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LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 8, 2005Linux in Italian schoolsThe region of Italy known as Trentino-Alto Adige or South Tyrol has an interesting history. It became part of Italy as a spoil of World War 1, and many of its residents have never been entirely comfortable with Italian control. It is a breathtakingly beautiful region, where German is heard more than Italian. The unique nature of this area has resulted in it being given a great deal of autonomy; Trentino-Alto Adige often does things its own way.Bolzano, a provincial capital in Trentino-Alto Adige, has just broken some new ground with this announcement that the area's Italian schools have switched to Linux. Your editor was able to discuss the project with three of its principals: Antonio J. Russo, Paolo Zilotti, and Christopher Gabriel. They deserve thanks for helping to fill in the details, and for putting up with your editor's Italian.
This project goes by the name "FUSS",
for "Free Upgrade South Tyrol's Schools." Over the course of two months,
And freedom is an important issue in this project; the introduction page starts out this way:
The decision to use free software in the schools is indeed, beyond
the economic and technical reasons, an ethical and political
choice. It is the choice of remaking oneself, both in the use
and teaching of computing, with the values of freedom and sharing,
and not just in the use of software which is efficient, stable, and
secure, which runs on older machines, and which is not subject to
licensing costs.
(The linked page, like most in this article, is in Italian; translations by the editor). To achieve its goals, the FUSS project decided early on that only free software could be used. All of the usual reasons apply for this choice: ethics, the ability to give the software to students, ability to modify the software, etc. Given this constraint, it is not surprising that FUSS decided to base its effort on Debian. The 100% free nature of the distribution, combined with its quality, vast array of packages, and adaptability are given as the reasons for this choice. The project developed its own version of Debian, which it calls "FUSS Soledad GNU/Linux," or just "Soledad." Soledad is based upon the Sarge release, but the FUSS developers have made a number of changes. The installer and default configuration have been adapted to the schools' needs, and a special GNOME-based desktop has been put together. The mix of packages has carefully selected for the target audience, with a strong bias toward educational software. The package list for the desktop configuration is available; there is also a version of Soledad for server deployments. ISO images of Soledad are available from the FUSS download page. Many of us who have dealt with the public school systems in their countries have often wondered why there is not more free software in use. But anybody who has tried to convince a school system to change knows what kind of inertia exists there. So how did the FUSS project supporters get the approval for a change of this magnitude? There are a few factors at play here. The Italian schools in Bolzano are (unlike those in much of Italy) organized around a central purchasing structure for information technology. Even better, the relationship between the schools and the central IT folks is good. This structure made it easier to convert the entire school system at once. The initial supporters of FUSS came from within the school administration, and thus had the advantage of pushing for change from the inside. Even so, the FUSS supporters had to work for years, and had to "assemble a fair amount of paper" before getting the project approved. Mr. Russo adds:
I don't think that there is a formula for bringing this sort of
project to conclusion; the only thing I can say is that, in
Bolzano, people active in the spread of free software have worked
hard for many years, organizing events, conferences, installation
parties, but, most of all, meeting people and explaining to them
the benefits of free software and how their work could be improved
and made more pleasant with the use of cooperatively-developed
tools.
The FUSS developers add that the autonomous nature of Bolzano helped, since decisions are made locally. But the importance of laying the groundwork is clear: spend enough time educating people about the benefits of free software, and they will eventually come around and support it. 2460 Linux installations may seem like a lot, but it is only a beginning. This deployment only covers Bolzano's Italian-language schools; the region also runs a great many German-language schools, and a rather smaller number based on Ladin. The FUSS developers have made offers of help to their German-speaking counterparts, but, so far, have received little response. School systems in various other regions of Italy are said to be interested, however, and are watching to see how it all turns out. The acid test will start on September 12, when 16,000 students return to school. It is hard to imagine that there would be no startup glitches on a project of this magnitude. How quickly they are ironed out, and how quickly students and teachers become comfortable with the new systems will have a big influence on whether other parts of Italy will make the jump to free software. The odds are in the project's favor: school systems have few needs which cannot be met nicely by currently-available free software. The hard part of this project is done; congratulations are due to the many people who have worked for years to make FUSS a reality.
A busy week for the courtsCourts in various parts of the world have handed down decisions which, in one way or another, can affect users and developers of free software. These decisions are not particularly friendly to our community. Here is a quick overview of what the courts have said.
ACRA v. LexmarkWe have encountered Lexmark before; that company has attempted to use the DMCA to shut down alternative manufacturers of alternative ink cartridges for its printers. That attempt failed, but the company appears to have found another, stronger way of protecting itself from competition: the shrink-wrap patent license. In this case, the Arizona Cartridge Remanufacturers Association (ACRA) took Lexmark to court, challenging Lexmark's "prebate" offering. This marketing scheme involves "reduced price" cartridges which are explicitly marked, on the box, as being "single use only." Customers are supposed to return empty cartridges to Lexmark, and they are prohibited from giving the cartridges to other remanufacturers. ACRA alleged that the labeling on the box was deceptive, since it was not actually binding upon customers. ACRA failed to convinced the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, however; on August 30, it reaffirmed a lower-court decision [PDF] in Lexmark's favor. The two things which come out of this ruling are: (1) patents can be used to impose post-sale restrictions on customers, and (2) labeling on a package can be a valid shrink-wrap patent license. So anybody who disposes of a used Lexmark cartridge in a non-approved manner becomes a patent infringer - and remanufacturers which accept those cartridges are inducing infringement. It is not hard to see where this sort of logic can go. If a product contains technology subject to a patent, that patent can be used to impose no end of post-sale conditions. In the current climate, obtaining a patent which can cover any given product will not be an especially challenging task. Those patents could be used in interesting new ways. It is already annoying to buy a laptop with a "designed for Windows" sticker attached to the case with 1000-year glue. How fun would it be if the sticker read "designed for Windows only" - and have it be enforceable? Many of us use free software because it gives us greater control over our systems. The growing power granted to those who hold intellectual property rights threatens to take the control away. Increasingly, we do not truly own the hardware we thought we had purchased; we simply hold a set of limited rights to use that hardware in specific ways which do not threaten the manufacturers' interests. That does not seem like the path to freedom.
Universal Music Australia Pty Ltd v Sharman License Holdings LtdIn Australia, a large number of media companies took Sharman License Holdings to court, alleging several copyright-related violations. Sharman, the distributor of Kazaa, does not have entirely clean hands - nobody disputes that many people use Kazaa to engage in copyright infringement. In its defense, Sharman argued that it had no control over the behavior of Kazaa users, that it had warned them about infringing copyrights, and that the license agreement for the software prohibited its use to make unauthorized copies of copyrighted materials. The judge actually bought that argument - to an extent. The ruling in this case clears the defendants of many charges of copyright infringement. The judge did find, however, that the defendants had "authorized" users to infringe copyrights, and that this act violated Australian copyright law. The defendants will now have to pay damages. Kazaa will be allowed to continue to exist, but a new version must be released within two months with filters designed to block infringing uses. In particular, the software will have to accept a list (provided by publishers) of claimed works, and block attempts to trade files which match entries in the lists. It is not hard to imagine that file traders will respond to the keyword matching in the same way spammers have; expect to see some creative spellings attached to music files in the near future. The judge seemed to have a real interest in not shutting down peer-to-peer communications altogether, and mandated that the filtering be imposed "... without unnecessarily intruding on others' freedom of speech and communication." The fact is, however, that this is yet another ruling holding software developers responsible for the acts of certain of their users. Manufacturers of cutlery, automobiles, and firearms are not held to such standards, but people who innovate in the software area do so at their own risk. Thus far, most of the legal firepower has been aimed at commercial file sharing operations, but that does not mean that pure free software projects are immune to this sort of attack.
Blizzard v. bnetdOne free software project which has been subject to this sort of attack is bnetd, last mentioned here two weeks ago. The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals has now issued its ruling in this case [PDF], and the news is not good: bnetd lost on all counts. The logic remains unchanged from the prior court's ruling; for example:
The bnetd.org emulator had limited commercial purpose because its
sole purpose was to avoid the limitations of Battle.net. There is
no genuine issue of material fact that Appellants designed and
developed the bnetd.org server and emulator for the purpose of
circumventing Blizzard's technological measures controlling access
to Battle.net and the Blizzard games. Summary was properly granted
in favor of Blizzard and Vivendi on the anti-trafficking
violations.
The idea that free software has fewer rights because it has "limited commercial purpose" is chilling, to say the least. In any case, the interoperability exception to the DMCA has been shown to mean little, once again.
Whither UserLinux?The UserLinux project was founded by Bruce Perens in 2003 with this mission:
Provide businesses with freely available, high quality Linux
operating systems accompanied by certifications, service, and
support options designed to encourage productivity and security
while reducing overall costs.
More informally, Bruce was disappointed with the currently-available "enterprise" Linux offerings, which he sees as taking much of the freedom out of free software. His goal was to create a new distribution (based on Debian) which would be 100% free, aimed at the needs of smaller businesses, and supported by a wide network of independent companies. UserLinux would thus fill in the gap between the unsupported "development" distributions and the expensive, restrictive packages offered by Red Hat and Novell. A small community coalesced around the idea and got busy with peripheral tasks: creating a web site (carrying the unfortunate tag line "Linux for Business" once used by Caldera), designing a logo, writing a trademark policy, and so on. But UserLinux never really got around to building a distribution. This was partly by design: UserLinux was intended to be a version of Debian Sarge with only minimal changes. A few metapackages would be put together, and the package mix as a whole would be greatly thinned down. But UserLinux never intended to create a new distribution; it was more of a repackaging effort with an attempt to build a support network around it. The UserLinux experience carries a warning for future efforts: any business or development plan which has a step reading like this:
is more than usually likely to encounter delays. UserLinux got to that step, and found itself waiting for the Sarge release. For a long time. This wait killed any momentum UserLinux may have had. Nonetheless, the Debian Sarge release happened in June. Three months later, nothing has been heard from UserLinux. So, finally, an interested observer asked what was going on. Bruce responded that UserLinux was, indeed, still alive, but, unfortunately, everything was waiting on him personally.
Essentially, the customer who was going to pay me to work on this
evaporated, and some time later I started running out of money to
support the project. I subsequently took a job with Sourcelabs. I
have 50% of my work time to work on whatever Open Source I choose
(courtesy of Sourcelabs) but so far have been pulled in a lot of
directions and thus not much has gotten done on UL of late.
Bruce may indeed succeed in getting others interested in doing some of the lifting to make UserLinux 1.0 a reality. But a distribution which can be stalled because one person gets busy is not going to be particularly appealing to businesses looking for an alternative to the current support offerings. UserLinux, in other words, appears to have little chance of achieving its initial goals, even if it does get a release out. The slow release of Sarge is one thing which happened to UserLinux, but there is another unexpected event which came along as well: Ubuntu. In many ways, Ubuntu is what UserLinux intended to be: a 100% free, Debian-based distribution with relatively long support periods and available commercial support offerings. Ubuntu seems to have beat out UserLinux by virtue of not waiting for a stable Debian release, putting a great deal of attention into ease of use and making things "just work," and the small advantages that come from having a few tens of millions of dollars of seed money in the bank. As a result, Ubuntu has a real distribution, with a large and enthusiastic user community. Not everybody is comfortable with Ubuntu, despite the fact that the company's models appear to have put their clothes back on. Bruce's message puts it this way:
I think the project continues to have value and I don't believe
that basing on the work of any one company, even Ubuntu which may
be more of a rich man's hobby project than a company, is the
solution for support of Linux distributions.
The creation of the Ubuntu Foundation may help to ease the concerns about the distribution being controlled by a single company. Meanwhile, Ubuntu has been building a distributed support network along the lines of the one envisioned by UserLinux, and a certification scheme is in the works. The 6.04 release, due next year, will be supported for five years (for server use) - if the Ubuntu Foundation lasts that long. In other words, it seems that the distribution UserLinux wanted to create has come to be - it just didn't happen quite the way they had intended. Anybody who wants to carry the UserLinux banner forward as a separate project should first be able to tell the world what they will do that existing distributors are not doing, and how they will turn UserLinux into a viable organization that businesses will trust. Without answers to those questions, UserLinux will remain a project with a nice logo, but with no software or users.
Security A selective look at response timesIt is often said that, while free software suffers from security flaws just like the proprietary variety does, fixes for those flaws come out much more quickly. For most users, however, security patches do not arrive until packaged by their distributor. So, every now and then, it is worthwhile to take a look at how quickly various distributors manage to get the fixes out. The following table lists a subset of recent vulnerabilities and the number of days required for each distributor to issue an update. For the purposes of this table, the clock starts when a vulnerability is disclosed, or when the first distributor alert is issued, whichever comes first.
The above table lists a subset of relatively important vulnerabilities disclosed since July, 2005. Distributions marked "n/a" do not ship the vulnerable package; a marking of "--" means that the update has not, yet, been released. Missing updates can mean one of two things: (1) the distributor simply has not gotten around to releasing an update yet, or (2) the relevant package is of the second class citizen variety, such as those found in Fedora Extras or Ubuntu's Universe. Even though the set of vulnerabilities above is relatively small, some patterns emerge. Some distributors (Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, Red Hat) have managed to close most of the listed vulnerabilities. A couple of others have fallen seriously behind, however, leaving users running vulnerable software. Some distributors tend to be quite fast in getting updates out; others are slower. Perhaps the biggest surprise is the current lag time on Debian's updates; Debian used to be one of the faster distributions to get updates out. It is worth noting, as well, that the increasingly popular "non-core" package repositories can be a hazard for administrators who are not paying attention. Clamav is used as a virus filter on many sites, and the recent vulnerability is real and exploitable. An administrator who relies upon a distribution's update mechanism may not have noticed that, when she used yum or apt-get to install clamav, it came from Fedora Extras or Ubuntu Universe. As a second class citizen package, clamav will not be updated by the distributor, and will remain vulnerable for an unknown period of time. Any security-conscious site which uses such packages should have a mechanism in place to note and respond to security problems in those packages.
New vulnerabilities affix: remote command execution
apache information disclosure if modssl=yes
courier: missing input sanitizing
kdebase: local root vulnerability
mplayer: heap overflow
net-SNMP: packaging flaw
openssh: privilege escalation
openssh: GSSAPI credential disclosure
OpenTTD: remote execution of arbitrary code
polygen: denial of service
smb4k: temporary file vulnerability
squid: DoS issues
Updated vulnerabilities a2ps: input validation error
affix: two remote vulnerabilities
apache2: CGI script denial of service
httpd: off-by-one overflow and cross-site scripting
awstats: command injection vulnerability
backup-manager: insecure permissions and tempfile
bzip2: race condition and infinite loop
courier: DNS failure vulnerability
cpio: directory traversal
CUPS: multiple vulnerabilities
cvs: insecure temp file
cyrus-imapd: buffer overflows
dhcpcd: denial of service
elm: buffer overflow
emacs21: format string vulnerability in "movemail"
enscript: arbitrary code execution
ethereal: dissector vulnerabilities
evolution: format string issues
Foomatic: Arbitrary command execution in foomatic-rip
gaim: buffer overflow
gdb: multiple vulnerabilities
gtk-pixbuf, gtk2: denial of service
gedit: format string vulnerability
gettext: Insecure temporary file handling
ghostscript: symlink vulnerabilities
glibc: tempfile vulnerability in catchsegv script
grip: buffer overflow
groff: insecure temporary directory
gzip: arbitrary command execution
htdig: cross site scripting
imap: buffer overflow in c-client
imlib2: buffer overflows
junkbuster: heap corruption and settings modification
kdeedu: tempfile handling vulnerabilities
kdelibs: kate backup file permission leak
kernel: multiple vulnerabilities
kernel: multiple vulnerabilities
kernel: multiple vulnerabilities
krb5: double-free flaw
libconvert-uulib-perl: arbitrary code execution
libdbi-perl: insecure temporary file
libgadu: memory alignment bug
libgd2: buffer overflows in PNG handling
libnet-ssleay-perl: weakened cryptographic operations
libpam-ldap: authentication bypass
libTIFF: buffer overflow
libxml2 - arbitrary code execution
libxml2: multiple buffer overflows
libXpm: new buffer overflows
lm-sensors: insecure temp files
maildrop: missing privilege release
mantis: missing input sanitizing
mod_python: remote access vulnerability
Mozilla: frame injection spoofing
mysql: low-impact security fix
ncpfs: multiple vulnerabilities
nfs-utils: arbitrary code execution
ntp: uses wrong gid
OpenSSL: information leak
OpenSSL: denial of service vulnerabilities
openvpn: multiple vulnerabilities
pam_ldap: plain text authentication leak
pcre3: arbitrary code execution
perl: setuid vulnerabilities
perl: symlink vulnerability
php: arbitrary code execution
phpldapadmin: programming error
phpsysinfo: cross-site-scripting
postgresql: database initialization errors
Pound: buffer overflow
ProFTPD: format string vulnerabilities
pstotext: remote execution of arbitrary code
rp-pppoe, pppoe: missing privilege dropping
ruby: arbitrary command execution
shorewall: rule bypass vulnerability
simpleproxy: format string vulnerability
slocate: long path bug
SquirrelMail: several XSS vulnerabilities
sudo: race condition
sysreport: insecure temporary file
File overwrite vulnerability in tar and unzip
tcpdump: denial of service
tcpdump: multiple DoS issues
thunderbird mozilla firefox: multiple vulnerabilities
ucd-snmp: denial of service
vixie-cron: crontab allows any user to read another users crontabs
wget: file overwrites and arbitrary code execution
XChat 2.0.x SOCKS5 Vulnerability
xine-lib: buffer overflows
xine-ui - insecure temporary file creation
xorg-x11: integer overflows
xpdf: buffer overflow
xpdf: denial of service
zlib: buffer overflow
zlib: buffer overflow
Page editor: Jonathan Corbet Kernel development Brief items Kernel release statusThe current 2.6 release remains 2.6.13; the first 2.6.14 prepatch has not yet been released. According to Andrew Morton's September 5 kernel status report, there is quite a bit of stuff yet to be merged, so we may not see 2.6.14-rc1 for a few more days.That prepatch is already taking shape in Linus's git repository, however. Merged patches include wireless extensions v19, relayfs, the ipw2100 and ipw2200 wireless network drivers, the hostap driver (which allows a suitably equipped system to function as a wireless access point), a number of swap file improvements, a new set of sparse memory support patches (preparing the kernel for memory hotplug), a number of kernel build system improvements, a klist API change (see below), a large InfiniBand update (with a shared receive queue implementation), a PHY abstraction layer for ethernet drivers, a serial ATA update, four-level page table support for the ppc64 architecture, some sk_buff structure shrinking patches, a big netfilter update (including netlink interface to a number of netfilter internals and a user-space packet logging capability), a new linked list primitive, a DCCP implementation (see last week's Kernel Page), and more. The current -mm release is 2.6.13-mm1. Recent changes to -mm include a big TTY layer buffering rewrite, an IBM accelerometer driver, and a number of architecture updates.
Kernel development news 4K stacks for everyone?The 2.6.6 kernel contained, among many other things, a patch implementing single-page (4K) kernel stacks on the x86 architecture. Cutting the kernel stack size in half reduces the kernel's per-process overhead and eliminates a major consumer of multi-page allocations. So running with the smaller stack size is good for kernel performance and robustness. The only problem has been certain code paths in the kernel which require more stack space than that. Overrunning the kernel stack will corrupt kernel memory and lead to unfortunate behavior in a hurry.Over time, however, most of these problems have been taken care of, to the point that Adrian Bunk recently asked: is it time to eliminate the 8K stack option entirely for x86? Some distributors (e.g. Fedora) have been shipping kernels with 4K stacks for some time without ill effect. What problems might result, Adrian asked, if 4K stacks became the only option for everyone? It turns out that there are a few problems still. For example, the reiser4 filesystem still cannot work with 4K stacks. There is, however, a patch in the works which should take care of that particular problem. A more complicated issue comes up in certain complex storage configurations. If a system administrator builds a fancy set of RAID volumes involving the device mapper, network filesystems, etc., the path between the decision to write a block and the actual issuance of I/O can get quite long. This situation can lead to stack overflows in strange and unpredictable times. What happens here is that a filesystem will decide to write a block, which ends up creating a call to the relevant block driver's make_request() function (or the block subsystem's generic version of it). For stacked block devices, such as a RAID volume, that I/O request will be transformed into a new request for a different device, resulting in a new, recursive make_request() call. Once a few layers have been accumulated, the call path gets deep, and the stack eventually runs out. Neil Brown has posted a patch to resolve this problem by serializing recursive make_request() calls. With this patch, the kernel keeps an explicit stack of bio structures needing submission, and only processes one at a time in any given task. This patch will truncate the deep call paths, and should resolve the problem. That leaves one other problem outstanding: NDISwrapper. This code is a glue layer which allows Windows network drivers to be loaded into a Linux kernel; it is used by people who have network cards which are not otherwise supported by Linux. NDIS drivers, it seems, require larger stacks. Since they are closed-source drivers written for an operating system which makes larger stacks available, there is little chance of fixing them. So a few options have been discussed:
No consensus solution seems to have emerged as of this writing. There is time, anyway; removing the 8K stack option is not a particularly urgent task, and certainly will not be considered for 2.6.14.
Merging GFS2Andrew Morton has stated that the OCFS2 cluster filesystem is likely to be merged for 2.6.14. OCFS2 is not the only such filesystem under development, however, and the developers behind the GFS2 filesystem are wondering when it, too, might be merged - into -mm, at least. Much work has been done on GFS to address concerns which have been raised previously; the developers think that it is getting close to ready for wider exposure. The resulting discussion raised a couple of interesting questions about the kernel development process.The first one was asked by Andrew Morton: "why?". Given that OCFS2 is going in, does the kernel really need another clustered filesystem? What, in particular, does GFS bring that OCFS2 lacks? The answers took two forms: (1) Linux has traditionally hosted a large variety of filesystems, and (2) since cluster filesystems are relatively new, users should be able to try both and see which one works better for them. David Teigland also posted a list of GFS features. GFS will probably win this argument; there is a clear user community, and filesystems tend not to have any impact on the rest of the kernel. But, still, some developers are starting to wonder; consider, for example, this message from Suparna Bhattacharya:
And herein lies the issue where I tend to agree with Andrew on --
its really nice to have multiple filesystems innovating freely in
their niches and eventually proving themselves in practice, without
being bogged down by legacy etc. But at the same time, is there
enough thought and discussion about where the
fragmentation/diversification is really warranted, vs improving
what is already there, or say incorporating the best of one into
another, maybe over a period of time?
The other issue which came up was the creation of a user-space API for the distributed lock manager (DLM) used by GFS. If nothing else, the two cluster filesystem should have a common API so that applications can be written for either one. One option for this API might be "dlmfs", a virtual filesystem used with OCFS2. The dlmfs approach allows normal filesystem operations to be used for lock management tasks; even shell scripts can perform locking. Concerns with dlmfs include relatively slow performance and a certain unease with aspects of the interface:
Actually I think it's rather sick. Taking O_NONBLOCK and making it
a lock-manager trylock because they're
kinda-sorta-similar-sounding? Spare me. O_NONBLOCK means "open
this file in nonblocking mode", not "attempt to acquire a clustered
filesystem lock". Not even close.
(Andrew Morton). It is not clear that better alternatives exist, however. One could implement it all with a big set of ioctl() calls, but nobody really wants to do that. Another approach would be to create a new set of system calls specifically for lock management. Some have argued in favor of system calls, but others, such as Alan Cox, are strongly opposed:
Every so often someone decides that a deeply un-unix interface with
new syscalls is a good idea. Every time history proves them totally
bonkers. There are cases for new system calls but this doesn't
seem one of them.
Alan lists a number of reasons why a file descriptor-based approach makes sense for this sort of operation - they mostly come down to well-understood semantics and the fact that many things just work. This is clearly a discussion which could go on for some time. Daniel Phillips points out that this is not necessarily a problem. There are currently no user-space users of any DLM API beyond a few filesystem management tools, so there is no great hurry to merge any API. The cluster filesystems could go in without any user-space DLM interface at all while the developers figure out what that interface should be. And, says Daniel, perhaps there should not be one at all. Despite the perceived elegance of having a single lock manager on the system, having user space rely upon its own, user-space DLM is a workable solution which could simplify the kernel side of things.
A pair of klist API changesThe klist type implements a linked list with built-in locking; it was described here last March. The 2.6.14 kernel will contain a couple of API changes affecting klists.The first is a simple change for a couple of klist functions, which now have the following prototypes:
void klist_add_head(struct klist_node *node, struct klist *list);
void klist_add_tail(struct klist_node *node, struct klist *list);
The change is that the order of the two parameters has been switched. This change makes the klist functions use the same ordering as the older list_head functions, hopefully leading to a lower level of programmer confusion. The more complicated change has to do with reference counting. The klist list iteration functions can hold references to objects on the list, but the higher level code (which actually creates the objects) does not know about those references. Somehow, the klist code must be able to tell the next layer up about references it holds during list iteration. To that end, klist_init() has picked up a couple of new parameters:
void klist_init(struct klist *list, void (*get)(struct klist_node *node),
void (*put)(struct klist_node *node));
The get() and put() functions are a bit of glue code which allows the klist code to take and release references. All code using klists must now provide these functions at initialization time.
Patches and updates Kernel trees
Build system
Core kernel code
Development tools
Device drivers
Memory management
Networking
Architecture-specific
Security-related
Miscellaneous
Page editor: Jonathan Corbet Distributions News and Editorials First Look at Asianux 2.0If you visit Asianux.com, you'll find yourself on a web site of a project with plenty of ambition. Perhaps the best indication of it is a chart on this page which attempts to define the sphere of influence of the main enterprise Linux distributions in the world, with Red Hat dominant in North America, SUSE in Europe and -- you've guessed it -- Asianux on much of the huge (and potentially very lucrative) Asian continent. Although the reality is a little more complex than the chart would like to us to believe, the Asianux project has succeeded in attracting much attention in the Linux media. With the recent release of Asianux 2.0 we decided to download the two ISO images for the i386 architecture (images for x86_64 and pSeries processors are also available) and install it on a Pentium 4 box to take it for a test drive.Before we start, it is important to stress that Asianux is not meant to be used as a standalone product. Although this is not clearly stated on the project's web site, the lack of any security and errata pages makes it obvious; in fact, since the release of Asianux 1.0 in April 2004 the project has issued just a single service pack, rather than regular security updates to vulnerable applications, as one would expect from an enterprise Linux distribution. Instead, Asianux serves as a base for the three participating Linux vendors - China's Red Flag Software, Japan's Miracle Corporation, and Korea's Haansoft. Of the three, only Red Flag has so far released a product based on Asianux 2.0 - a development snapshot of Red Flag Linux 5.0 Desktop, which is available for free download from Red Flag's web site. Asianux 2.0 is not an independently developed distribution, but rather obviously based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. This is also true of the Anaconda installer, which, although heavily modified and themed, offers roughly the same steps as any recent Red Hat or Fedora installation program. Nevertheless, there are some differences; for example, the partitioning stage in Asianux also offers ReiserFS and XFS formatting options, but, on the other hand, it completely omits the option to select SELinux functionality, leaving SELinux disabled instead. The package selection is also simplified with the only two options being a "minimal install" and "install everything". Also unlike the Fedora/Red Hat installation program, where some configuration takes place after the first reboot, in Asianux, the package installation step is immediately followed by monitor setup, while the first reboot triggers the good old Kudzu for further hardware configuration. The step to add non-root users has been removed from the Asianux installation program. The system can boot into a console login prompt or KDM. The only available desktop environment in Asianux 2.0 is KDE 3.2.1 with a "start button" and window decorations and widgets strongly resembling Windows 98. The set of available applications is rather limited, but this is hardly surprising given the fact that Asianux is designed to be a base to build upon, rather than an all-encompassing Linux distribution. As such, don't expect to find much beyond the simplest of tools for common tasks. The only area that has some interesting applications is system administration, which includes several graphical front-ends for analyzing SELinux policies, a tool for authentication configuration, Guarddog firewall configuration, and the usual printer and network setup tools. Also present is a "Control Panel" with several modules that are virtual copycats of their counterparts from Microsoft Windows. Although the name "Asianux" implies that the operating system is designed for the large Asian continent full of diverse cultures, languages and writing systems, the truth is that Asianux only supports four Asian languages, or to be more precise, four Asian character sets - simplified Chinese (used in China and Singapore), traditional Chinese (used in Taiwan and Hong Kong), Japanese and Korean - these are often referred to as CJK languages. It also supports English. Somewhat surprisingly, the system locale defaults to the national language code set (e.g. Big5, GB2312) as selected during installation, rather than Unicode (UTF8). The input of CJK characters is offered via SCIM, an increasingly popular and intelligent utility (originally developed by Turbolinux) for typing the complex character sets of East Asian languages. After spending an afternoon in Asianux 2.0 we found few reasons to complain about the operating system. Although the application set is a little outdated and we didn't particularly care for the Windows-like look and feel of the default theme, we found the system solid, responsive, and with trouble-free input of the four supported character sets. The extra graphical utilities included in the system provided for a pleasant surprise. A little less impressive is the Asianux web sites, which lacks documentation and any interactive community resources, such as mailing lists, user forums or Wikis. Also, the distribution is developed completely behind closed doors without any public participation and without any public development releases. Now for the all-important question: are there any compelling reasons for an Asian company to choose Asianux over its main competitors - the enterprise offerings by Red Hat, Novell and even Turbolinux, which has been active on the Chinese and Japanese markets? After all, Red Hat, SUSE and Turbolinux have been supporting CJK languages for a long time. The latest release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the upcoming release of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server will also support a number of Indian languages, not to mention many other languages on the continent, including those of the Middle East and South East Asia. As such, one can argue that both Red Hat and SUSE are, in fact, more "Asian", at least in terms of language support, than Asianux itself. If Asianux wants to become a leading Linux player on the continent, it needs to do two things. Firstly, it needs to invite other main Asian Linux players to join the development effort - Turbolinux is an obvious example of a highly experienced and relatively successful Linux vendor with good sales in China and Japan, but large Linux companies also operate in Thailand, India and other countries. Secondly, the project should open up to community participation - in a fashion similar to Fedora Foundation, OpenSUSE or OpenSolaris. This is a trend that has already started in other parts of the world and Asian Linux companies would be wise not to ignore it.
New Releases Ubuntu Colony CD 4Ubuntu has released Colony CD 4, the fourth in a series of milestone CD images with a snapshot of the Breezy development cycle. This will be the last Colony CD release before the Breezy preview.
Novell: SUSE Linux 10.0 comingNovell announces that SUSE Linux 10.0 will come out "in early October." "SUSE Linux 10.0 is created by the openSUSE project, a recently launched community initiative sponsored by Novell that promotes the use of Linux everywhere. A first for Novell, SUSE Linux 10.0 will include code changes and bug fixes initiated with developer input from across the worldwide Linux community."
Distribution News Fedora.us Status, Warning to FC3 APT Users!The mirrors for download.fedora.us mirrors will completely remove FC3 and FE3 from the apt-only fedora.us mirror network on September 10th. "The Fedora Project recommends that users migrate away from apt to newer tools like yum or smartpm. Even upstream Conectiva has given up on apt, instead worked on their new client smartpm rewritten from scratch. Apt-rpm has bugs (virtual provides bugs like #164601) and missing functionality (like multilib) that may never be fixed, making it impossible to support for the Fedora Project." Also fedora.us will no longer make security updates for RH8 Extras.
MadTux/eLucis fund drive for DebianMadTux/eLucis is organizing a drive to raise funds for the Debian Project. They will donate 40% of their gross proceeds for the week of Sept 19-Sept 24, 2005 to support Debian development.
Debian: New experimental "shadow" package 4.0.12-1, synced with upstreamThe shadow package maintenance team has announced the release of version 4.0.12-1 of the shadow package, in experimental. "Please test it as much as possible by installing the new passwd and login packages. Package maintainers who use "su" in their maintainer scripts should test them with the new su as much as possible."
Debian bugs.d.o: usertags and user categoriesAnthony Towns reports on changes to the Debian Bug Tracking System (BTS). Click below to find out about the latest features that have been added to the BTS.
Announcing the release of the Ubuntu Documentation Style GuideThe Ubuntu Documentation Project (UDP) has announced the release of version 1.0 of the Ubuntu Documentation Style Guide. The Style Guide is a reference tool used by the Ubuntu Documentation Project members and contributors.
Linspire giving away desktop Linux OS (News.com)Two weeks ago we introduced Freespire, a distribution made from the freely available sources used by Linspire. Unfortunately Freespire was not ready to be outed. News.com reports on Linspire's response, which included giving away free copies of Linspire Five-O. Freespire will be renamed Squiggle to avoid further confusion with Linspire.
New Distributions EliveElive is a live CD with the Enlightenment 17 and 16 desktop environments. It features hardware autodetection and self-configuration, as well as wide support for different kinds of monitors. Hard disk install is also supported. It has also the capability of writing in a virtual system (in the live CD mode), which allows the user to install any program through apt-get or compile it. Here is the list of packages included in the new 0.3 release.
Distribution Newsletters Debian Weekly NewsThe Debian Weekly News for September 6, 2005 covers a quiz to test your knowledge of Debian, the KDE transition status, a discussion on the license for wiki content, run levels and the Linux Standards Base, and several other topics.
Fedora Weekly News #12The 12th issue of the Fedora Weekly News covers the upcoming FUDCon London, meeting minutes for the Fedora Documentation and Fedora Marketing meetings, a Fedora Glossary, and more.
Gentoo Weekly NewsletterThe Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for September 5 is out. Topics this week include the election of a new Gentoo developer council, the simultaneous support of PHP4 and PHP5, and the question of whether Tor users should be allowed into the Gentoo forums.
MOTU report - Issue 7Here's the latest report from the Masters of the Ubuntu Universe, with an introduction to the newest MOTUs and look at what's new in the Universe.
DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 116The DistroWatch Weekly for September 5, 2005 is out. "The first full week in September should be an exciting one for users and fans of Free Software - GNOME 2.12, Ubuntu 5.10 Preview, and SUSE Linux 10.0 RC1 are all expected to hit the download mirrors later this week. But before that happens we will take a brief look at the "smart" package manager in Mandriva, check out "SUPER", a performance-enhancing subproject of SUSE Linux, and revisit the Linspire versus Freespire controversy. Our featured distribution of the week is Elive, a great live CD featuring the Enlightenment window manager - a project that is also the recipient of our US$250 August 2005 donation."
Package updates Fedora updatesUpdates for Fedora Core 4: xorg-x11 (lots of bug fixes), evince (add evince-0.4.0-dbus-fix.patch), openmotif (fix mrm initialization error), cman-kernel (rebuilt for kernel 2.6.12-1.1447_FC4), gnbd-kernel (rebuilt for kernel 2.6.12-1.1447_FC4), dlm-kernel (rebuilt for kernel 2.6.12-1.1447_FC4), GFS-kernel (rebuilt for kernel 2.6.12-1.1447_FC4), lockdev (bug fix), perl-Compress-Zlib (update to 1.37), termcap (rebuild), ckermit (use baudboy.h to create per-device lock(s) in /var/lock), kdegraphics (backport CVS patches), pam (fix potential auditing problems), util-linux (bug fix), tar (provide man page), tzdata (updates for time zone changes).Updates for Fedora Core 3: perl-Compress-Zlib (update to 1.37), perl-DBI (old and low priority security update), tzdata (updates for time zone changes).
Trustix updatesUpdates for Trustix Secure Linux 2.2 & 3.0 fix various bugs: 4suite, aspell, bind, cpplus-trustix, dmapi, kernel, lftp, logwatch, mc, mrtg, nano, openssh, php4, php, sqlite2, sqlite3, tsl-utils, xfsdump and a2ps, amanda, apache-ant, autofs, dev, gcc4, gpm, iptables, kernel, lrzsz, mc, module-init-tools, mrtg, newt, openswan, setup, slang, sysstat, tsl-utils.
Distribution reviews Linux From Scratch 6.1 - Part 2 - BLFS (TuxMachines)TuxMachines takes a look at Beyond Linux From Scratch. "I had the basic LFS 6.1 install in place and I was hoping I only needed to pick up from there. The BLFS docbook lists such topics as security, filesystems, shells, editors, differing networking configurations, and my main goal here: X and window managers."
Discovering Ubuntu Linux (Flexbeta)A Windows zealot discovers Ubuntu, on Flexbeta. "Ubuntu has what is, quite possibly, the friendliest Linux user community of any distribution I've ever tried. Their forums are home to thousands of users, many of them completely new to Linux. Any question you could possibly have has probably already been asked and answered there, but if you can't find your answer you can post about it in one of their many forums. It is very rare someone won't have an answer to your question, and if you can't find an answer you can always ask them on IRC."
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol Development The GNOME 2.12 Desktop and Developer PlatformThe GNOME project has announced the release of version 2.12 of the GNOME Desktop and Developer Platform:
The GNOME Foundation today released the
latest version of the GNOME Desktop and Developer Platform, the leading
desktop for Linux and Unix operating systems. Version 2.12 improves the
usability and power of GNOME in response to user feedback and developer
contributions, and includes thousands of changes which refine the easiest and
friendliest free software desktop.
In keeping with GNOME's "users first" philosophy, GNOME makes stable
releases every six months. This allows developers and distributors to plan
their GNOME-based products with confidence. As a result, distributions such as
Fedora, SUSE, and Ubuntu will include GNOME 2.12 in the next release of their
products, providing GNOME 2.12 to millions of users.
The changes in this release are grouped according to the needs of users, systems administrators, and software developers. The What's New For Users document lists the user-visible changes. These include:
The What's New For Administrators document lists changes to the administration utilities, including:
What's New For Developers introduces a number of API enhancements to the GTK+ GUI framework, and Cross-platform development improvements. Also, this release of GNOME adds support for the Cairo SVG library. The GNOME Internationalization effort continues to increase the number of supported languages. For a hint at what's to come in the next release, see the Looking to GNOME 2.14 and Beyond document.
System Applications Database Software PostgreSQL Weekly NewsThe September 5, 2005 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News covers the latest releases of the PostgreSQL database and related software.
PyGreSQL 3.7 releasedVersion 3.7 of PyGreSQL, a Python module for interfacing to a PostgreSQL database, is out with numerous improvements.
ZODB 3.5 final releasedVersion 3.5 final of ZODB, the Zope Object DataBase, is out. "ZODB 3.5 is very close to ZODB 3.4.1 in features. Subtransactions are deprecated in 3.5 (in favor of savepoints), and 3.5 adds a simple multi-database feature (a way to group multiple databases into a collection, such that a connection to any database in the collection can be used to obtain connections to the other databases in the collection)."
Networking Tools J2EP 1.0 release (SourceForge)Version 1.0 of J2EP is out and is considered ready for general use. "J2EP is a reverse proxy running on a Servlet 2.3 compatible engine. A reverse proxy proxies traffic to servers and not, like a standard proxy, outgoing traffic. A reverse proxy can be used when you want to give access to your internal server but not open the firewall for direct connections. Then the client can connect to the proxy and the proxy will connect to the server."
Security OpenSSH 4.2 releasedOpenSSH 4.2 is out. The changes are mostly security-oriented; they include one which might cause interoperability problems with very old versions of OpenSSH. Click below for the details.
Web Site Development GNU Hosting Helper 1.48 release (SourceForge)Version 1.48 of GNU Hosting Helper, a web hosting management package, has been announced. "GNU Hosting Helper now supports MyDNS name server software and a Postfix/MySQL virtual mail system along with already having supported standard Sendmail and Postfix installations, BIND name server software, virtually any FTPd server software, and Apache web server."
Desktop Applications Audio Applications The XMMS2 music playerhref="http://wiki.xmms2.xmms.se/index.php/Main_Page">XMMS2, the X(cross)platform Music Multiplexing System is an effort to rewrite the poplular XMMS (X Multimedia System) music player.
Calendar Software Sunbird and Mozilla Calendar Progress Report (MozillaZine)MozillaZine covers the progress on the Sunbird and the Mozilla Calendar project. "Simon Paquet has written a progress report on Sunbird and the Mozilla Calendar project. The post details the bugs that have been fixed over the past two and a half months. The next planned Sunbird release is 0.3alpha1."
Desktop Environments GNOME Software AnnouncementsThe following new GNOME software has been announced this week:
KDE Software AnnouncementsThe following new KDE software has been announced this week:
Electronics XCircuit 3.3.32 releasedVersion 3.3.32 of XCircuit, an electronic schematic drawing application, is out. Changes include a bug fix and a new -replace file load option.
gEDA Suite CDROM ISO 20050830Release 20050830 of the gEDA Suite CDROM, a set of electronics applications, has been announced. See the README document for details.
Financial Applications SQL-Ledger 2.4.16 is outVersion 2.4.16 of SQL-Ledger, a web-based accounting system, has been released. Changes include BOM formatting for assembly items, partsgroup selection improvements, and improved portability.
Fonts and Images The STIX fonts for free mathematicsThe STIX consortium is assembling a royalty-free character font for mathematical typesetting purposes. The consortium is accepting comments regarding the project's draft license. "Unfortunately, the license does not quite meet the free-software, open-source, or DFSG criteria. It allows you to add glyphs to the font, as long as you release the new font under a different name, but you cannot modify the existing glyphs (even if you rename the font)."
Games MetalMech 0.2.2 released (SourceForge)Version 0.22 of Metal Mech is available with bug fixes. "Metal Mech is a Web-based mass multiplayer game of battle between robots and space exploration. It is a game of strategy, economics, role-playing, and combat. Each player can handle their own war robot and battle against other players to be the Emperor of the Universe. Players battle against each other for resources, energy, money, buildings, and more."
Graphics TesselSphere 1.1.5 releasedVersion 1.1.5 of TesselSphere, an OpenGL spherical subdivision utility for plotting particle and geodesic modules, has been announced. Here are the changes: "Now links to WildMagic version 3 and STLport 5.0 2. Fixes a nasty bug on linux where some geodesic grid vertices failed to intersect with an ellipsoidal envelope. 3. Separated some of the UI classes. (UI will undergo major overhaul in the next release). 4. New base class TS_Envelope; this will eventually allow projection into all kinds of envelopes; at present it just projects into a TS_Ellipsoid. 5."
Interoperability Wine 20050830 releasedRelease 20050830 of Wine has been announced. Changes include more theming support, crypto dll improvements, better LDAP support, a new MSXML implementation, MSHTML improvements, bug fixes, and more.
Web Browsers Mozilla Firefox to Drop Support for SSL 2.0 (MozillaZine)MozillaZine reports on plans to drop SSL version 2 in Mozilla Firefox. "Unfortunately, there are a number of known security flaws in SSL 2.0, which was the first public version of the protocol (no applications shipped with support for SSL 1.0). Therefore, the Mozilla Foundation is eager to disable support for SSL 2.0 and have all Firefox installations use only the newer and more secure SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0 protocols."
Litmus Testing Tool in Testing (MozillaZine)MozillaZine reports that a new Web-based Mozilla testing tool called Litmus is in need of testing. "The Mozilla quality assurance team is keen for Litmus to get some small-scale testing now before it's promoted to a wider audience. Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird testers interested in experimenting with Litmus should follow the instructions in the weblog post and leave feedback and comments there. Any Firefox and Thunderbird problems discovered in the process should be posted to Litmus itself."
Extending Firefox for Web Developers (Warping it up)Fini Alring has written an article introducing several Firefox extensions, including JavaScript Console, DOM Inspector, Venkman - JavaScript Debugger, Web Developer Extension, Greasemonkey, Platypus, ColorZilla, and more. (Found on MozillaZine)
Minutes of the mozilla.org Staff Meeting(MozillaZine)The minutes from the August 22, 2005 mozilla.org staff meeting have been announced. "Issues discussed include Firefox and Thunderbird 1.5, New Newsgroups, Trademarks, DevMo and Software Update."
Minutes of the mozilla.org Staff Meeting (MozillaZine)The minutes from the August 29, 2005 mozilla.org staff meeting have been announced. "Issues discussed include Mozilla Firefox 1.5, Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5, newsgroups, DevMo and conferences."
Languages and Tools Caml Caml Weekly NewsThe September 6, 2005 edition of the Caml Weekly News is online with the latest articles about the Caml language.
Haskell Haskell Weekly NewsThe August 30, 2005 edition of the Haskell Weekly News is online with the latest Haskell news. Topics covered this week include several new packages and discussions about arrays and binary files.
Haskell Weekly NewsThe September 6, 2005 edition of the Haskell Weekly News is online with the latest Haskell news. Topics covered this week include the announcement of the cabal-get system, h4sh 0.2, time limits on computation, and new hosting for cvs.haskell.org.
Java GNU Classpath 0.18 releasedVersion 0.18 of GNU Classpath, the essential libraries for java, is out. "This is our first release after "The Big Merge" with GCC/GCJ. GNU Classpath can now be used as a subdirectory of libgcj inside the GCC tree so it will be much easier to keep GCC up-to-date with the latest GNU Classpath developer release snapshots."
This week on harmony-devThe August 28 - September 3, 2005 edition of This week on harmony-dev is online with coverage of the latest developments to the Harmony open-source Java platform.
PHP PHP 5.0.5 ReleasedVersion 5.0.5 of PHP has been released. "This version is a maintenance release, that contains numerous bug fixes, including security fixes to vulnerabilities found in the XMLRPC package. All users of PHP 5.0 are encouraged to upgrade to this version."
Python PyQt v3.15 ReleasedVersion 3.15 of PyQt, the Python language bindings for the Qt GUI Toolkit, is out. Changes include: improved integration between Qt's ActiveQt framework and Python's win32com modules, support for QScintilla v1.6 and support for Python's cyclic garbage collector.
Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!The September 5, 2005 edition of Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! is online with the latest Python language article links.
Ruby Ruby Weekly NewsThe September 4th, 2005 edition of the Ruby Weekly News brings you the latest discussions from the ruby-talk mailing list.
Tcl/Tk Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!The September 1, 2005 edition of Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! is online with new Tcl/Tk articles and resources.
Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!The September 5, 2005 edition of Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! has been published, take a look for the latest Tcl/Tk articles and resources.
Editors RText Version 0.9.2.3 Now Available (SourceForge)Version 0.9.2.3 of RText is available with many new features. "RText is a customizable programmer's text editor written in Java. Some of its features include: syntax highlighting, editing multiple documents at once, printing and print preview, find/replace/find in files dialogs, undo/redo, and online help."
Page editor: Forrest Cook Linux in the news Recommended Reading Microsoft Fights Piracy In China, Linux Wins (InformationWeek)InformationWeek has posted a lengthy article on how "anti-piracy" efforts in China are pushing the country toward Linux. "China in particular will see compound annual growth rates of 25.6 percent in the number of developers in the next three years, predicts IDC analyst Stephen Hendrick. It's a good bet that many of them will be working on the Linux platform, especially since Linux is already gaining traction among Chinese college students."
Moving on With Patents and Open-Source Software (ComputerWorld)HP's Stormy Peters has a column in ComputerWorld urging the free software community to start playing the software patent game for real. "Building its own portfolio of actual patents, not just the right to use them, enables the open-source community to effectively defend open-source software and to use its patents to negotiate cross-patent agreements. Open-source developers should file for as many software patents as they can and stockpile them. By working with the system, you can file for patents, accumulate them and use them to protect your software rights."
Trade Shows and Conferences aKademy 2005 Concludes on Sunday (KDE.News)KDE.News reports from aKademy. "The 2005 KDE conference aKademy in Malaga, Spain, ends on Sunday 4th of September. Up to now the conference has been hugely successful with more than 250 visitors. The Users and Administrators Conference and the Developers and Contributors Conference have both concluded, the Coding Marathon is continuing for two more days."
Usability Events at aKademy 2005 (KDE.News)KDE.News looks at the presentations by the KDE-Usability group, at aKademy. "Usability has grown over the year since the last aKademy. During the Coding Marathon portion of the conference, the KDE-Usability group gave several presentations and tutorials so developers can learn more about usability, and get live usability support while they hacked away. It was a great success and there were a lot of great bug fixes completed during the weekend. The following is a summary of the presentations and tutorials from the conference."
Collaboration and Integration at Developer's Conference (KDE.News)KDE.News provides wrap-up coverage of the aKademy conference. "The aKademy 2005 KDE Developers Conference finished yesterday with a second day of talks to prepare for KDE 4. Topics of the day included integration with other programming platforms, marketing KDE and accessibility. In their keynote, David Carson and Deepika Chauhan from Nokia described the challenges involved with porting KHTML to the series 60 platform."
Companies IBM gets own facts out for Linux v Windows (the Register)The Register covers the IBM version of the Windows vs Linux TCO comparison. "IBM is kicking some total cost of ownership (TCO) dirt in Microsoft's face, releasing a numbers survey that claims Linux is cheaper to deploy and manage than Windows. An IBM-sponsored Robert Frances Group study found it is 40 per cent cheaper to buy, implement and run an application server on an x86 server running Linux than on a similar server running Windows. Robert Frances polled IT executives at 20 mid-sized and large companies with 250 or more employees."
Interviews Mozilla as a Development Platform: An Interview with Axel Hecht (O'ReillyNet)Edd Dumbill talks with Axel Hecht, a member of Mozilla Europe's board of directors, and a major contributor to the Mozilla project, on O'ReillyNet. "ED: Are there any recent technical changes that have helped Mozilla become a more viable platform? AH: There is a considerable amount of energy going into XULRunner these days. This is the platform that we will port our applications to. We are going to start with Firefox, but there are already people actively using the IRC client Chatzilla as an XULRunner application. XULRunner will include Gecko and a set of other modules usable for application creation."
The first Power Architecture Technical Briefing (developerWorks)developerWorks talks with Stanley Kwong, who will be giving a technical briefing about Power Architecture in the People's Republic of China. "Stan Kwong: I'm in charge of the worldwide technical briefings and also a lot of the technical events. You can kind of look at us as the evangelists for IBM, the face-to-face evangelists. I started with developerWorks about four years ago. Given the background of how we try to evangelize, specifically in terms of the Web and the developer online community, IBM started feeling that there was a major need in terms of the entire world to have evangelists going out there to talk a lot about our technology and also about products. So from a very small staff, we began doing technical briefings."
Reviews Kontact personal information manager (Linux.com)Linux.com reviews Kontact, a personal information manager. "KDE's Kontact personal information manager acts as a centralized viewing and editing interface for email, contacts, to-do list, calendar, and notes. Kontact provides you with a Summary view of all the important information you have stored on computer. It also warns you when birthdays and anniversaries are fast approaching, and can even tell you the weather conditions in as many cities as you set it up to show. It's pretty good-looking to boot."
Introduction to the Xen Virtual Machine (Linux Journal)Rami Rosen introduces Xen in a Linux Journal article. "The Xen VMM (virtual machine monitor) is an open-source project that is being developed in the computer laboratory of the University of Cambridge, UK. It enables us to create many virtual machines, each of which runs an instance of an operating system. These guest operating systems can be a patched Linux kernel, version 2.4 or 2.6, or a patched NetBSD/FreeBSD kernel. User applications can run on guest OSes as they are, without any change in code. Sun also is working on a Solaris-on-Xen port."
Miscellaneous MA Chooses OASIS OpenDoc XML as Office Standard (Groklaw)Groklaw reports on a plan to migrate all of the Massachusetts state agencies to the OpenDocument standard by the beginning of 2007. "As they themselves acknowledge, "Given the majority of Executive Department agencies currently use office applications such as MS Office, Lotus Notes and WordPerfect that produce documents in proprietary formats, the magnitude of the migration effort to this new open standard is considerable." Considerable, yes, but if your goal is interoperability, both necessary and worth the effort, as anyone who has ever tried to interoperate in WordPerfect with someone working in MS Office can testify."
Open Source: upsizing is unpleasant for some! (IT-Director)This IT-Director article describes the frustrations some developers feel regarding the commercialization of free software, and comes to a strange conclusion. "Inevitably, the pioneer spirit is eroded as commercial organisations pick, choose and adapt Open Source software to meet their own strategy. Open Source will lose its original ethos. Ultimately, Open Source software which does not make commercial sense, or at least indirectly contribute towards the commercial strategies of the software vendors and their corporate markets, is doomed to a dead end."
Page editor: Forrest Cook Announcements Non-Commercial announcements The GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity ProjectThe Free Software Foundation and FSF Europe have sent out an announcement regarding the next phase in the process leading to version 3 of the GPL. "The project will bring together thousands of organisations, software developers, and software users from around the globe during 2006, in an effort to update the world's most popular Free Software licence. The GPLv3 promises to be one of the largest participatory comments and adoption efforts ever undertaken." There is a €150,000 grant from Stichting NLnet supporting this project, but not many specifics (yet) on what will actually be done.
OpenOffice.org License SimplificationLouis Suarez-Potts has sent an announcement regarding Sun's retirement of the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL). "How does this move affect OpenOffice.org? As most know, OpenOffice.org code was launched under the dual banner of the SISSL and LGPL; licensees could choose which one they wanted to use, and nearly all have chosen the LGPL. Effective with the announcement that Sun is retiring the SISSL, however, OpenOffice.org will in the future only be licensed under the LGPL."
Commercial announcements Brightstar on $100 laptop projectBrightstar has announced its involvement in the "One Laptop Per Child" project. "The $100 laptop is envisioned as a Linux-based, full color, full screen laptop enabled with both WiFi and cellular technology and produced to be able to handle a rugged, child's environment." A little more information is available on this Media Lab page.
CA makes a patent pledgeComputer Associates has announced that it will not assert patent infringement claims against free software projects using technology covered by any of 14 patents. The list of patents includes one entitled "graphical display of data," among others.
Panda Software announces malware certificationPanda Software has announced malware certification for its Panda SambaSecure Antivirus product. "Panda SambaSecure has obtained Checkmark Level 1 and 2 certification on detection and disinfection of malware, which is a good indicator of the quality level of our products."
SCO Partners With MySQL ABAccording to this press release, the SCO Group and MySQL AB have joined forces, with SCO shipping a commercial version of mysql on OpenServer. "As part of the agreement, the companies will work together on a range of joint marketing, sales, training, business development and support programs that will benefit customers throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia." The PR has dropped SCO's usual "owner of the Unix operating system" line as well.
Servertec Java Products Go Open SourceServertec has released its suite of Java products under the GNU Library General Public License. A number of embedded web servers for embedded platforms and other utilities are included.
SWsoft partners with HPSWsoft has announced a partnership with HP relating to its Virtuozzo server virtualization solution. "SWsoft, an established leader in server automation and virtualization software, today announced complete Virtuozzo-based server virtualization solutions on IntelR ItaniumR 2 processor-based HP Integrity servers and other HP platforms."
New Books Addison-Wesley publishes Beyond the C++ Standard LibraryAddison-Wesley has published the book Beyond the C++ Standard Library: An Introduction to Boost by Björn Karlsson.
Blog Out Loud--Sound Great Doing ItO'Reilly has published the book Podcasting Hacks by Jack D. Herrington.
Resources The EFF's guide to DRM in online musicThe Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a guide to DRM in online music. "This guide 'translates' the marketing messages by the major services, giving you the real deal rather than spin. Understanding how DRM and the DMCA pose a danger to your rights will help you to make fully informed purchasing decisions. Before buying DRM-crippled music from any service, you should consider the following examples and be sure to understand how the service might limit your ability to make lawful use of the music you purchase."
Free Software Foundation Europe NewsletterThe FSF Europe newsletter looks at the GPLv3, a report from Karsten Gerloff at the ATTAC Germany summer academy, the AFFS General Meeting and improving the infrastructure.
The InterBase and Firebird Developer Magazine launchesThe initial release of the InterBase and Firebird Developer Magazine is available as a free PDF download. "In this issue: cover story "Inside savepoints" about internals of savepoints mechanism, interesting article "How to use temporary tables in InterBase", overview of "Embedded User Authentication in InterBase 7.5", practical guide "How to avoid 10054 errors", and so on."
Linux Gazette #118The September Linux Gazette is out. This edition has the usual features plus articles such as 'Linux Analog to Digital Converter', 'Microprocessor Simulator on Linux', 'New Use for Old Hardware: A Network Copier', 'Using The QEMU Emulator, My Thoughts And Experiences', 'Digital Television', 'Snort Inline Part II', and more.
New Mozilla Newsgroups FAQ (MozillaZine)A new FAQ about Mozilla newsgroups has been announced. "The document covers issues such as access to the new newsgroups, access to the old newsgroups, the mailing lists and anti-spam measures. Last month, it was announced that Mozilla newsgroups will be moved to a server hosted by Giganews."
MyOSS Magazine Edition 5 available for free downloadThe latest edition of MyOSS Magazine - Edition 5 (Chronicles of FaTUX) is available for download. This issue looks at Live CDs, code design, PythonCard, HackInTheBox conference tickets and more. Click below for a more through summary, or just grab a copy.
Contests and Awards amaroK and Kontact Artwork Challenges (KDE.News)KDE.News covers two KDE-Artists.org artwork challenges for amaroK and Kontact. "The amaroK developers are currently working on the 1.3 release of their live CD. If you are an Open Source artist and are interested in creating the amaroK 1.3 live CD artwork then join the 7 day artwork challenge. Excellent prizes await the winner."
2.12 Splash Screen Winner (GnomeDesktop)GnomeDesktop has announced the winner of the GNOME 2.12 splash screen contest. "The winner of the 2.12 splash screen competition is GNOME in Silk - evolving 2 by Xilef. The new splash screen will be used in the official GNOME 2.12 release in a few days." The image resembles a foot-shaped pill dissolving in water.
TUX 2005 Readers' Choice Award Winners AnnouncedSSC Publications, Inc. has announced the winners of its first-annual TUX Magazine Readers' Choice Awards. Winners include Kubuntu/Ubuntu, KDE, Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim, and more.
Upcoming Events Badger Badger Badger Tour and Special USA TourJeff Waugh has announced the Badger Badger Badger Tour. "I will be travelling for a month and a half, criss-crossing the northern hemisphere, to bring the world of Ubuntu to your doorstep. Expect badgers, mushrooms, schnaaaaaakes, an awful lot of Ubuntu CDs, and a healthy dose of madcap hijinks! If you would like to catch up with me during my journey, add your details to the wiki page, or reply to this email."
Third Fedora User Conference, LondonThe third Fedora User Conference has been announced. The event will be held in London on October 6, 2005. "The Fedora Project, a Red Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source project, today announced that the third Fedora User and Developer Conference (FUDCon) will take place on the second day of this years LinuxWorld in London on 6th October, 2005 at the Olympia Exhibition Centre. Following successful conferences of the Fedora Community in Boston in February and during Linux Tag in Karlsruhe, Germany in June this year, this third conference will further enable Fedora participants in the UK to exchange their views on various topics around the current state of the Fedora Project including infrastructure and development issues."
Events: September 8 - November 3, 2005
Page editor: Forrest Cook Letters to the editor TOE performance
Page editor: Jonathan Corbet
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the entire computing infrastructure for the region's Italian-language
schools was converted over to a customized version of the Debian
distribution. This effort involved installing Linux on 2640 computers over
the course of 23 days; an ![[GNOME 2.12]](/images/ns/GNOME212.png)
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