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News and Editorials

Plans from Red Hat

Several articles were published this week looking at Red Hat's plans. The Register starts off with this article about the recently announced end-of-life schedule. (See Red Hat's errata policy announcement). We understand the need to set an end-of-life to products, but announcing a December 31, 2003 end-of-life for 8.0 seems a bit extreme. After all, 8.1 isn't even due out until April.

Next, Linux Journal takes a look at Red Hat's plans for a corporate desktop. The idea here is to get people familiar with Red Hat desktop at work. Then in a year or two they'll be ready to trade in their Windows systems for a Red Hat desktop at home. This seems like a good strategy. If the corporate sales are good, Red Hat should gain some users this way.

Finally, vnunet looks at Phoebe and a new Samba configuration tool included with Phoebe. Phoebe is, of course the beta version of 8.1. "Without the new tool, most system administrators would configure Samba by editing text files on each system running the Samba software. Many administrators prefer this method of configuration because it makes it straightforward to back up and redistribute server configurations simply by copying one text file. However, other administrators who are used to working with Windows may be put off by the text-based interface." As long as 'vi filename' still works....

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Linux Comes to Unisys Servers (via SCO) (Register)

The Register reports that the SCO Group plans to release SCO Linux for Unisys Corps ES7000 servers and ClearPath mainframes.

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Advantages of OpenMosix on IBM xSeries (IBM developerWorks)

IBM developerWorks has a three-part series on setting up an openMosix mini-cluster on IBM xSeries. Part 1 introduces current clustering technologies available for Linux and and an introduction to openMosix. Part 2 steps through the process of getting a fully-functional openMosix cluster configured and running. Finally, in Part 3, gives some examples of how you can use your new cluster.

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Distribution News

Debian GNU/Linux

The Debian Weekly News for January 28th, 2003 is available. This week: Netcraft added Debian to the list of operating system vendors; the security team finally got everything together and was able to release a whole bunch of advisories for the version of KDE in woody; and more.

The nomination period for this year's Debian Project Leader election began on January 24; nominations will be accepted through February 14, and voting will begin on March 21. Click here for the full announcement from the Project Secretary.

Meet people from the Debian Project at Solutions Linux 2003 / Linux Expo France (February 4 - 6, 2003 in Paris), and the Free and Open Source Software Developers' Meeting (FOSDEM) (February 8 - 9, 2003 in Brussels).

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter -- Volume 2, Issue 4

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of January 27, 2003 is available. This week looks at Gentoo Linux at LinuxWorld, and much more.

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Mandrake Linux - Updated msec packages

Mandrake Linux fixes a bug in msec with Multi Network Firewall 8.2. This version has improperly enabled password aging in msec level 4.

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Slackware Linux

This week's Slackware changes include an upgrade to cups-1.1.18; new stuff in a/devs-2.3.1-i386-11.tgz; an upgrade to LPRng-3.8.20; bunches of new gnome stuff; an upgrade to proftpd-1.2.7; and much more.

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Yellow Dog Linux

Yellow Dog Linux has some bug fix advisories available for gaim and nautilus.

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New Distributions

Emergency CD 2

Emergency CD 2 is a bootable CD-ROM with a console-only mini-distribution based on Red Hat 7.3. It uses Linux kernel 2.4.19-xfs(i586) and includes many console tools and utilities. The first public release is v2.01.

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Minor distribution updates

Astaro Security Linux

Astaro Security Linux has released v3.383 beta with major feature enhancements. The 3.390 beta release adds bug fixes. "Changes: This Up2Date adds a new WLAN feature. It also updates WebAdmin, MiddleWare, Selfmonitor, HTTP proxy, and some other software. New versions of the DHCP server and client are also included."

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EvilEntity Linux

EvilEntity Linux has released vDR-0.2.5 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: The Application Suite has been expanded, and was made more focused on multimedia. Packages have been updated system wide. Install speed has been increased, as well as system performance."

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Gibraltar Firewall

Gibraltar has released v0.99.6a with minor security fixes. "Changes: This release fixes the recently discovered security hole in the dhcp3 daemon. If you have enabled it, please update to this release."

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OpenZaurus

The second release candidate for OpenZaurus 3.1 is currently available for testing.

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PXES Linux Thin Client

PXES Linux Thin Client has released v0.5.1-25 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: This new release introduces some expected changes. Maybe the most important is the migration to kernel 2.4.20, although the previous kernel is included too. You can select the desired kernel in the proces of image building. Some interesting inclusions are a graphical boot screen and the selection of boot messages level, with no messages at all. Support for a read-only root filesystem was added so you can create a PXES CDROM if you want, and support for multiple kernel architecture was fully added."

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SmoothWall

SmoothWall has released v2.0 beta 4 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: This release includes major updates to the networking capabilities. Support for the U.S. Robotics SureConnect USB ADSL modem and modems based on the ECI chipset (such as the Fujitsu FDX310) was improved, and the new USB Home Highway ISDN connections from BT are now supported."

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TopologiLinux

TopologiLinux has released v2.0.0 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: Both NTFS and FAT are now supported, as are all versions of Windows."

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Xandros

Xandros announced the release of the Xandros Desktop Standard Edition 1.0. The Standard Edition is a less expensive version of the previously announced Deluxe Edition.

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Distribution reviews

Red Hat Slips off a Curve (OfB.biz)

Timothy R. Butler continues the Penguin Shootout with a look at Red Hat 8.0. He is not entirely pleased with the results. "Another small issue is the Red Hat Network. Unlike MandrakeSoft or SuSE's update utilities, RHN keeps a profile of your system to decide what updates you need. Besides the fact that Red Hat ends up knowing a lot about your system (you can opt out of giving various information), this also means that Red Hat doesn't allow you to have multiple systems hooked up to RHN without additional fees. While I can certainly understand why, after all, it takes a lot of space to store all of that information, Red Hat could avoid both the problem and the cause by simply having the RHN utility decide on the client side what needs updates rather than on the server side."

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