suite. "Aethera is commercial Free Software available at no cost under the GNU GPL with some proprietry plugins available to add extra features. Calendaring support is provided by the popular KOrganizer application from KDE. It supports a number of groupware servers including KDE sister project Kolab."
Science JGAP 2.0 released! (SourceForge)Version 2.0 of JGAP has been announced. "JGAP is a genetic algorithms package written in Java. It is designed to require minimum effort to use "out of the box," but is also designed to be highly modular to allow for custom components to be easily plugged in by the more adventurous. JGAP version 2.0 represents the second big production release of JGAP after many years of development, testing, alpha, and beta releases!"
Languages and Tools Caml Caml Weekly NewsThe January 4-11, 2005 edition of the Caml Weekly News is online with the latest Caml language developments.
Java Working with Hibernate in Eclipse (O'ReillyNet)Jim Elliott works with Hibernate in Eclipse in an O'Reilly article. "In this article, Jim explores Hibernate Synchronizer--a plugin that automatically updates your Java code when you change your mapping document."
Results from the Second 2004 ONJava Reader Survey (O'ReillyNet)O'Reilly has published the results of their 2004 ONJava Reader Survey. "The results are in from our second reader survey conducted at the end of 2004. We intend to run these now and then to ask you who you are and what you would like to see from ONJava. With the release of J2SE 5.0 and the increasing popularity of various frameworks and tools, we asked what you are using and what you would like to see covered on ONJava. Here's a snapshot of what the 660 respondents told us."
Perl This Fortnight in Perl 6O'Reilly's This Fortnight in Perl 6 for December 21-31 2004 is online with the latest Perl 6 news.
Python Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!The January 9, 2005 edition of Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! is online with the week's Python language articles and resources.
python-dev SummaryThe python-dev Summary for November 16-30, 2004 has been published. Take a look for the summary of traffic on the python-dev mailing list for that period.
Tcl/Tk Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!The January 5, 2005 edition of Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! is out. Take a look for the week's Tcl/Tk articles, events, and resources.
XML WPC Releases XML Schemas for HIPAA Transactions (LinuxMedNews)LinuxMedNews has an announcement for a set of open-source XML schemas for HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. "WPC has released Open Source schemas representing the HIPAA transaction sets. Representing HIPAA EDI data in XML just became much easier. WPC, publisher of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) transaction implementation guides adopted under HIPAA, is pleased to announce the release of W3C complaint XSD, Open Source Schemas, under the GNU license."
Manage XML collections with XAPI (IBM developerWorks)Uche Ogbuji looks at XAPI on IBM developerWorks. "XML repositories are a simple extension of the idea of XML documents, and they call for a simple API for access and manipulation. The likes of DOM and XPath are too granular, while XQuery may be too elaborate for some needs. A group of XML repository implementers (named XML:DB) have come together to develop such an API specification, and the result is the Application Programming Interface for XML Databases (XAPI). In this article, Uche Ogbuji introduces XAPI."
IDEs DrPython 3.8.5 releasedVersion 3.8.5 of DrPython, a Python language IDE, is available. See the Change Log for details.
Page editor: Forrest Cook Linux in the news Recommended Reading IBM slammed over patent giveaway (Silicon.com)Silicon.com looks at the backlash to IBM's patent release announcement. "A spokesman for Germany's ruling Social Democratic (SPD) party, which spoke out against the [European software patent] directive in October, told silicon.com sister site ZDNet UK that IBM has put pressure on it both individually and through EICTA to support the directive. In particular, Fritz Teufel, the head of IBM's patent department in Germany, has been involved in pushing through the software patent directive, according to Mueller and the FFII..."
To Evil! of December 2004 (OSDir)Danny O'Brien's latest 'To Evil!' column is up on OSDir. "It's kind of intriguing, isn't it, when the MPAA and RIAA is to scaring us into believing that the world of unauthorized copying is filled of dodgy-dealers stuffing the files with all kinds of polluted malware and pop-ups, that they're also paying the people who do the stuffing?"
Trade Shows and Conferences 10 Questions for CES (Linux Journal)Doc Searls goes hunting for penguins at CES, on Linux Journal. "So, why am I at CES? One answer is there's no more Comdex. That leaves CES alone with the distinction of being the biggest technology show in the US. I believe CeBit in Europe still is bigger overall. Peter Hirshberg calls it "the world's silliest trade show", but that's only on the surface. It's still a great place to hunt down cool Linux stories that almost nobody else is talking about, mostly because they're too busy providing the same Big Vendor Sports coverage as the other thousand-plus reporters at the show."
The SCO Problem SCO Files Claim of Appeal in DC -- Claim Being Evaluated (Groklaw)Groklaw notes that SCO is attempting to appeal the dismissal of the DaimlerChrysler case - which it declined to proceed with. "Anybody can file the claim. That doesn't mean it's going anywhere. The court will take your claim notice and your $375 but then they evaluate your claim to see if you can appeal that way or if you must file an application and get permission to appeal."
Companies Mandrakesoft trail could lead to corporate Linux desktop (SearchEnterpriseLinux)SearchEnterpriseLinux covers the latest distribution releases from Mandrakesoft. "When Mandrakesoft released Corporate Server 3.0 and Corporate Desktop, it also released it with longer development cycles -- roughly 12 to 18 months in length which differed from its previous approach of shorter development cycles. The French firm also included a five-year maintenance plan to accompany the enterprise edition products, and designed them to be as easily configurable as possible. "These products have received specific development and testing efforts to make them as fit as possible for use in a business environment," said GaËl Duval, Mandrakesoft's co-founder.""
Legal Not-so-golden oldies (Economist)The Economist reports on the "problem" of copyright expiration in Europe. "Many people believe that America has gone too far in protecting copyright at the expense of the public good, including, it seems, the [European] commission, which said last year that it saw no need to lift its own 50-year limit. Its deadline for proposals on copyright law has slipped from this year to 2006. But governments are likely to weigh in on the issue. France, Italy and Portugal have indicated that they support an extension of the term, and Britain is likely to stick up for its own music major, EMI."
Interviews db4objects Interviews (NewsForge)NewsForge has an interview with the CEO and Chief Software Architect of db4objects. "While the traditional relational database market has largely resisted open source databases, the database world overall is a dynamic market full of change and opportunity. Berkeley DB and MySQL are notable open source successes in the embedded market and the market for database-backed Web sites. To that mix, db4objects hopes to become the newest success story, with its object database."
Novell, Mandrake respond to Sun's Red Hat claims (NewsForge)NewsForge talks to executives at Novell and Mandrakesoft about Red Hat's dominance in the Linux market. "When Sun's Scott McNealy told us that Red Hat had the Linux market, we decided it might be a good idea to find out what Novell and Mandrakesoft had to say about that. We exchanged email with Mandrakesoft CEO François Bancilhon and Novell's director of product management and marketing, Charlie Ungashick, on the subject of Solaris 10, Red Hat, and how they compete in a consolidating market."
Resources Keeping Your Life in Subversion (O'ReillyNet)In this O'ReillyNet article, Joey Hess talks about using Subversion for keeping track of more than just source code. "I keep my life in a Subversion repository. For the past five years, I've checked every file I've created and worked on, every email I've sent or received, and every config file I've tweaked into revision control. Five years ago, when I started doing this using CVS, people thought I was nuts to use revision control in this way. Today it's still not a common practice, but thanks to my earlier article "CVS homedir" (Linux Journal, issue 101), I know I'm not alone. In this article I will describe how my new home directory setup is working now that I've switched from CVS to Subversion."
Use Your Digital Camera with Linux (O'Reilly)Robert Bernier explains the use of digital cameras under Linux in an O'Reilly article. "This camera, like most, comes with a USB plug, so interfacing with a Linux box is easy. Camera applications are as about as common as snow (depending upon where you live, of course). However, for the most part they depend upon the libgphoto2 libraries."
Reviews Application of the Month: Akregator (KDE.News)KDE.News has announced a new Application of the Month article on the Akregator RSS reader. "As usual we have an interview with the author and a description of this nifty application which allows you to browse through thousands of internet feeds without the hassle of using a web browser."
Miscellaneous Donald Pederson, chip scientist, dies at 79 (NYTimes)The New York Times covers the death of Donald Pederson, a computer scientist who oversaw the creation of a widely used tool for the design of electronic circuits. "Designers of computer chips need to know how those chips will behave before they make them, but in the 1960s, the software available for simulating the behavior of integrated circuits was slow and unreliable. That changed in 1972, when Pederson's laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, created a fast and accurate program called Simulation Program with Integrated Circuits Emphasis, or Spice." (Thanks to horen)
Page editor: Forrest Cook Announcements Non-Commercial announcements Sun yanks FreeBSD's Java licenseThe current FreeBSD Newsletter has an article stating that Sun has revoked the FreeBSD project's license to distribute the Java runtime environment. "Even after receiving notice of the termination of our license attempts to contact Sun to renegotiate the license have gone unanswered. For now, it is safe to assume that the Foundation will engage in another lengthy, and potentially costly, licensing negotiation before our binary distributions can continue."
Restarting the software patent directive initiative in Europe?The FFII has put out an advisory stating that 61 members of the European Parliament have introduced a motion which would restart the entire software patent directive process from the beginning. The renewed debate would allow new participation from the (enlarged) Parliament and provide a "face-saving exit" for the EU Council. It also, one hopes, would end with the adoption of a directive which does not legitimize software patents in Europe.
open-source tools for population health epidemiology (LinuxMedNews)LinuxMedNews has an announcement for the NetEpi project. "NetEpi, which is short for "Network-enabled Epidemiology", is a project to create a suite of free, open source tools for epidemiology and public health practice. The project web page is at http://www.netepi.org. Anyone with an interest in population health epidemiology or public health informatics is encouraged to examine the prototype tools and to consider contributing to their further development."
Commercial announcements Adobe releases Acrobat 7 with Linux reader support (ZDNet)ZDNet covers the latest commercial software releases from Adobe, including version 7 of Adobe Reader, a freely downloadable PDF viewing application. "The Linux beta version for Adobe Reader 7 isn't a surprise. Adobe is becoming more active in desktop Linux. The San Jose, Calif.-based company had released a version of Acrobat Reader 5 for Linux but skipped version 6."
Arkeia Appoints Dave Elliott as Business Development DirectorArkeia Corp has announced the appointment of Dave Elliott as director of business development.
C.A.C. Media and VWB Announce Commercial Success of Linux Media CenterC.A.C. Media has announced a successful commercial test launch of its Media Convergence Software Suite, which uses embedded Linux for running digital entertainment devices. ""We believe our Linux Media OS is the right choice for digital entertainment device manufacturers because it has a small footprint, possesses greater flexibility due to its open source architecture, lowers manufacturers' BOM, and has the widest and deepest feature set in the industry," said Ken Nelson, C.A.C. Media's CEO."
Cybernet Systems upgrades NetMAXCybernet Systems Corporation has announced the availability of an upgrade to NetMAX Professional Suite, its easy to use Linux software for Internet appliances and network servers.
IBM frees 500 patentsIBM has put out a press release stating that it is making 500 patents available for free software. The patents can be used with any OSI-approved license, not just the GPL. The full list of freed patents is available in PDF format. It does not include the famous RCU patents, which remain available to GPL-licensed code only. "IBM intends for this pledge to form the basis of an industry-wide 'patent commons' in which patents are used to establish a platform for further innovations in areas of broad interest to information technology developers and users."
JBoss Releases New Open Source Middleware AppsJBoss, Inc. has announced the release of four new versions of its open-source middleware applications. The announcement mentions JBoss Application Server 4.0.1, Hibernate 3.0 Beta, JBoss Cache 1.2, and Mod_jk 1.2.8.
Linuxant adds native 64-bit (x86_64) support to DriverLoaderLinuxant inc. has announced the addition of native support for the x86_64 architecture to its DriverLoader software.
Niku Announces Open Workbench 1.1 Project Scheduling ToolNiku Corporation has announced general availability of Open Workbench(tm) 1.1, "the first enterprise-class, free-of-charge alternative to Microsoft(r) Project."
Opera Beta for LinuxA new beta release of the Opera browser is available for Linux. "Opera Software today released the much awaited beta version of its next browser for the Linux platform. Opera is breaking ground once again with a range of new usability tools, including Fit-to-Window-Width, Fit-to-Paper-Width, improved RSS handling, Start Bar for easy access to main features, and automatic update checks -- all presented in a simplified user interface (UI). Still keeping some secrets up their sleeve, Opera has yet to reveal the name of their newest browser version."
Oracle Database 10g Sets New World RecordOracle Corporation has announced that their 10g database has set a new TPC-C record running on an HP four processor system with Red Hat Enterprise AS 3. "Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition (four-processor maximum) running on an HP Integrity rx4640 server with four Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 1.6 GHz processors and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 3 operating system, achieved world record performance of any four processor system on Linux of 161,217 tpmC (transactions per minute) with a price-performance ratio of $3.94/tpmC."
OSoft's ThoutReader Goes GPLOSoft.com has announced that the ThoutReader(TM) is now available under the GNU General Public License (GPL) Version 2. The ThoutReader(TM) is a documentation platform that allows developers to browse, search, bookmark, and append their favorite library of reference documentation as well as reference books.
Pervasive Software Markets PostgreSQLPervasive Software Inc. has announced Pervasive Postgres(TM), an integrated set of open source software and services around the PostgreSQL database. ""Pervasive's help driving the rapidly growing acceptance of PostgreSQL in the mainstream business community is very welcome," said Josh Berkus, a member of the PostgreSQL Core Team, the PostgreSQL community's leadership group. "The adoption of our technology by a well-established proprietary database vendor demonstrates how cooperation between open source developers and software companies can work to benefit the entire industry.""
Red Flag Joins OSDLOpen Source Development Labs has announced that China's Red Flag Software Company, Ltd. has joined OSDL and will participate in the lab's Desktop Linux (DTL), Carrier Grade Linux (CGL), and Data Center Linux (DCL) working groups.
New Books "AspectJ Cookbook" Released by O'ReillyO'Reilly has published the book AspectJ Cookbook by Russ Miles.
Upcoming Events FOSDEM: Question Leading KDE Developers (KDE.News)KDE.News offers a chance to post questions to several FOSDEM 2005 speakers. "The biographies of KDE speakers at FOSDEM 2005 are up for Matthias Ettrich, Harald Fernengel and Alexander Dymo. FOSDEM will interview speakers before the event so if you have questions about the future of KDE or KDevelop please send them to fosdem@gmail.com or add a comment to this story and we will send them on."
LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in BostonLinuxWorld Conference & Expo has announced their upcoming event in Boston, Mass. The expo will take place on February 14-17, 2005 at the Hynes Convention Center. "LinuxWorld's conference program will illustrate how companies across the globe have achieved higher profits and increased their productivity by utilizing Linux-the fastest-growing operating system in the world."
The LinuxWorld New York Summit 2005LinuxWorld Conference & Expo has announced the Linux World New York Summit 2005. The event will take place at the New York City Marriott Marquis on May 25 and 26, 2005.
AMD and RealNetworks Sign on as Desktop Linux Summit Key SponsorsLinspire, Inc. has announced the signing of AMD and RealNetworks as key sponsors for the San Diego Desktop Linux Summit. "The Desktop Summit today announced that AMD, RealNetworks, Linspire, and other major tech companies have been added to the roster for the only event to focus exclusively on Linux and open source for the desktop. Rob Glaser, CEO of RealNetworks, has been confirmed as a keynote speaker, joining Mitch Kapor, creator of Lotus 1-2-3 and founder of the Mozilla Foundation, Michael Robertson, CEO of Linspire, Inc., and Doc Searls, Senior Editor at Linux Journal."
OOoCon 2005 - Call for LocationA Call for Location has gone out for OOoCon 2005, the OpenOffice.org convention. "After Hamburg in 2003 and Berlin in 2004, we are searching for the perfect location for the OpenOffice.org Conference in 2005. We are collecting applications from teams who are willing to organize OOoCon 2005 in locations outside Germany."
OSDL Enterprise Linux Summit in Burlingame, CAOpen Source Development Labs (OSDL) has announced its upcoming Enterprise Linux Summit. The event will take place in Burlingame, CA on February 2, 2005. "The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a global consortium dedicated to accelerating the adoption of Linux in the enterprise, today announced the growing momentum around its brand-new Enterprise Linux Summit that will provide the Bay and Silicon Valley area's technology community access to top Linux experts."
UKUUG Winter Conference and Perl 6 WorkshopA Perl 6 Workshop will be held in conjunction with the UKUUG LISA Winter Conference in Birmingham, England on February 24 and 25, 2005.
Dutch Perl Workshop 2005 (use Perl)Use Perl has announced the 2005 Dutch Perl Workshop. The event will be held on February 25, 2005 in Arnhem.
php|tropics 2005 announcedphp|tropics 2005 will be held at the Moon Palace Resort near Cancun, Mexico from May 11-15, 2005. "php|t includes over 30 hours' worth of technical sessions given by the best PHP speakers, authors and developers in the world. Most of all, you'll find yourself learning in the incredible paradise setting of one of the most luxurious, all-inclusive resorts of the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico." Moon Palace Resort near Cancun, Mexico between May 11th and 15th, 2005.
Linux Installfest workshops in Davis, CAThe Linux Users' Group of Davis has announced another Linux Installfest event. It will be held at UC Davis on January 22, 2005.
Black Duck Software Seminars AnnouncedBlack Duck Software has announced a series of free seminars on open-source software, the events will take place in Boston, New York, and Silicon Valley from January 13-18, 2005. "Dan Bricklin and Karen Copenhaver, two noted open source commentators, will highlight open source trends and compliance issues for 2005. They will make a compelling case for the use of open source in software development, and illustrate the new disciplines that will become a necessary part of the development process as open source achieves its full potential in the enterprise."
Events: January 13 - March 10, 2005
Page editor: Forrest Cook
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