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LWN.net Weekly Edition for November 3, 2005A study on free software in British schoolsThere have been a number of stories recently about the adoption of free software in public school systems around the world. Certainly free software has a lot of attributes which make it well suited for that role: it is relatively secure, open to curious minds which wish to look inside it, freely available for students to copy and use at home, easily adapted to local languages, and easier on a school's (typically stretched) budget. Of course, not everybody agrees that the use of free software is cheaper; certain proprietary software companies, in particular, are trying to cast doubt on that assertion. So the administration of a school contemplating a switch to free software might well wonder: will it truly save money?The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency decided that it needed an answer to that question. So it took a detailed look at 48 British schools - 33 which were not using free software, and 15 which were - to get a sense for their relative costs. The result of this work is now available as a glossy report [PDF], suitable for printing on heavy paper and handing to a school administrator near you. The study divided software usage into three broad categories: (1) servers, (2) class and administrative computer operating systems, and (3) classroom and administrative applications. The total costs were summarized in each category, taking a broad view. Costs include hardware and software, but also support - both purchased from outside and provided by internal staff. Training was also included. In other words, the study took into account all of those factors which, according to the critics, make free software more expensive than the proprietary alternatives. The bottom-line result is quite clear:
The annual total cost per PC was less for nearly all the OSS
schools at both primary and secondary school levels. For OSS
schools, cost per PC at primary school level was half that of
non-OSS schools, and cost per PC at secondary school level was
around 20% less than that of the non-OSS schools.
Unsurprisingly, the study found that the best immediate results came from the use of free software on server systems. There are more obstacles to deployments on administrative and classroom systems. In some cases - especially for school administrative functions - the necessary applications are not yet available (the study notes that projects like SchoolTool are working to provide those applications). There is also some opposition to free applications from people who are trained in other packages. Tellingly, most of this opposition seems to come from the teachers, not the students:
This willingness to "mix and match" was also mentioned by the head
teacher in the case study report on another primary school:
"Children don't seem to care if they have Word at home, or
StarOffice. At school they have never complained about which they
use."
Teachers and administrators, like most adults, have a certain tendency to get set in their ways and stick with what they already know. Children can be more flexible. What these schools are seeing corresponds with your editor's own experience: children have no problem working with free software, and, if exposed to it, will take to it readily. Just don't (speaking from experience here, again) expose your children to Battle For Wesnoth, or their homework will suffer. In summary: this report is a good thing, as far as it goes. The flood of hostile "total cost of ownership" studies is unlikely to slow in the near future, so it is good to have contrary evidence from relatively unbiased sources. There are, however, no end of reasons, beyond the financial ones, for using free software in public schools, but this report ignores them almost completely. At the lower school levels, free software can be made available to students without licensing hassles or sanctimonious lectures about not making copies. At higher levels it can teach the students much about software itself, encourage them to experiment, and demonstrate how cooperative work can yield benefits for everybody involved. A strict focus on costs may provide a favorable picture, but risks creating the impression that cost is the only reason for using free software. In the context of the public schools, more than in many other situations, it is important that people understand that there is far more to free software than "free of cost."
Open source compliance insuranceThe folks at Open Source Risk Management have, for some time now, been working on indemnification insurance for free software. The idea behind this offering is that businesses which are worried about an SCO-style lawsuit can purchase insurance turning that risk into a regular, predictable business expense. This sort of service may well turn out to be a hard sell, however; SCO's experience seems unlikely to inspire many copycat acts. The risk of successful, copyright-based legal attacks against free software currently seems to be quite low.Patents may yet prove to be a different story, though. Meanwhile, OSRM, in conjunction with Kiln plc and Miller Insurance Services, has come up with a new idea: sell insurance to companies which fear GPL compliance problems:
Open Source Compliance Insurance will initially offer cover of up
to $10 million for direct loss suffered by the insured following a
finding of non-compliance with specific license agreements under
which open source code is obtainable. The insurance will indemnify
the insured for the loss of profits associated with the withdrawal
or alteration of a product incorporating non-compliant code or the
impaired valuation of an acquisition agreement exchanging open
source software. In certain circumstances the policy would pay the
costs to mitigate such losses including the expense of repair or
replacement of code that is found to infringe upon the General
Public License (GPL) or other Open Source licenses.
This is, in other words, a 180-degree change from the previous OSRM offering. The previously-offered indemnification policies addressed concerns that free software could be infringing on copyrights through the inclusion of proprietary code. Now, instead, we have insurance to benefit those who might just infringe the copyrights associated with free software. This situation is, certainly, more likely to come about; here's another quote from the press release:
Worldwide, more than thirty legal claims involving infringement of
open source licenses have been brought against corporations in the
last two years. In each case, plaintiffs have prevailed in
enforcing their rights to restrict the use of their code.
This statement, certainly, is a strong statement in favor of the enforceability of free software licenses. One might argue that this sort of insurance policy presents a moral hazard. A company which hopes to ignore the requirements of the GPL could ship a product without source, secure in the knowledge that, if somebody calls them on it, they can fall back on the insurance policy to mitigate their losses. The plan's fine print must certainly have language excluding deliberate acts of noncompliance, but proving that a specific infringement was willful could be a challenge. Others might say that there should be no inadvertent infringement of the GPL; any such infringement constitutes, at best, an extreme lack of due diligence. Consider, however, the much-publicized cases where various wireless routers have used GPL code in noncompliant ways. In these cases, the final vendor - the one whose name is on the product - often has little knowledge of what software was used by the obscure, far-eastern supplier who actually made the product. As more GPL rulings are handed down, it seems likely that resellers will start asking more questions of their suppliers, but surprises still seem possible. This particular risk - being betrayed by a supplier - seems like a legitimate thing to insure against. So OSRM and its partners might just find a market for this particular offering. If, in the process, they make businesses feel more comfortable about using free software in their products - and, perhaps, even helping with the further development of that software - it should be a good thing for the free software community as a whole.
EFF: Halloween on the hillAs reported on the EFF site: the broadcast flag is back, bigger and badder than ever. The new halloween document [PDF], otherwise known as the "Analog Content Security Preservation Act of 2005," would impose no end of restrictions. "The unprotected analog outputs of computers will be, in perpetuity, restricted to either DRM-laden standards, or to a 'constrained image', 'no more than 350,000 pixels'. Analog video which has been branded as 'do not copy', will last for only ninety minutes only in the digital world - and will be erased, literally frame by frame, megabyte by megabyte, from your PC, without your control. You'll watch a two hour film, and as you watch the final half hour, the first few scenes will be being dissolved away by statute."
The send-a-link featureThe recent discussion on improving LWN's readership led to one clear action item: the addition of a feature which would allow subscribers to create special links which they could use to point out interesting articles to non-subscribers. These links would bypass the normal subscription gate, allowing articles to be read while they are still current.That feature has been implemented, and is now active. There is no limit on the number of links a subscriber may create, and no limit on how many people may read an article via a given link. A few caveats do apply, however:
Privacy stuff and details: for each link, we track who created it and the number of hits it receives. That information will go away some time after the link expires - which happens when the relevant article becomes freely available. The links are constructed in such a way that they will continue to work forever. Currently, following a subscriber link leads directly to the article in question; in the future, we might throw in some sort of encouragement to subscribe. We are most interested to see how this new feature - which was driven by requests from our subscribers - works out.
Security Sony, rootkits, and the escalation of the DRM warAs most readers are likely to have seen by now, a Windows developer recently discovered that a rootkit on his system had been installed by the DRM ("digital restrictions management," to use Richard Stallman's apt term) code from a copy-protected CD. This CD (Van Zant's appropriately named "Get Right With The Man") was issued by SonyBMG. It happily installed software on the system, overrode a couple of system calls, and proceeded to hide itself from casual view. This is not the sort of experience that CD purchases are normally looking for. SonyBMG should - and will - take a fair amount of grief from this bit of silliness.Just how silly is just becoming clear: consider this weblog entry which suggests that SonyBMG's DRM activities don't really even have anything to do with copy protection. Instead, SonyBMG is simply trying to make life more difficult for iPod users as a way of trying to muscle in on Apple's turf. It is increasingly clear that DRM is being used as a way of excluding competition, rather than for its stated purpose. With luck, some politicians might begin to understand this, and the tone of the debate in various national capitols may change a bit. Meanwhile, it is also clear that DRM is increasingly a security issue. We have music discs which install malware, the entertainment industry trying to poison bittorrent streams, and legislators who would like to legalize overt attacks against those who are deemed to be pirates. There will certainly be many computers - including those in companies - which have been infected with the DRM code shipped by SonyBMG, and the full capabilities of that code remain unclear. The next security compromise carried out in the name of piracy prevention may be even worse. There are some obvious conclusions to be drawn from this episode. The most obvious of all being that automatically running code from an arbitrary CD is a stunningly bad idea. Beyond that, avoiding Windows helps, for now. Even Macintosh systems are unaffected by SonyBMG's DRM. And it has been made clear that security threats can come from unexpected directions. SonyBMG is not a bunch of script kiddies in a basement somewhere; it's a high-profile corporation which, one might expect, would not be in the business of attacking its customers' computers. This is unlikely to be the last episode of this kind we will see.
New vulnerabilities gallery: privilege escalation
gnump3d: cross-site scripting, directory traversal
Mantis: multiple vulnerabilities
openvpn: format string vulnerability
Squirrelmail: preference modification
TikiWiki: XSS vulnerability
Updated vulnerabilities a2ps: input validation error
abiword: buffer overflow
apache information disclosure if modssl=yes
httpd: off-by-one overflow and cross-site scripting
awstats: command injection vulnerability
bzip2: race condition and infinite loop
common-lisp-controller: design error
cpio: directory traversal
curl/wget: NTLM username buffer overflow
cyrus-imapd: buffer overflows
dia: missing input sanitizing
elm: buffer overflow
emacs21: format string vulnerability in "movemail"
enigmail: information disclosure
enscript: arbitrary code execution
ethereal: multiple vulnerabilities
evolution: format string issues
fetchmailconf: insecure file creation
firefox: multiple vulnerabilities
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
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
kdebase: local root vulnerability
kdelibs: kate backup file permission leak
kernel: multiple vulnerabilities
koffice: KWord RTF import buffer overflow
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
libgda2: format string vulnerabilities
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
kernel: multiple vulnerabilities
lm-sensors: insecure temp files
lynx: stack overflow
mod-auth-shadow: authorization bypass
mod_python: remote access vulnerability
mysql: buffer overflow
mysql: low-impact security fix
ncpfs: multiple vulnerabilities
netpbm: buffer overflow in "pnmtopng"
nfs-utils: arbitrary code execution
ntp: uses wrong gid
openssh: GSSAPI credential disclosure
openssl: protocol rollback
OpenSSL: denial of service vulnerabilities
pam: brute-force vulnerability
pcre3: arbitrary code execution
perl: setuid vulnerabilities
perl: symlink vulnerability
phpMyAdmin: local file inclusion and XSS
phpsysinfo: cross-site-scripting
postgresql: database initialization errors
Pound: buffer overflow
pstotext: remote execution of arbitrary code
Py2Play: remote execution of arbitrary Python code
rp-pppoe, pppoe: missing privilege dropping
smb4k: temporary file vulnerability
squid: denial of service
squid: DoS issues
squid: authentication handling
sudo: missing input sanitizing
sudo: race condition
sysreport: insecure temporary file
File overwrite vulnerability in tar and unzip
tcpdump: multiple DoS issues
texinfo: temporary file vulnerability
ucd-snmp: denial of service
uim: privilege escalation
unzip: race condition
up-imapproxy: format string vulnerabilities
util-linux: unintentional grant of privileges by umount
uw-imap: buffer overflow
vixie-cron: crontab allows any user to read another users crontabs
w3c-libwww: possible stack overflow
XChat 2.0.x SOCKS5 Vulnerability
xine-lib: buffer overflows
xine-ui - insecure temporary file creation
xloadimage: buffer overflows
xorg-x11: heap overflow
xpdf: buffer overflow
xpdf: denial of service
zlib: buffer overflow
zlib: buffer overflow
Resources mwcollect v3.0.0 releasedThe Honeynet Project has announced the release of mwcollect v3.0.0. This tool, intended to be run from a Linux system, simulates a number of known vulnerabilities then harvests malware payloads from the resulting exploit attempts. In this way, researchers can attract their own collection of nasty code and see what the crackers are trying to do. Click below for the announcement, or see mwcollect.org for more information.
Page editor: Jonathan Corbet Kernel development Brief items Kernel release statusThe current 2.6 kernel is 2.6.14, released on October 27. A very small number of patches went in since 2.6.14-rc5. Major changes in 2.6.14 include a new version of the wireless extensions, the HostAP system (which allows a Linux system to function as a wireless access point), relayfs, the DCCP network protocol, the filesystems in user space patch, v9fs, securityfs, and more.The first 2.6.15 prepatch has not yet been released, and may not be until the window for new features closes. A major pile of patches has been merged into the mainline git repository; see the separate article, below, for a list of some of the more interesting ones. There have been no -mm releases in the last week. The current 2.4 prepatch is 2.4.32-rc2, released by Marcelo on Halloween. It contains a small set of fixes, mostly in the networking subsystem.
Kernel development news Quote of the week
It'd help more if people focused more on testing their own shit
before submitting it than complaining about -mm. If it's the same
people breaking the tree all the time, I'm sure we can find a
recycled set of stocks somewhere.
-- Martin Bligh
The newest development model and 2.6.14The 2005 Kernel Summit made some tweaks to the kernel development model with the aim of producing higher-quality releases in a more timely manner. To that end, it was said that major changes would only be allowed during the first two weeks of each development cycle; after that, only bug fixes could go in. The hope was that this rule would eliminate destabilizing patches late in the cycle and concentrate developers' minds on making things work.The 2.6.14 kernel is the first to go through the entire cycle since the kernel summit. This kernel, released on October 27, came out almost exactly two months after 2.6.13, which showed up on August 29. That is relatively fast by 2.6 standards, but still too slow for some developers. The complainers feel that the freeze period puts too much of a damper on development, and that, somehow, the kernels should come out faster. 2.6.14 would have come out sooner were it not for a final delay to fix some remaining bugs (some of which turned out not to be real). Linus, however, is pretty happy with how 2.6.14 worked. A number of significant changes were merged, but regressions in the released kernels seem to be within reasonable limits. As a result, Linus doesn't see the need to make further changes to the process at this time:
So I'm planning on continuing with it unchanged for now. Two-week
merge window until -rc1, and then another -rc kernel roughly every
week until release. With the goal being 6 weeks, and 8 weeks being
ok.
Andrew Morton, meanwhile, has an answer for those who think the development cycle is still too long:
a) you're sitting around feeling very very very bored while
b) the kernel is in long freeze due to the lack of kernel developer attention to known bugs The solution seems fairly obvious to me? It was pointed out that many bugs relate to hardware which most developers do not have. The response was that sometimes developers have to talk to users who encounter bugs and try to track them down anyway. In any case, the ongoing effort to get developers to fix bugs seems likely to be necessary for some time to come. One other branch of the discussion, meanwhile, took on the question of whether the kernel has gotten too big. Prompted initially by Roman Zippel, Andrew Morton did some compile tests and came out with some disturbing numbers: the size of kernels with similar configurations went from about 600K (2.5.71) to over 800K (2.6.8). He also noted that the use of a current version of gcc adds almost 100K to the final kernel size when compared to gcc 2.95.4. Clearly, some serious inflation is going on somewhere. Except that it's not quite so clear. Adrian Bunk demonstrated that, by using the -Os compile option (which instructs gcc to optimize for size), current compilers can make kernels which are quite a bit smaller than those made with the old 2.95 release. The resulting discussion suggests that the kernel developers may try making -Os the default for kernel builds in the future. Fedora already builds its kernels this way. The interesting thing is that, in the past, kernels built with -Os have often performed as well as (or even better than) those optimized for speed. Cache effects have a huge impact on kernel performance, and a smaller kernel is more cache friendly. Compiler issues aside, there truly has been some growth in the kernel. Linus is not surprised by this:
On the other hand, I do believe that bloat is a fact of life....
The fact is, we do do more, and we're more complex. Our VM is a _lot_
more complex, and our VFS layer has grown a lot due to all the
support it has for situations that simply weren't an issue
before. And even when not used, that support is there.
Expect an increase in de-bloating work in the near future. In some areas, this work has been ongoing for a while - consider, for example, the effort to shrink the sk_buff structure used to represent packets in the networking subsystem. For a more extreme example, see Matt Mackall's SLOB allocator, a replacement for the slab subsystem which is much smaller, but which does not perform as well on larger systems. SLOB is not for everybody (it's mainly intended for embedded systems), but it almost certainly foreshadows a surge in Linux weight reduction patches.
What's going into 2.6.15The release of the 2.6.14 kernel opened the door for new changes. Many developers have been quick to submit their patches, with the result that nearly 2000 commits have been merged for 2.6.15. The door will remain open for two weeks - until around November 11 - at which point the kernel should return to stabilization mode.Many of the patches merged are fixes, and quite a few of them are in architecture-specific code. Among the rest, however, are the following, starting with user-visible changes:
API changes and other internal patches visible to kernel developers include:
Stay tuned: there is still time for quite a few more changes to be merged before the 2.6.15 window closes.
Some power management changes for 2.6.15The 2.6.14 kernel has brought with it a few changes to the power management API. The first of these has to do with the suspend() and resume() methods found in struct device_driver. These methods would be called three times for each suspend and resume operation, in order to maintain compatibility with an older version of the API. The new versions are called once, and have different prototypes:
int (*suspend) (struct device *dev, pm_message_t state);
int (*resume) (struct device *dev);
This change required updates to a fair number of drivers, so the patch is relatively large. The other change is for devices which can supply "wakeup events" to the kernel. These devices include network adapters with "wake-on-LAN" capability, keyboards, and simple power switches. The power management core has been reworked to enable these devices to perform their wakeup functions while providing overall control to the system administrator. The dev_pm_info structure (found inside struct device) has gotten two new, single-bit fields. Drivers for devices which can create wakeup events should set the can_wakeup field to one. The actual issuance of such events, however, should be controlled by the may_wakeup field. If that field is zero, the power management core has decreed that wakeups should not be issued. A device_may_wakeup() helper function has been added to make testing the may_wakeup bit easy. The patch adds a new wakeup field in sysfs. When read, it will return enabled or disabled (or an empty string if the device is not capable of generating wakeup events at all). The system administrator can also write a new value to allow (or disallow) the generation of wakeup events from the device. The driver core code has been merged, along with support for wakeups from USB devices. As of this writing, however, the PCI wakeup code has some outstanding issues with G5 systems which has prevented it from going into the mainline.
Fragmentation avoidanceMel Gorman's fragmentation avoidance patches were covered here last February. This patch set divides all memory allocations into three categories: "user reclaimable," "kernel reclaimable," and "kernel non-reclaimable." The idea to support multi-page contiguous allocations by grouping reclaimable allocations together. If no contiguous memory ranges are available, one can be created by forcing out reclaimable pages. Since non-reclaimable pages have been segregated into their own area, the chances of such a page blocking the creation of a contiguous set of free pages is relatively small.Mel recently posted version 19 of the fragmentation avoidance patch and requested that it be included in the -mm kernel. That request started a lengthy discussion on whether this patch set is a good idea or not. There is, it seems, a fair amount of uncertainty over whether this code belongs in the kernel. There are a few reasons for wanting fragmentation avoidance, and the arguments differ for each of them. The first of these reasons is to increase the probability of high-order (multi-page) allocations in the kernel. Nobody denies that Mel's patch achieves that goal, but there are developers who claim that a better approach is to simply eliminate any such allocations. In fact, most multi-page allocations were dealt with some time ago. A few remain, however, including the two-page kernel stacks still used by default on most systems. When the kernel stack allocation fails, it blocks the creation of a new process. The kernel may eventually move to single-page stacks in all situations, but a few higher-order allocations will remain. It is not always possible to break required memory into single-page chunks. The next reason, strongly related to the first, is huge pages. The huge page mechanism is used to improve performance for certain applications on large systems; there are few users currently, but that could change if huge pages were easier to work with. Huge pages cannot be allocated for applications in the absence of a large - and suitably aligned - region of contiguous memory. In practice, they are very difficult to create on systems which have been running for any period of time. Failure to allocate a huge page is relatively benign; the application simply has to get by with regular pages and take the performance hit. But, given that you have a huge page mechanism, making it work more reliably would be worthwhile. The fragmentation avoidance patches can help with both high-order allocations and huge pages. There is some debate over whether it is the right solution to the problem, however. The often-discussed alternative would be to create one or more new memory zones set aside for reclaimable memory. This approach would make use of the zone system already built into the kernel, thus avoiding the creation of a new layer. A zone-based system might also avoid the perceived (though somewhat unproven) performance impact of the fragmentation avoidance patches. Given that this impact is said to be felt in that most crucial of workloads - kernel compiles - this argument tends to resonate with the kernel developers. The zone-based approach is not without problems, however. Memory zones, currently, are static; as a result, somebody would have to decide how to divide memory between the reclaimable and non-reclaimable zones. This adjustment looks like it would be hard to get right in any sort of reliable way. In the past, the zone system has also been the source of a number of performance problems, mostly related to balancing of allocations between the zones. Increasing the complexity of the zone system and adding more zones could well bring those problems back. There is another motivation for fragmentation avoidance which brings a different set of constraints: support for hot-pluggable memory. This feature is useful on high-availability systems, but it is also heavily used in association with virtualization. A host running a number of virtualized Linux instances can, by way of the hotplug mechanism, shift its memory resources between those instances in response to the demands of each. Before memory can be removed from a running system, its contents must be moved elsewhere - at least, if one wants to still have a running system afterward. The fragmentation avoidance patches can help by putting only reclaimable allocations in the parts of memory which might be removed. As long as all the pages in a region can be reclaimed, that region is removable. A very different argument has surfaced here: Ingo Molnar is insisting that any mechanism claiming to support hot-pluggable memory be able to provide a 100% success rate. The current code need not live up to that metric, but there needs to be a clear path toward that goal. Otherwise, the kernel developers risk advertising a feature which they may not ever be able to support in a reliable way. The backers of fragmentation avoidance would like to merge the patches, solving 90% of the problem, and leave the other 90% for later. Ingo, instead, fears that second 90%, and wants to know how it will get done. Why can't the current patches offer 100% reliability if they only put reclaimable memory in hot-pluggable regions? There are ways to lock down pages which were once reclaimable; these include DMA operations and pages explicitly locked by user space. There is also the issue of what happens when the kernel runs out of non-reclaimable memory. Rather than fail a non-reclaimable allocation attempt, the kernel will allocate a page from the reclaimable region. This fallback is necessary to avoid inflicting reliability problems on the rest of the kernel. But the presence of a non-reclaimable page in a reclaimable region will prevent the system from vacating that region. This problem can be solved by getting rid of non-reclaimable allocations altogether. And that can be done by changing how the kernel's address space works. Currently, the kernel runs in a single, contiguous virtual address space which is mapped directly onto physical memory - often using a single, large page table entry. (The vmalloc() region is a special exception, but it is not an issue here). If the kernel were, instead, to use normal-sized pages like the rest of the system, its memory would no longer need to be physically contiguous. Then, if a kernel page gets in the way, it can simply be moved to a more convenient location. Beyond the fact that this approach fundamentally changes the kernel's memory model, there are a couple of little issues with it. There would be a performance hit caused by the higher translation buffer use, and an increase in the amount of memory needed to store the kernel's page tables. Certain kernel operations - DMA in particular - cannot tolerate physical addresses which might change at arbitrary times. So there would have to be a new API where drivers could request physically-nailed regions - and be told by the kernel to give them up. In other words, breaking up the kernel's address space opens a substantial barrel of worms. It is not the sort of change which would be accepted in the absence of a fairly strong motivation, and it is not clear that hot-pluggable memory is a sufficiently compelling cause. So no conclusions have been reached on the inclusion of the fragmentation avoidance patches. In the short term, Andrew Morton's controversy avoidance mechanisms are likely to keep the patch out of the -mm tree, however. But there are legitimate reasons for wanting this capability in the kernel, and the issue is unlikely to go away. Unless somebody comes up with a better solution, it could be hard to keep Mel's patch out forever.
Levanta's MapFS releasedOnce upon a time, kernel developers would post their contributions on the linux-kernel mailing list. Now they issue press releases instead. Along those lines, Levanta (the company once known as Linuxcare) has announced the availability of MapFS. This GPL-licensed module allows a read-only filesystem to be mounted locally for write access, with any changes being kept on the local system. It looks like another implementation of the "translucent filesystem" idea.
Patches and updates Kernel trees
Core kernel code
Development tools
Device drivers
Documentation
Filesystems and block I/O
Janitorial
Memory management
Architecture-specific
Security-related
Miscellaneous
Page editor: Jonathan Corbet Distributions News and Editorials Testing Mandriva Linux 2006When the second beta of Mandriva Linux 2006 was released, I didn't hesitate - I reconfigured my urpmi sources to point to the beta directory on a nearby FTP server and upgraded my 2005LE installation. The upgrade, as well as subsequent upgrades to beta3 and RC1, went without a hitch. Sensing that a final Mandriva 2006 was not far away, I then redirected the urpmi sources to point to the Cooker (Mandriva's development branch) and continued upgrading on a more ore less daily basis. The release was shaping up nicely and I didn't expect any troubles.One day, however, things went wrong. After restarting the X window system, I was greeted by a screen that reminded me of faulty CRT monitors of yesteryear, with ghastly green and pink colors replacing the pleasant light blue of Mandriva's KDE. Worse, the mouse was barely functional, because the pointer was seemingly trapped in an invisible rectangle and the actual pointer was about half an inch to the left of the tip of the arrow. Additionally, some menus, toolbars and window edges were "decorated" by unsightly vertical lines, as if they were perforated. After recovering from the shock of losing the good-looking desktop, my first reaction was "ah, well, it's a beta, it'll get fixed soon". Only it never did. At one point the Cooker was frozen, but my desktop remained broken. I was hoping that perhaps a clean installation of Mandriva 2006 final would restore the nice colors and revive the handsome penguin gazing at the sky (the default Mandriva 2006 wallpaper), but no joy - the pink and green color combination remained firmly entrenched on my desktop and no amount of xorg.conf tweaking would bring back Mandriva's pretty face from before that fatal upgrade. To cut the long story short, Mandriva 2006 ships with a development version of X.Org 6.9 pulled from the CVS. Although this particular bug was reported on the distribution's forums and Bugzilla, it was never fixed before the final release and a lone errata entry is the only indication that Mandriva is aware of the issue. Apparently, it only affects a few NVIDIA and ATI cards and a solution is as simple as installing the proprietary drivers (which Mandriva provides to club members in the form of pre-built RPM packages). Unfortunately, my graphics card is a Matrox G450, which most certainly won't be cured by NVIDIA! Not to mention that, as some LWN readers love to remind me from time to time, tainting the kernel with a binary-only kernel module is just plain wrong! Needless to say, the above trouble thoroughly soured my Mandriva 2006 experience. This was my main test machine with two dozens of other, well-behaved Linux distributions residing on its two hard disks. Interestingly, one of them, the latest test release of PCLinuxOS, also ships with X.Org 6.9 pulled from CVS (from roughly a month later than Mandriva's X.Org), but it has never suffered from any of those ghastly symptoms that made the Mandriva desktop look so horrible. Wading through Mandriva's Club forums, I found further evidence of discontent - some users experienced frequent and random hard lock-ups, while others complained about X.Org consuming 99% of their processing power. Mandriva's new desktop search tool called "Kat" (KDE's answer to Beagle) was also on the receiving end of some users' complaints for being extremely resource-hungry. Next on test: a Pentium 4 laptop with a SiS graphics card - and the contrast couldn't have been any more different. On this particular piece of hardware Mandriva 2006 installed smoothly and has run beautifully ever since. No ghastly colors, no freezes, none of those bugs that some users and reviewers of the product reported in online forums and media. It has been a thoroughly enjoyable experience with perhaps a few minor annoyances, but nothing overwhelmingly negative. My only real complaint about Mandriva 2006 is that it ships with OpenOffice.org 1.1 and although several weeks have passed since the release of 2.0, Mandriva has yet to provide new binaries. As OpenOffice.org 2.0 is such a huge upgrade and is included in both SUSE 10.0 and Ubuntu 5.10, it is surprising to see Mandriva sticking to the older version (while, at the same time, quite happy to ship a half-broken development version of X.Org)! With my opinion about Mandriva 2006 torn between an absolute failure on one system and a thoroughly enjoyable ride on another, it was left up to my main machine to swing the scales one way or the other. This box, powered by an AMD64 3200+ processor with a NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 graphics card and 2 GB of RAM, has had plenty of experience running 64-bit operating systems from all major Linux vendors. I downloaded the x86_64 edition of Mandriva's PowerPack and went on with installation. Incidentally, Mandriva no longer sells the x86_64 edition separately; instead, both the i586 and x86_64 editions are bundled together in one €80 PowerPack box. When the installation finished and I rebooted the system, I was fascinated once again. A beautiful operating system that is really a joy to use! The installer correctly detected the NVIDIA card and installed the proprietary kernel module without any user intervention. But even with X.Org's native "nv" driver, the screen never suffered from any color disorder. Perhaps the most amazing part about the new Mandriva is its remarkable speed - it seems that the developers have implemented every speed tweak they could come up with in each new release, and version 2006 is possibly one of the fastest Linux distributions available today. Can you imagine a complete Linux OS booting into text console in 22 seconds and into full KDE in 45 seconds? Yes, that's Mandriva 2006! What started as a complete disaster turned out to be quite a pleasant experience in the end. Unless you have an unlucky hardware combination, Mandriva Linux 2006 is a perfectly usable operating system, in addition to being extremely fast and serenely beautiful. But let my experience serve as a warning to potential customers: don't spend your money on a Mandriva 2006 retail box or on the Club membership until you've tried it out and made sure that it works on your hardware. While the ISO images of the product are, at the time of writing, only available to Club members (no word on when they will be released to general public), Mandriva 2006 can be installed directly from FTP or HTTP servers (after booting from a small "netinstall" ISO image). If it works, then your purchase is money well spent. If it doesn't then, well, let me offer a solution as suggested by a Club member who had experienced frequent lock-ups which no amount of tweaking could fix: "I solved the problem," he declared one day, "I've switched to SUSE 10.0."
New Releases OpenBSD 3.8 released November 1, 2005OpenBSD has announced (click below) the official release of OpenBSD 3.8. OpenBSD is focused on security and is justifiably proud of its record of eight years with only a single remote hole in the default install. Version 3.8 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system.
Sorcery 1.13.0 ReleasedThe Source Mage Project has released a new version of its package manager, Sorcery 1.13.0. Some of the major features in this release include: "on_cast" triggers integrated into the dependency tree, dispel can now walk up and down the dependency tree, verification level selection for source files has been added, cast now has a screen mode with compilation and downloading displayed in separate terminals, and more. See the release notes for more information.
Distribution News Debian transition timeSteve Langasek reports (click below for full text) that the bulk of the C++ ABI transition will be pushed into testing soon. "As a result, any packages that have versions in testing and depend on one of these libraries must be updated at the same time. For the first time over the past months, we are now able to get a comprehensive look at just which packages are involved in this transition -- around 300 source packages that need to be updated!"
Debian testing now with secure aptA new version of apt, 0.6.42 has reached Debian testing. This new apt supports verifying signed apt repositories, adding an important layer of security to Debian upgrades by preventing installation of forged packages. The details are explained in the apt-secure(8) man page.
New Distributions Nexenta (Debian-based GNU/Solaris) launchesThe Nexenta distribution has announced its existence; click below for the full text. Nexenta is a Debian-based distribution built on the Solaris kernel; the developers have "a working prototype" running now, and some 2300 packages are available. There is a site at gnusolaris.org, but it is currently necessary to ask the project for a username and password to get into it; that is expected to change in a few weeks.
BeleniXBeleniX is an OpenSolaris derivative from India. The 0.2 release of BeleniX is available as a LiveCD that can (optionally) boot into an XFce4 desktop. Like its parent, BeleniX has been released under the Common Development and Distribution License CDDL Version 1.0.
NonuxNonux is a Slackware-based GNU/Linux distribution from the Netherlands. The website is in Dutch and it features Dutch localized applications. Available as a Live CD, Nonux can also be installed to a hard drive. The Nonux CD is currently at v1.6.
Distribution Newsletters Debian Weekly NewsThe Debian Weekly News for November 1, 2005 is out, with a look at i386 compatibility in the upcoming etch release, a debhelper script that helps calculate libtool dependencies for development packages, a new version of OpenSSL, a Berlinux event report, and several other topics.
Fedora Weekly NewsThe Fedora Weekly News #20 has the following articles: FreeSoftwareMagazine: FUDCon London 2005, Why we should use OpenOffice.org, Fedora user testimonials, Kernel Security Update fixes NVIDIA issue, HOWTO: OpenLDAP on FC4, HOWTO: F-Spot on FC4, REVIEW: New Linux (FC4) with an Old Laptop, and more.
Gentoo Weekly NewsletterThe Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of October 31, 2005 is out. This edition looks at a new Korean version of GWN, the introduction of subforums at Gentoo forums, Portage moving toward 3.0, and several other topics.
DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 124The DistroWatch Weekly for October 31, 2005 is out. "Fans of the BSD family of projects can expect an exciting week as NetBSD 2.1, FreeBSD 6.0 and OpenBSD 3.8 are all expected to be announced and released with the next couple of days. On the Linux front, we have some interesting information regarding the Ubuntu Zero Conference, a link to guide describing the installation of Enlightenment 17 on SUSE 10.0 and news about a working graphical front-end for the Debian installer. Finally, the fans of Debian-based distributions will no doubt appreciate our review of The Debian System - Concepts And Techniques, a newly released book written by a well-known Debian developer."
Package updates Fedora updatesFedora Core 4 updates: esound (update to 0.2.36), mutt (fixes for crashes), cpio (bug fixes), selinux-policy-strict-1.27.1-2.7, selinux-policy-strict-1.27.1-2.11 (change boolean name), selinux-policy-targeted-1.27.1-2.11 (change boolean name), cman-kernel (rebuilt for new FC4 kernel), gnbd-kernel (rebuilt for new FC4 kernel), GFS-kernel (rebuilt for new FC4 kernel), dlm-kernel (rebuilt for new FC4 kernel).Fedora Core 3 updates: libgnomeui (backports a fix to GnomeDruid), kernel-2.6.12-1.1381_FC3 (fix a failure to mount RAID devices on startup).
Mandriva update MDKA-2005:048Mandriva has updated mdkonline packages that provide some enhancements, for 10.1, 10.2, 2006.0 and Corporate 3.0.
Newsletters and articles of interest openSUSE inspires derivative distros (Linux.com)Linux.com covers SUPER SUSE derivatives. "The SUSE Performance Enhanced Release (SUPER) project is integrating experimental patches, packages, and configurations in an effort to create a faster, more usable, and more attractive bleeding-edge SUSE distribution. Novell, understandably, shies away from implementing these kinds of changes until it has done extensive testing to assure stability for enterprise customers. However, such rigorous standards are not a requirement for the desktop users SUPER targets."
Distribution reviews Trying out the new OpenBSD 3.8 (NewsForge)NewsForge reviews the OpenBSD 3.8 release. "The most interesting feature in my humble opinion is the trunk virtual network interface. With trunk, you can combine multiple physical network interfaces and treat them as a single virtual interface, allowing for bandwidth aggregation and automatic fail-over. In addition, these virtual interfaces can themselves contain virtual interfaces and handle more complex scenarios, such as seamless hand-off between multiple wireless networks."
Review: Mandriva Linux 2006 (Linux.com)Linux.com reviews Mandriva Linux 2006. "New to Mandriva 2006 is Kat, a Mandriva-sponsored desktop search tool similar to Google's Desktop Search. Cataloging both file metadata and contents, Kat currently supports a wide variety of graphics formats and a more limited selection of text formats, including PDF, HTML, Microsoft Word, Excel, OpenOffice.org 1.0, and OpenDocument. It requires an OS with lnotify activated; lnotify is a kernel module originally designed to search logs for suspect entries and the running of the kat daemon. Once set up, it provides quick and detailed responses. However, considering that Mandriva attempts to organize users by adding subdirectories such as Documents, Download, and Pictures to each home directory, I am uncertain about what advantages Kat itself offers over well-organized directories and a file manager in everyday computing."
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol Development The GNU Bayonne 2 Telephony Application ServerGNU Bayonne is a telecommunications project that is being developed by this group of developers as a Free Software Foundation (FSF) project. Bayonne is derived from the Adjunct Communications Server project (ACS), which was started in 2000.
GNU Bayonne, the telecommunications application server of the GNU project, offers free, scalable, media independent software environment for development and deployment of telephony solutions for use with current and next generation telephone networks.
Bayonne features include:
GNU Bayonne version 2 was introduced in May of 2005.
This new server offers support both for wired and protocol stack based telephony drivers, including initial support for SIP and H323. Bayonne 2 uses a simplified driver model and exposes core functionality both through an interface library and a model script driven voice application server.
The first 1.0 release candidate for GNU Bayonne 2 was announced this week: "GNU Bayonne 2 1.0 is composed of a subset of those services and features found in the recently introduced, and very rapidly advancing GNU Bayonne 2 development effort. Features were chosen for introduction in this release candidate that were already stable and effective for production use and supportable under GNU/Linux and other platforms." With the 2.0 release, GNU Bayonne has becoming the obvious choice as a platform for a wide variety of open-source telecom applications, congratulations go to the developers for carrying this important project forward.
System Applications Clusters and Grids JPPF version 0.6.1_beta2 released (SourceForge)Version 0.6.1 beta 2 of JPPF, the Java Parallel Processing Framework, has been released. "This release provides bug fixes and documentation improvements."
Database Software OpenToro 3.0 released (SourceForge)Version 3.0 of OpenToro has been announced. "OpenToro is a Web Database Publisher, a tool that allows us developing database-driven web applications in an agile and automatic way. Using OpenToro simply means to forget coding countless SQLs and JSPs every time we want to implement a web application with database access."
PostgreSQL 8.1.0 Release Candidate 1Release Candidate 1 of PostgreSQL 8.1.0 is available for testing. "As with all pre-releases, but especially now that we are in the final stretch, testing is paramount to a successful, and bug free, release. As such, we ask everyone able who is able to do so to, to run RC1 through its paces and report any bugs to us through pgsql-bugs@postgresql.org."
PostgreSQL Weekly NewsThe October 30, 2005 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News is online with the weekly PostgreSQL database article assortment.
Mail Software Sendmail X.0.0.0.0 releasedThe initial release of Sendmail X (version X.0.0.0.0) has been announced. See the project documentation for more information.
Telecom Asterisk 1.2.0-beta2 ReleasedVersion 1.2.0-beta2 of Asterisk, an open-source PBX, is out with numerous new features.
IHU 0.5.1 releasedVersion 0.5.1 of IHU, I Hear U Project, is out. "IHU is a Voice over IP (VoIP) application for Linux (using Qt), that creates an audio stream between two computers easily and with the minimal traffic on the network." Changes include new features and bug fixes, see the change log for details.
VPN Software SSL-Explorer 0.1.14 released (SourceForge)Version 0.1.14 of SSL-Explorer, an open-source, browser-based SSL VPN solution, has been released. "Release 0.1.14 introduces a new remote forwarding feature which now brings full SSL tunneling support to SSL-Explorer. A series of improvements were also made to the secure proxy web forwarding feature for a more robust intranet browsing experience. Lastly, a number of minor bug-fixes were included with this release."
Web Site Development Bricolage 1.8.8 releasedVersion 1.8.8 of Bricolage has been announced. "Bricolage is a full-featured, enterprise-class content management and publishing system. It offers a browser-based interface for ease-of use, a fully-fledged templating system with complete HTML::Mason, HTML::Template, PHP 5, and Template Toolkit support for flexibility, and many other features. It operates in an Apache/mod_perl environment and uses the PostgreSQL RDBMS for its repository." See the change log for release details.
Campsite 2.3.3 ReleasedMaintenance release 2.3.3 of Campsite, an open-source multilingual content management system for news web sites, is out with bug fixes and minor feature enhancements.
Wicket 1.1 released (SourceForge)Version 1.1 of Wicket is out with numerous new features. "Wicket is a Java component oriented web application framework that takes simplicity, separation of concerns and ease of use to a whole new level. Wicket web applications consist of HTML markup and Java classes. No strange languages, no strange markup, no configuration files, no specialized, expensive tools: just Java, HTML and you."
Zope 2.8.4 releasedVersion 2.8.4 of the Zope web development platform has been released. "This version obsoletes Zope 2.8.2 and Zope 2.8.3 which shipped with an older Docutils version as expected. For security reasons you should update to Zope 2.8.4. In addition this release fixes a potential security problem when using Zope with Python 2.4 - although Python 2.4. is neither recommended nor supported."
AJAX: How to Handle Bookmarks and Back Buttons (O'ReillyNet)Brad Neuberg shows how to add back and forward control to AJAX web applications. "This article presents an open source JavaScript library that finally brings bookmarking and back button support to AJAX applications. By the end of this tutorial, developers will have a solution to an AJAX problem that not even Google Maps or Gmail possesses: robust, usable bookmarking and back and forward behavior that works exactly like the rest of the Web."
Miscellaneous PowerDNS 2.9.19 releasedVersion 2.9.19 of PowerDNS, an open-source domain name server, is out. "This is again an important release. In short, better recursor, some DNSSEC support, possibility to run from alternate DNS roots (ORSN, for example), many many bugs fixed and more involvement and support from the PowerDNS community. A recommended upgrade!"
Desktop Applications Business Applications phpBMS v0.601 Released (SourceForge)Version 0.601 of phpBMS, a PHP and MySQL-based billing, scheduling, and client management system, is available. "This is a minor bug fix update that address some issues with associated notes, the quick view screen, and compatibility issues with older versions of PHP".
Desktop Environments GARNOME 2.13.1Release 2.13.1 of GARNOME, the bleeding edge GNOME desktop environment, is out. "This release of GARNOME includes all of the GNOME 2.13.1 Desktop and Developer Platform, together with GStreamer 0.9 for added 'oomph'. It does include a fair few performance enhancements over it's stable counterpart, but that's because things are still relatively sane in the unstable branch."
GNOME Software AnnouncementsThe following new GNOME software has been announced this week:
Cool but abandoned applications (GnomeDesktop)GnomeDesktop.org looks at some GNOME applications that need adoption by developers. "I don't know if it can be proven statistically but I seem to come across an ever increasing number of incredibly useful GNOME based applications which have been abandoned by their former developers, even though there is no viable alternative to them. Lately I found that at least three apps which have found to be stable, useful and without alternative in the GNOME environment have been either officially abandoned or are slowly fading into oblivion."
This Month in SVN (KDE.News)KDE.News has announced the October 29, 2005 edition of This month in SVN. "This Month in SVN for October looks at KOffice development. "While much of the rest of KDE is in feature freeze preparing for the imminent release of KDE 3.5, KOffice developers are starting to work hard for their 1.5 release, scheduled for between KDE 3.5 and KDE 4. This release will be able to be used with KDE 3x and Qt 3x, and will have a great deal of improvements over the current stable version." Topics covered include accessibility improvements, Krita one step closer to world domination and how you can help out."
KDE Software AnnouncementsThe following new KDE software has been announced this week:
KDE/Qt Extension for Traditional Eastern Languages (KDE.News)KDE.News covers support for new Eastern languages under KDE. "A research group in the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have been working on an operating system to support traditional Eastern languages such as Mongolian, Uighur and Tibetan. We have now extended Qt and KDE 3 to support these langages."
Electronics ASCO 0.3.9 releasedVersion 0.3.9 of ASCO, a SPICE Circuit Optimizer, has been announced. "This is the first public release of the ASCO tool. You can read more about the features and applications on-line before downloading it. This is still a test release for a wide audience. However, I do not expect you to run into great difficulties in using it. So far it has only been used by me."
Kicad 2005-10-27 releasedRelease 2005-10-27 of Kicad, an electronics CAD package for KDE, is out. See the change log for details.
Financial Applications SQL-Ledger 2.6.2 is outVersion 2.6.2 of SQL-Ledger, a web-based accounting system, has been released with several new capabilities.
Games Ember 0.3.4 releasedVersion 0.3.4 of Ember has been announced by the WorldForge game project. "Ember is a fully functional 3d client for the WorldForge project. It takes advantage of the latest graphic cards to present a beautiful, fully interactive world. An easy to use GUI allows the player to interact with both the world and other players with ease. This release is built with the latest version of the Eris (1.3.9) library, which brings much improved stability. Various other libraries used internally have also been updated."
ScummVM 0.8.0 released (SourceForge)Version 0.8.0 of ScummVM, a cross-platform interpreter for point-and-click adventure engines, is out. "Along with a new improved launcher and in-game GUI, and the usual load of bugfixes, this release adds support for the two game titles "Inherit the Earth" and "Gobliiins", several new ports (Playstation Portable, Playstation 2 and EPOC/SymbianOS), and much improved support for Humongous Entertainment children games."
Vultures 1.10.0 releasedVersion 1.10.0 of Vultures, an isometric 3D interface for Nethack and Slash'EM, has been released. "We've just released 1.10.0, which brings lots of fixes, some enhancements and a ton of monster artwork (we now have unique graphics for about 60% of Nethack's monsters)".
GUI Packages GORM release 1.0.0Version 1.0.0 of GORM, the GNUstep user interface designer, is out. "Gorm allows developers to quickly create and edit graphical application interfaces using a whole lot of GUI elements: windows, menus, buttons, labels, sliders, tables, textfields, browsers, images, altert panels and more."
Interoperability Two editions of Wine TrafficIssues #296 and #297 of Wine Traffic are online with the latest Wine project articles.
Medical Applications GNUmed hitting Debian mirrors (LinuxMedNews)Debian packages of GNUmed 0.1, a medical practice management system, have been announced. The CHANGELOG file has the release information.
Music Applications amSynth 1.1.0 announcedVersion 1.1.0 of amSynth, an audio synthesizer, is out with GTK2 support, bug fixes, and more.
Sineshaper 0.4.0 announcedThe initial release of Sineshaper (version 0.4.0) has been announced. "The Sineshaper synth has two sine oscillators and two waveshapers. The sound from the two oscillators is mixed and passed through the waveshapers, first through the first waveshaper and then the second. You can control the tuning of both oscillators as well as their relative loudness, and the total amount of shaping and the fraction of that amount that each shaper applies. Both waveshapers use a sine function for shaping the sound, but for the second shaper you can shift the sine function (with maximal shift it becomes a cosine function) to produce a different sound."
Office Suites OpenOffice.org NewsletterThe October, 2005 edition of the OpenOffice.org Newsletter is online. Read about OpenOffice.org 2.0 and other OpenOffice.org news.
Web Browsers Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird 1.5 Release Candidate 1 Test Builds (MozillaZine)Release Candidate 1 Test Builds of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird have been announced. "These builds are essentially release candidates of the release candidates, intended to be checked out by the Mozilla quality assurance community before the Release Candidate 1 builds are made available to a wider audience. Testers are asked to ensure that webmail and banking sites work as they should, verify that extensions and themes install correctly and check that there are no problems with general browser surfing."
Languages and Tools Caml Caml Weekly NewsThe October 18 - November 1, 2005 edition of the Caml Weekly News is online with the latest Caml language topics.
Haskell Haskell Weekly NewsThe November 1, 2005 edition of the Haskell Weekly News is online with the latest Haskell news. Topics covered this week include possible redesign of the Time module, the Data module hierarchy, GHC assembly code, and what happened to HWN last week.
Java KSE PWSLIB 0-3-1 Released (SourceForge)Version 0-3-1 of KSE PWSLIB is out. "JPasswords offers a compact but proficient and user-friendly, Java Swing based application to store and manage passwords on encrypted files. KSE PWSLIB is a backend package to read/create/modify Password Safe encrypted database files. - Release 0-3-1 is a maintenance release. Beside some bug corrections it offers improved speed of file loading and record list handling."
Test-Driven Development Using StrutsTestCase (O'ReillyNet)John Ferguson Smart explores the StrutsTestCase framework on O'Reilly. "StrutsTestCase is a powerful and easy-to-use testing framework for Struts actions. Using Struts and then StrutsTestCase, in combination with traditional JUnit tests, will give you a very high level of test coverage and increase your product reliability accordingly."
This week on harmony-devThe October 23-31, 2005 edition of This week on harmony-dev covers the latest from the Harmony open-source Java project.
Lisp SBCL 0.9.6 releasedVersion 0.9.6 of Steel Bank Common Lisp has been released. "This is mostly a bug fix release, with an optimization to numeric comparison operators and MIPS/Linux support for saving cores with foreign code loaded."
CL-PDF 2.90 releasedVersion 2.90 of CL-PDF, a Common Lisp library for generating documents in Adobe Acrobat format, is out. "This version supports basic Unicode and TrueType fonts, extraction and manipulation of pages from existing PDF files, adds new examples and a few fixes."
PHP PHP 4.4.1 ReleasedVersion 4.4.1 of PHP has been released. "This version is a maintenance release, that contains numerous bug fixes, including a number of security fixes related to the overwriting of the GLOBALS array. All users of PHP 4.3 and 4.4 are encouraged to upgrade to this version."
phpBMS v0.6 Released (SourceForge)Version 0.6 of phpBMS has been announced. "phpBMS is a PHP, MySQL based billing, scheduling, and client management system. Features include PDF generation for printing, mass e-mailing to clients, repeatable task and event handling, and quote/order/invoice tracking. The package has undergone significant changes and enchancements, but can still be installed over the top of most existing 0.51 installations and upgraded without losing data."
Python Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!The October 26, 2005 edition of Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! is online with a new collection of Python articles.
Ruby Ruby Weekly NewsThe October 30th, 2005 edition of the Ruby Weekly News looks at the latest discussions from the ruby-talk mailing list.
XML 4Suite XML 1.0b2 announcedVersion 1.0b2 of 4Suite XML, an open-source platform for XML and RDF processing, has been announced. "The most important development is that 4Suite is being split into three separate packages: 4Suite XML - XML, XPath, XSLT, related technologies and support libraries; 4Suite RDF - RDF processing libraries and stand-alone DBMS; and 4Suite Repository - XML and RDF repository."
What Is Atom (O'Reilly)Ben Hammersley introduces Atom on O'Reilly. "The Atom Syndication Format is the next generation of XML-based file formats, designed to allow information--the contents of web pages, for example--to be syndicated between applications. Like RSS before it, Atom places the content and metadata of an internet resource into a machine-parsable format, perfect for displaying, filtering, remixing, and archiving."
Bug Trackers Bugzilla 2.20 Released (MozillaZine)Bugzilla 2.20 has been announced, and the software has been installed on bugzilla.mozilla.org. "Version 2.20 of Bugzilla, the Mozilla bug tracking software, has been released. The Bugzilla 2.20 new features page has more details about the improvements in this release, which include experimental support for PostgreSQL (previously only MySQL was supported) and a new user interface style."
Debuggers Winpdb 1.0.5 Released (SourceForge)Version 1.0.5 of Winpdb is available with bug fixes. "Winpdb is an advanced Python debugger, with support for smart breakpoints, multiple threads, namespace modification, embedded debugging, encrypted communication and speed of up to 20 times that of pdb."
Editors RText Version 0.9.3.0 Now Available (SourceForge)Version 0.9.3.0 of RText is out with bug fixes and 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."
Version Control (H)gct 0.3 announcedVersion 0.3 of (H)gct, a source code management tool, is out with several new capabilities.
Page editor: Forrest Cook Linux in the news Recommended Reading Red Hat looks under Linux's hood (ZDNet)ZDNet looks at Red Hat's open source projects. "Trying to take a more active role in open-source programming, Red Hat has created a team of 34 programmers to work on nothing but next-generation software, the company plans to announce Tuesday."
My sysadmin toolbox (Linux.com)Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier lists his top ten software tools, on Linux.com. "The first time I read about GNU Screen, I thought it was a bit of a silly program. Why not just open a bunch of xterms, instead of mucking about with all the complex keybindings used by Screen to switch between its windows? Sure, it might be useful if you only work from the console, but how many folks really do that anymore? Then I actually spent a little bit of time with Screen, and I found out what a valuable utility it really is. Instead of worrying about dozens of xterms, I could have a single terminal window with multiple Screen windows that I could switch between easily and quickly."
Companies Red Hat Wants Xen in Linux Kernel (eWeek)eWeek looks at the ongoing process of getting Xen into the kernel. "Ian Pratt, of the University of Cambridge in England and the leader of the Xen project, said there were a number of reasons for the delay in including Xen in the kernel. Primarily, Xen 3.0 had suffered from a bit of feature creep. Physical Address Extension (PAE) 32b support and Virtualization Technology, for example, were added very late in the cycle. 'We were aiming for an end-of-summer release, but this now looks on target for December,' Pratt said."
Linux Adoption Desktop Linux 'like teenage sex' (ZDNet)ZDNet covers comments by Red Hat's CEO Matthew Szulik at a recent conference. "One area where open source software hasn't caught on widely is on the desktop, an area where Red Hat has a modest product aimed at a relatively narrow set of customers such as those manning the phones at call centres. Desktop Linux is a tough nut to crack, Szulik said. "The desktop is like teenage sex. Everybody's talking about it, but nobody's doing it," Szulik said." No analogies were given for the Windows desktop, however.
Linux PCs: Customer service or lip service? (ZDNet)ZDNet has discovered that the major computer vendors are still not going out of their way to offer desktop Linux systems. "While American consumers are having a hard time finding Window-less PCs, their counterparts in Europe, Asia and Japan have a much easier path. Outside the United States, it's easier to buy a desktop with non-Microsoft operating systems pre-installed. HP's Web store in the Netherlands offered three HP Compaq computers with Windows XP, Suse Linux 9.3 or FreeDOS for the same price. These models retail starting at $806 (669 euros), excluding sales tax."
Legal GPL Undergoes Major Revisions (eWeek)eWeek takes a look at the GPL v3.0. "There will be eight people working full-time on all the processes around GPL 3, but there will also be some 60 other people chairing committees and playing major public roles in the discussions. "But they will be outsiders with interests and stakes and concerns. I also expect there will be many thousands of people who want to be heard, and they are all important to the process," Moglen said."
Interviews Free Remote KDE Desktops from CosmoPOD.com (KDE.News)KDE.News interviews Stephen Ensor of the CosmoPOD project. "CosmoPOD.com offers free remote KDE desktops over NX. Anyone can sign up to have their own desktop accessible from any computer with a network connection. CosmoPOP uses KDE's Kiosk framework to ensure security for their system. To find out more about the service and why KDE was the chosen desktop, KDE Dot News spoke to the man behind CosmoPOD, Stephen Ensor."
Resources CLI Magic: GNU find (Linux.com)Linux.com looks at the GNU find command. "If you're forgetful like me, you may sometimes need to help finding a file you created or modified just an hour ago because you can't remember its name. You can still use find to locate it. Instead of using find with the -name option, use find -amin -60 to see a list of all files accessed within the past 60 minutes. Note the minus sign before the 60 in that example. In this context, it means less than. If you leave it off, you will only see files accessed exactly 60 minutes ago, or if you use a plus sign instead of the minus, files accessed more than 60 minutes ago."
The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin, by Dr. Peter H. Salus - Ch. 20 (Groklaw)This installment of The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin looks at some of the early Linux distributions. "The first of these was Adam Richter's Yggdrasil (in the Old Norse Edda, Yggdrasil is the "world ash," from a branch of which Odin/Wotan made his spear). Yggdrasil alpha was released on 8 December 1992. It was called LGX: Linux/GNU/X -- the three components of the system. Recall that Gilmore, Tiemann and Henkel-Wallace formed Cygnus in 1989. Richter spoke to Michael Tiemann about setting up a business, but was "definitely uninterested in joining forces with Cygnus." Yggdrasil beta was released the next year."
High-Performance Linux Clustering (developerWorks)developerWorks shows how to build a working Linux cluster. "This article covers parallel algorithms, and shows you how to write parallel programs, set up clusters, and benchmark clusters. We look at parallel programming using MPI and the basics of setting up a Linux cluster. In this article, meet OSCAR, an open source project that helps you set up up robust clusters. Also, get an overview of cluster management and benchmarking concepts, complete with detailed steps to run the standard LINPACK tests on a cluster."
Advanced Linux LDAP authentication (Linux.com)"American" Dave Kline continues his Linux.com series on LDAP configuration with part two. "In an earlier look at LDAP, we set up a simple LDAP-based authentication system. We configured client machines to retrieve authentication information from a server running OpenLDAP. Now let's go further by enabling encryption and looking at how to make user modifications through LDAP."
Paranoid Penguin - Single Sign-on and the Corporate Directory, Part I (Linux Journal)Ti Leggett shows how to use Kerberos and OpenLDAP for managing centralized authentication in a Linux Journal article. "Author Ti Leggett presents the first in a series of articles focused on building a secure corporate directory, including support for single-sign-on that's scalable up to thousands of users."
All hail the speed demons (O'Reillynet)Here's an O'Reillynet article on the efforts to speed up Linux desktop performance. "What I find so interesting about Waldo's, Federico's and Michael's work is that they are playing with something of a black-art. Performance optimisation is something that not only requires an expansive knowledge of how software is built and represented in memory, but also how to optimise code and the way code is interpreted."
Reviews Network monitoring with Cacti (Linux.com)Linux.com looks at Cacti for monitoring Linux servers. "I recently set up three new servers at my university. To monitor and track various parameters, I decided to install Cacti to see if it lived up to the description. I previously used MRTG to monitor our network, but I was never able to configure it to my complete satisfaction. MRTG is pretty complex, and takes a lot of getting used to. The network in question comprises about 600 nodes. Three Linux servers prove DHCP, DNS, Squid network caching, and other services. The devices that I needed to monitor were the three servers themselves, some Layer 3 managed switches, Wi-Fi access points, and a few workstations."
Hardware emulation with QEMU (Linux.com)Linux.com takes a look at QEMU. "QEMU is an open source cross-platform emulator for Linux hosts. It allows you to emulate a number of hardware architectures (x86, x86-64, and PowerPC are currently known to work, with others, including SPARC and MIPS, in development). QEMU thereby lets you run another operating system on top of your existing OS. Going through the process of installing and configuring QEMU not only gave me a worthwhile new software tool, but also helped me learn a few things about Linux."
Does Slackware still matter? (Linux-Watch)Alan Canton compares Slackware to other distributions on Linux-Watch. "Unlike Slackware, most Linux distros have by now moved on toward newer and better (IMO) package management systems, as well as either full-fledged GUI admin modules or a collection of easy-to-run scripts that you can use to configure your system. Only in Slackware do you actually have to go in and edit xorg.conf. Just about every other distro has a GUI module or a script that will easily let you set the resolution or dpi of your display."
Miscellaneous BeOS rises from the grave, takes the name ZETA (NewsForge)NewsForge covers the release of ZETA Live CD 1.1. "In the aftermath of Be, Inc.'s demise, several Be-like projects sprang up -- notably OpenBeOS, an open-source clone of the original BeOS (later renamed Haiku), BlueEyedOS, and Cosmoe, both reimplementations of the BeOS APIs running on top of the Linux kernel. But ZETA remains the only true descendant of the real BeOS code."
An open-source rival to Google's book project (ZDNet)ZDNet looks at the current state of online book archiving and the recently launched Open Library effort. "When it comes to digitizing books, two stories appear to be unfolding: One is about open source, and the other, Google. Or so it seemed at a party held by the Internet Archive on Tuesday evening, when the nonprofit foundation and a parade of partners, including the Smithsonian Institution, Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN, rallied around a collective open-source initiative to digitize all the world's books and make them universally available."
Why Wikipedia isn't like Linux (The Register)Andrew Orlowski compares Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, to Linux. "Of Encyclopedia Britannica, David says "It's of consistent high quality, it's one of the truly great books of Anglophone culture and it's doomed." Oh. Why does David want to replace something truly great and of high quality with something mediocre? He says it's inevitable: "Commercial encyclopedias are doomed anyway because, as Microsoft is finding out with Linux, it's hard to compete with free. "If we want a good encyclopedia in ten years, it's going to have to be a good Wikipedia, because everything else will have been undercut.""
Page editor: Forrest Cook Announcements Non-Commercial announcements OpenDocument Fellowship petitions Microsoft to support ODFThe OpenDocument Fellowship has organized a petition to convince Microsoft to support the OpenDocument format. "Microsoft has said that they will support the OpenDocument format if there is customer demand. The purpose of the petition is to demonstrate that customer demand." (Thanks to David A. Wheeler.)
Software Freedom Law Center Appoints New AttorneysThe Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has announced the appointment of two new attorneys. Karen M. Sandler and James Vasile have joined the SFLC and will apply their technology and legal experience to support FOSS projects, developers and vendors.
Commercial announcements AOpen launches miniPCAOpen Inc. has announced the new AOpen miniPC. "The 6.5-inch, square metallic miniPC has a slot-load CD drive and a power button in the front, along with two USB ports, one 1394 and speaker out/mic in the back. It features the latest Intel Pentium M notebook processor, allowing near silent cooling without sacrificing performance. In addition, the miniPC boasts a DVI Connection, integrated Ethernet card and slot-loaded DVD-Burner. The product is built with mini-PCI 802.11 a/b/g wireless communication module and Bluetooth support. The miniPC also provides DVI, S-Video, component, composite and YPbPr connectors so that it can be connected to HDTV, plasma display monitor, large screen display panels, and high definition audio products."
CodeSourcery is Newest EEMBC MemberEEMBC has announced its newest member, CodeSourcery. "The Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC) today announced that its newest member is CodeSourcery, a provider of development tools, software test solutions, and custom software development services for semiconductor and operating system vendors."
Forgent to step up JPEG patent suitsForgent has sent out a press release on its acquisition of a new lawyer to head the team which is shaking down companies for royalties on its image compression patent. "'Forgent's '672 Patent case is the kind of litigation we like and we look forward to bringing significant value to the licensing and litigation process,' replied Steve Susman, partner with Susman Godfrey LLP." If Forgent continues to be successful, this one will hit the free software community for sure, sooner or later.
Google Supports Open Source InitiativesGoogle has a press release touting its recent $350,000 contribution to a joint open source technology initiative of Oregon State University and Portland State University.Doc Searls will be interviewing Google's Open Source Project Manager Chris DiBona soon, and is currently soliciting questions on Linux Journal.
Novell Promotes Ronald W. Hovsepian to President and COONovell, Inc. has announced the appointment of Ron Hovsepian as its President and chief operating officer. "Mr. Hovsepian, 44, joined Novell in June 2003 as president of North America, and has led the transformation of global field operations since May of 2005. Previously, Mr. Hovsepian held management and executive positions at IBM Corporation over a 17 year period, including worldwide general manager of IBM's distribution industries, managing global hardware and software development, sales, marketing and services. Mr. Hovsepian also served as a managing director of Internet Capital Group, a venture capital firm."
Novell announces its layoffsAs has been expected for a while, Novell has announced that it is laying off some 600 people. The purpose of the restructuring is to allow the company to focus on its "growth opportunities," defined as Linux and "identity." Hopefully that bodes well for the Linux developers employed there.
Pogo Linux: Named As One of the Fastest Growing Private CompaniesPogo Linux has made its way onto the Puget Sound Business Journal's list of fastest growing private companies. "Pogo Linux, a manufacturer of customized computer servers, workstations and storage systems running on the Linux platform, today announced recognition from the Puget Sound Business Journal as one of the fastest growing private companies in the state of Washington. This annual list is an indicator of Washington's most active and successful entrepreneurial companies. The index measures revenue and ranks companies by revenue growth over a three-year period, as expressed in percentages."
SGI and Novell Attain Elevated Security CertificationSilicon Graphics, Inc. has announced a security certification of Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 on SGI Altix computers. "SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 on Altix(R) systems has attained Evaluation Assurance Level 3+ (EAL3+) as determined by the Common Criteria for Information Security Evaluation. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 was evaluated under full compliance with the Controlled Access Protection Profile (CAPP) on an SGI Altix 3700 Bx2 supercomputer and an SGI Altix 350 mid-range server."
Trusted Computer Solutions announces NetTop(R)2Trusted Computer Solutions, Inc. has announced a new Linux-based thin client application. "Trusted Computer Solutions, Inc. (TCS), a leading supplier of secure information sharing products to the Department of Defense, the intelligence community and commercial industry, today announced the addition of SecureOffice(R) NetTop(R)2 - Thin Client to its SecureOffice family of software products."
VA Linux partners with Clara OnlineVA Linux Systems and Clara Online, Inc. have announced a partnership. "VA Linux Systems Japan K.K. (VA Linux), Japan's leading Linux and Open Source solutions provider, and Clara Online, Inc. today announced that the latter would adopt VA Balance, the former's load balancer and high-availability service solution, for Clara Online's dedicated server service for Linux. Both companies agreed that Clara Online would sell VA Balance to its housing customers at Clara's data centers and also work closely in marketing VA Balance."
New Books JBoss at Work: A Practical Guide - O'Reilly's Latest ReleaseO'Reilly has published the book JBoss at Work: A Practical Guide by Tom Marrs and Scott Davis.
Linux Desktop Pocket Guide - O'Reilly's Latest ReleaseO'Reilly has published the book Linux Desktop Pocket Guide by David Brickner.
Resources Two new Audio Libre articles on FireWire audio for LinuxLinuxaudio.org is running a pair of articles about FireWire audio for Linux. The article titles include One cable to rule them all - mLAN audio networking and Hot on the wire - the FreeBoB project.
The Linux Documentation Project Weekly NewsThe November 2, 2005 edition of the Linux Documentation Project Weekly News is out with the latest new documentation releases.
Public domain Lisp logoA new Public domain Lisp logo is available for Lisp projects. "Conrad Barski has created a logo "for anyone who needs an attractive graphic to indicate their use of, and support for, Lisp"."
Contests and Awards BitDefender Challenges Linux CommunityBitDefender has announced a product testing contest. "BitDefender, an award-winning provider of antivirus software and data security solutions, is inviting Linux enthusiasts and professionals to crash test BitDefender Mail Protection for Enterprise Beta, the upcoming BitDefender antivirus and antispam solution for Linux e-mail servers. The most thorough beta tester will receive 1,000 German beers and a trip to BitDefender's corporate headquarters in Romania, where they will attend meetings with Count Dracula, the BitDefender development team and other local luminaries."
Realm Systems announces Project BlackDog ContestRealm Systems, Inc. has announced a contest for porting the best application to the BlackDog mobile computing platform. "Realm Systems announces the start of Project BlackDog, a skills contest offering prizes in five categories, including a $50,000 grand prize for the best application created or ported to run on BlackDog(TM). The contest started October 15 and ends January 15, 2006. Prizes will also be awarded for the most bugs reported that are determined to be critical to BlackDog functionality."
Upcoming Events Linux Audio Conference 2006 CFPA call for papers and music has gone out for the Linux Audio Conference 2006. Papers are due by January 8. "LAC2006 will take place 27-30 April 2006, again at the ZKM | Institute for Music and Acoustics in Karlsruhe, Germany."
OSDC open for registrationsRegistration is open for the second Australian Open Source Developers Conference. The event takes place in Melbourne, Australia on December 5-7, 2005.
Events: November 3 - December 29, 2005
Web sites Nokia open source site launchesNokia has announced the launch of opensource.nokia.com, a gathering point for the company's free software work. There's not a huge amount there yet; look for the new S60 browser to show up early next year, though.
Page editor: Forrest Cook Letters to the editor Change the name of LWN.
Dear editor, while I was reading this weeks issue of LWN - it struck me that the L in LWN is not really very accurate anymore. This weeks front page has an article on new ideas in web browsers (some of which don't even work on linux), a piece on the release of Minix (an alternative to linux) and Gnome (a desktop that runs on linux, but other OS's as well). While the sections on kernel and distributions is still very Linux focused, the sections on development and security are broader scope. In light of the ongoing revenue problems for LWN - perhaps a name change could be considered to reflect that LWN contains quality content on a large range of free/open software/systems/document topics. Open Source Weekly News - OSWN Linux and Open Source Weekly News - LOSWN Libero Weekly New - LWN This week in the free noosphere - TWFN Actually - now I come to think of it... The N is not really that accurate either. If I want dry press release style New, then there is heaps of that available at newsforge. If I want rampant opinions, then TSS is the place to be. But LWN offers editorial - news with opinions that one has come to trust. So perhaps: Open Source Editorials and Linux Weekly News OK that suxs as well..... but you get the idea - I don't think your name is doing you any favours in advertising your great content! cheers
Page editor: Jonathan Corbet
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The