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News and Editorials

The demise of MicroBSD

The MicroBSD project has shut down following allegations of copyright violations from members of the OpenBSD project. The web site now contains only a letter of explanation, which is not likely to stay long. LWN introduced MicroBSD in the June 6, 2002 edition of the Distributions page. MicroBSD's 0.4 Mini and Full x86 release version were announced May 28, 2002. Many software projects come and go in a year, but few go out with this kind of fanfare.

This deadly.org article has a discussion with links and comments and plenty of recriminations. The short story is that OpenBSD accused MicroBSD of stealing code by changing instances of "openbsd" to "microbsd" in cvs source code. The MicroBSB crew has chosen not to argue these allegations, but to close shop and move on.

Reading through the comments it became clear not everyone seems to know what is and is not covered by copyright. OpenBSD's Copyright Policy is one of the least restrictive of all open source licenses. Giving proper credit for the code is really the only requirement.

Free software does not mean unlicensed software. The Open Source Initiative lists dozens of OSI Certified licenses. Most, including the GNU General Public License (GPL), are more restrictive than OpenBSD's Copyright Policy. Anyone leading an open source project needs to be aware of any licensing issues that go along with any code they use. It's not just the law, its polite.

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Distribution News

Debian GNU/Linux

The Debian Weekly News for February 25th, 2003 is available. This week features an essay from Paul Graham about why nerds are unpopular; a feasibility study on free and open source software by the Swedish agency for public management; a DistroWatch review; and much more.

Meet members of the Debian Project at several events in Europe, starting with LinuxForum in Copenhagen, March 1, 2003.

Here is a status report on the Debian installer. The alpha release looks good, and most of the goals set in the last report have been accomplished. "Still outstanding is the addition of a self-test/logging tool."

Anand Kumria provides the listmaster update, with information about a new list, the fight against spam, and more.

Martin Michlmayr provides the new maintainer report, with information about where to find a listing of new members.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter -- Volume 2, Issue 8

This week's Gentoo Weekly Newsletter looks at an agreement with NeTraverse to bring Win4Lin to Gentoo users at a reduced price, and much more.

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Mandrake Linux Community Newsletter - Issue #75

The Mandrake Linux Community Newsletter for February 21 is now available. This week's top story: Mandrake Linux 9.1 'RC1' is available; and much more.

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MontaVista Linux

MontaVista Software announced that MontaVista Linux Professional Edition will support the new Intel IXP420, IXP421 and IXP422 network processors unveiled at the recent Intel Developer Forum.

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Red Hat Linux

TechWeb reports that Red Hat has posted an update for Red Hat Advanced Server that optimizes performance with IBM's x440 high-end server and Intel's Tiger technology.

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Slackware Linux

This week the slackware-current change log shows several upgrades and bug fixes, and a couple of new additions.

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TimeSys Linux

TimeSys Corporation has announced the release of TimeSys Linux 4.0, a significantly upgraded version of its embedded Linux operating system and development environment. TimeSys Linux 4.0 adds a number of High Availability/Carrier Grade Linux requirements and updates the TimeSys Linux kernel to the 2.4.18 Linux kernel.

TimeSys also announced a new pricing model for its royalty-free, full Linux real-time operating system (RTOS) with all Linux utilities and libraries, for Pentium processors for only $795.00

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Trustix Security Linux

Trustix has a bug fix advisory for initscripts, pam, SysVinit.

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Porting uCLinux to the MC68360-Based MTPSR2-150 Board (Linux Journal)

Here's a Linux Journal article which shows how to get uCLinux running on several different microprocessor boards. "uClinux comes equipped with a full TCP/IP stack, as well as support for numerous other networking protocols. Pretty much all the networking protocols are implemented. uClinux is an Internet-ready OS perfect for embedded devices."

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Minor distribution updates

BasicLinux

BasicLinux has released v2.0 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: This release is compatible with Slackware 7.1 and includes a new kernel, new libraries, new versions of busybox and links, and new mail and DHCP clients. There are also new installation scripts for both FD and HD."

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bootE Linux

bootE Linux has released v0.20-r1 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: The kernel version is now 2.4.20. Most of the e2fsprogs package was included, along with sfdisk and fdisk from the util-linux package. BusyBox was upgraded to 0.60.5, and uClibc was upgraded to 0.9.17."

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DyneBolic GNU/Linux

DyneBolic has released development version 1.0 alpha 4 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: There has been a complete recompilation of the whole system (gcc3.2 mcpu=i586), and squashfs is used to greatly improve speed performance. A multimedia production (not only fruition) tool is in the works; many free software programs are made available for audio/video acquisition, encoding, editing, and streaming. Among them are Blender, PD, TerminatorX, MuSE, mp4live, Freej, Soundtracker, MPlayer, GDAM, Audacity, Gimp, Abiword, Bluefish, Sylpheed+GPG, Lopster, Xchat, Samba, VNC, and lots more, including games."

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Mindi Linux

Mindi Linux has released v0.82 with minor bugfixes. "Changes: In this version, various minor bugs have been fixe, and support for RAID and LVM has been improved."

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PXES Linux Thin Client

PXES Linux Thin Client has released v0.5.1-30 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: This new release has some useful additions like supermount support in the 2.4.20-2pxes kernel and local devices sharing with samba in RDP sessions. A local session was added as a starting point for local session further developments. Microsoft Terminal Session: The local devices shared can be accessed as \\thinclientname\cdrom and \\thinclientname\fd from the terminal server where you can add a mapping. thinclientname is the thin client hostname that could be set by the DHCP server."

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ttylinux

ttylinux has released v3.0 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: This release updates LILO and util-linux to their latest versions and makes running with devfs a little easier."

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uClinux

uClinux has released v2.5.63-uc0 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: This release was merged with the latest kernel update. There are few patches remaining to be merged."

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Warewulf

Warewulf has released v1.9 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: Nodes can now be displayed with wwmon, wwstat, and wwnodes. The commands now default to only showing nodes that the user has access to. A NODES environment variable can be used to either list nodes or point to a file containing a node list. Bugs in nodeupdate and masterconf were fixed, and wwmon and wwstat now can query remote master nodes. warewulfd now outputs a node's short name instead of its FQDN."

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Page editor: Rebecca Sobol
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