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Linux in the news
Recommended Reading
Linux's Hit Men (Forbes)
It's time for the FUD of the month. Here's is a Forbes article on the Free Software Foundation's GPL enforcement efforts (and the LinkSys case in particular) which makes a rather interesting contrast to that magazine's coverage of the SCO case. "The dispute, which was leaked to an Internet message board, offers a rare peek into the dark side of the free software movement--a view that contrasts with the movement's usual public image of happy software proles linking arms and singing the "Internationale" while freely sharing the fruits of their code-writing labor."
Leader of the Free World (Wired)
Wired Magazine has posted a lengthy look at Linus Torvalds. "He works from home as a fellow for the Open Source Development Lab, a corporate-funded consortium created to foster improvements to Linux. His commute is a walk down a flight of stairs to an office he shares with Tove, his wife of nine years. It's jammed with Linux-related books, few of which he's read, and looks out onto the narrow walkway between his home and the neighbor's. The early July day he invites me to visit is his first official one as an OSDL employee, but it isn't long after my arrival that he excuses himself to take out the garbage because Tove nags him about the smell."
Samba beats Windows (vnunet)
Vnunet covers tests of Samba vs. Windows. "Samba 3's scalability is as impressive as its performance. While Windows performance scales up well initially, it then drops off quickly as more clients access the server. In contrast, Samba 3 offered excellent throughput up to the limit of our test, conducted on a low-spec Intel server."
Trade Shows and Conferences
Why You Should Go to Defcon (Linux Journal)
Here is a Defcon trip report on Linux Journal. "As for the presentations themselves, the majority I attended were superb and very practical. They provided information you can use straightway and demonstrated new tools out for downloading, the features and inner workings being explained by the creators. It was striking that very few presenters were representatives of well known IT companies or what the general public thinks of as the IT industry. The majority were individual, independent security consultants, often running their own companies, or enthusiasts programming and researching for fun--in one word, hackers, in the definition of the word I support."
The SCO Problem
Copyright Lawsuit Is Turnabout for SCO (New York Times)
Here's a New York Times article (registration required) on the SCO suit and its similarities with a just-settled GPL suit filed by MontaVista against Lineo. "But in an unpublicized case, one of SCO's former sister companies, Lineo, has agreed to quietly settle a third party's accusations that it engaged in the same kind of copyright infringement that is at the heart of SCO's claim against I.B.M., industry executives who have been briefed on the matter said. The case spotlights the behind-the-scenes role of Canopy, an investment firm formed by Ray Noorda, the founder of Novell and a personal computer industry pioneer. Canopy is SCO's largest shareholder and formerly controlled Lineo."
SCO Gets Lift in Form of 'Buy' Rating (InternetNews.com)
InternetNews.com has taken a look at the Deutsche Securities report that has pumped so much air into SCO's stock. "'We view SCOX as a call option on a substantial lawsuit against IBM and the potential to capitalize on Linux,' the authors wrote. 'Investors should consider an investment in SCOX as extremely high risk that may yield a substantial return or may collapse in value.'"
Companies
Linux PC maker plans e-mail service (News.com)
News.com covers Linare's plans for the Linux.net domain. "The company plans to begin offering the e-mail service this week to those who want an e-mail address that ends in "@linux.net," Linare CEO Soma Sundaram said. The Web-based e-mail service with 6MB of storage space will be free; two other options, with features such as more storage space or spam blocking, will cost $1.67 or $2.33 per month."
Linux Adoption
UK tests open source waters (BBC News)
The BBC News reports on what the UK's Office of Government Commerce is up to, and why it worries Microsoft. "The OGC has just announced a deal with IBM to trial open source software - programs where the source code is available to users to read, change and even give away to other people - in nine different areas of government." (Thanks to Dave Killick)
Open Asia: Open source in the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and Singapore (NewsForge)
NewsForge continues its survey of open source in Asia. "University of the Philippines, Quezon City, President of the Board of Regents Dr. Francisco Nemenzo -- in an open letter -- advocated users "install the Linux operating system and use OpenOffice or StarOffice for word processing, making ... presentations, spreadsheets, data bases, etc., sending emails, and accessing the Internet." Greenpeace Southeast Asia (Philippines) recently began a shift to Linux desktops."
Legal
Student faces suit over key to CD locks (News.com)
News.com reports that SunnComm is planning to sue John Halderman for the crime of showing how to evade SunnComm's new CD "copy protection" scheme. As predicted, the shift key is now a DMCA violation. "On Thursday, SunnComm CEO Peter Jacobs said the company plans legal action and is considering both criminal and civil suits. He said it may charge the student with maligning the company's reputation and, possibly, with violating copyright law that bans the distribution of tools for breaking through digital piracy safeguards."
Threat of lawsuit passes for student (Daily Princetonian)
The Daily Princetonian reports that SunnComm will not be suing John Halderman after all. "[CEO Peter] Jacobs said in an interview late last night that a successful lawsuit would do little to reverse the damage done by the paper Halderman published Monday about his research, and any suit would likely hurt the research community by making computer scientists think twice about researching copy-protection technology."
Resources
Introduction to Linux filesystems and files (NewsForge)
This NewsForge article looking at Linux filesystems, is an excerpt from the book Linux Power Tools. "Unfortunately, the best filesystem to use is not always obvious. For many installations, it's not even terribly important, but for some applications it is. Filesystem design differences mean that some perform some tasks better than others. Varying support tools also mean that advanced filesystem features differ. This section describes the pros and cons of the popular Linux filesystems in several different areas, such as filesystem portability, disk check times, disk speed, disk space consumption, support for large numbers of files, and advanced security features."
Optimizing Linux filesystems (NewsForge)
NewsForge has another excerpt from Linux Power Tools. "Most filesystems support a variety of options that may impact performance. For instance, large allocation blocks can improve performance by reducing fragmentation and the number of operations needed to retrieve an entire file. Some of these options can be set only at filesystem creation time, but some can be changed after the fact. Not all of these features are available in all filesystems."
Resizing and defragmenting Linux filesystems (NewsForge)
Here's another piece of the book Linux Power Tools in this NewsForge article. "All too frequently, you discover only after installing Linux that your partitions aren't the optimum size. For instance, you might have too much room in /usr and not enough room in /home. Traditional fixes for this problem include using symbolic links to store some directories that are nominally on one partition on another partition; and backing up, repartitioning, and restoring data. In many cases, a simpler approach is to use a dynamic partition resizer. Fortunately, partition resizers exist for the most popular Linux filesystems, as well, so you can use these tools to manage your Linux installation."
Roll Your Own Firewall with Netfilter (Linux Journal)
Linux Journal explains how-to build a firewall. "Every self-respecting Linux guru should be familiar with firewalls and how to install and configure them. With this in mind, Linux gurus also should be curious about how firewalls function and how to build a firewall of his or her own. Explaining exactly these two things is the goal of this article. Here, we attempt to write a firewall in less than 60 lines of C code. As impossible as this may sound, it actually is quite simple to do using the power of Linux kernel modules and Netfilter."
An introduction to Firebird, part 3 (Nidelven IT)
Kay Frode continues the series on the Mozilla Firebird browser with part three. "With a multi function application like Mozilla Firebird, it's important you know your way with the keyboard, and the mouse. In this part of the article I will talk about some basic commands, where to find them and how to keep things efficient. In addition I will talk a bit about blocking pop-ups."
Build a network router on Linux (IBM developerWorks)
IBM's developerWorks has an article by Dominique Cimafranca and Rex Young that shows how to use Zebra to build a Linux-based network router. "Zebra is open source TCP/IP routing software that is similar to Cisco's Internetworking Operating System (IOS). Flexible and powerful, it can handle routing protocols such as Routing Information Protocol (RIP), Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), and all of their various flavors. This article shows how our authors set up Zebra and used it to manage routes dynamically in conjunction with real Cisco hardware."
Linux lab upgrades software for telecoms (News.com)
News.com covers the Open Source Development Lab's (OSDL) new Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) specifications. "The CGL effort is geared toward telecommunications servers--the machines that handle tasks such as connecting phone calls, playing voice mail messages and recording a phone call's duration for billing purposes. But one effect of developing Linux for this market has been to make it better for all users, Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff said." The press release from OSDL announcing CGL Requirements Definition version 2.0 can be found here.
Seven open source OS distributions for 64-bit processors (NewsForge)
NewsForge lists seven distributions that support AMD's new 64-bit chips; Debian GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Mandrake, NetBSD, Red Hat, SuSE, and Turbolinux.
Reviews
Egenera's blades are blooming (Register)
The Register takes a look at who is buying Egenera blade servers. "Egenera today announced a deal with America Online, which will see the ISP use BladeFrame systems to power the MapQuest service. AOL cited price/performance advantages of running Linux on blades as a major reason for the move."
High-Performance Computing (Linux Journal)
Linux Journal looks at HPC, past and present. "Will Linux clusters stay in the HPC niche? Big vendors are putting their money on "no". Oracle is dropping UNIX boxes for cheap racks of generic machines. Penguin Computing acquired Beowulf-originator Donald Becker's cluster company, Scyld. Dell and IBM will sell you turnkey clusters with service contracts--maybe not with one click from the Web site, but close."
Synaptic: Point-n-Click Software Management (LinMagAuOrg)
LinMagAu.org takes a look at Synaptic, a package management tool for Debian systems. "Unlike Apt, which performs all actions immediately, Synaptic lets you queue up a number of actions until you're satisfied with your choices. Selecting a package in the list and marking it to be installed or removed won't cause a sudden flurry of activity. In fact, it'll look like nothing much is happening at all. Synaptic just makes a little internal note about your selection and waits to see what you do next. That means you can browse through the packages at your leisure without waiting for your computer to go through a potentially lengthy download-configure-install cycle for every item you select."
View from the Trenches: Alternative Package Sources (Linux Journal)
The Linux Journal looks at alternative package sources for popular distributions. "For the Debian folks, punch up Apt-get.org (of course) and have yourself a blast. This is not your ordinary package search engine; search for a program here, and it returns not links to individual packages, but the appropriate deb lines for your sources.list file. It also serves links so you can find what other packages are in the same repository and a rating as to the current status of the repository."
Miscellaneous
Mozilla Charts an Independent Course (eWeek)
eWeek looks at a strategy shift from the Mozilla Foundation. "Now known as the Mozilla Foundation after splitting from America Online Inc.'s Netscape Communications subsidiary in July, the project is turning its focus to the end user after five years as strictly a development organization. Starting this month, end users and enterprises can expect to see the first signs of that shift. Mozilla is preparing greater user support, a set of new releases and greater enterprise outreach."
E-mail filters not fooled by signed spam (News.com)
News.com discusses spam with fake signatures which is designed to get past SpamAssassin. "The attack on the software's filtering process highlights the dangers of open-source projects, but it also reinforces the ability of projects with active development teams to quickly respond to such security holes."
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