LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 6, 2006
Interview: Jim Gettys (Part II)
The first part of our interview with Jim Gettys covered many aspects of the "One Laptop Per Child" (OLPC) system. With the second and final installment, we look at a number of other issues, including the software which will run on the system, security issues, and more.LWN: Time for a few questions about the mix of software you envision running on the OLPC systems. To start with, it appears that the system will be based on a pared-down Fedora-based distribution?
Red Hat is putting together a pared-down Fedora derivative distribution. The community being what it is, I expect others will put other distributions on the machine as well, given that the OLPC system is an open platform. I'm not sure such duplication is worthwhile, but I'm resigned to it.
I *really* urge everyone to cooperate very strongly at the level of the software for the kids, no matter what the underlying distribution in the long term. This project is fundamentally about kids learning and helping the world; not about free software.
That being said, *free software enables the kids to learn computing in a way that they cannot learn it on closed proprietary platforms*. We are therefore very much part of the free and open source software community.
Chris' team is putting together a python based environment (into which conventional applications can be embedded) aimed at young children, temporarily called "sugar" (more information can be found in postings here, here, here, and here); conventional GUI's are not good for children still learning to read. I have a 8 year old son and an 11 year old daughter, and so have seen over the last few years first hand how unsuitable conventional desktops are for young children.
The Sugar environment, by using the Avahi library (zeroconf/mdns technology), will show the presence of people on the network as a fundamental aid to building collaborative applications. Collaboration is fundamental to learning: most kids learn from their peer group, and teachers serve as the guides.
Will the systems as shipped be 100% free software?
If not, what other code do you think you might include?
We are strongly recommending that future content not be created in closed format like Flash, whose format is closed, lack tools for manipulation, and present major problems for accessibility tools.
But some countries have such content today, and need to use it immediately. And since there is so much flash content on the web, it would not surprise me if countries arrange for Flash to be installed, even if they do not have existing educational content in Flash. We are encouraging everyone to use open standards based formats, and to release useful content under appropriate free creative commons and free software licenses.
Reality being what it is, even if we had veto power over software on the machine (which we certainly don't), we'll see such software included on the machine by the time it in children and teacher's hands; just not distributed from OLPC, but added on afterwords.
Is it true that there will be no package manager on this system?
If so, will there be any provision for customizing the system software mix, installing localization data, or updating software?
A system like this clearly needs a good set of education applications - an area where free software has not traditionally been strong. What sort of applications are you looking at in this area, and might any missing pieces come from?
We believe all children learn by doing, and should be authoring content, not only passively reading unchangeable engraved in stone content. We are placing some major bets on wiki technology as a base for this. (Not wiki markup though!).
I'd also like to draw your attention to a web site: logowiki.net. Content doesn't have to be static at all, and content can be programs, even programs for young children. The ability to run simulations and manipulate the starting conditions is a major tool to learning.
And one more hardware feature is unique to our machine: you can choose to use the audio input as a direct analog input, allowing direct measurements be made with very cheap sensors (e.g. photodiodes, accelerometers, etc.).
With the likes of Seymour Papert and Alan Kay involved, I think we're in for some fun stuff. For example I saw a demo this week of a wonderful music application called TamTam, that Jean Piche' et al in Canada and Ireland are building using the Csound synthesis software Barry Vercoe originally developed.
Will the systems include a compiler, or, failing that, an interpreter for a language like Python?
At a minimum, we expect Logo, javascript and python to be present, and compilers as well when needed by interested kids. Learning programming, though, is best done in interpreted language environment, rather than compiled languages. Certainly C++ should never be a child's first computer language.
In general, is hacking one of the uses to which you think these machines will be put?
Do you expect that the kids will have root access on their systems?
Being root on your own personal machine is fundamentally different than having any access to information on the network you should not have. Project Athena, at MIT (where such technologies as Kerberos, X11, the first network IM system, among others), demonstrated this even 20 years ago: on those systems having root access does not get you access to anything but the services you had access to as an individual user. The root password on those systems has been posted for years: it just doesn't matter, if you do your homework properly.
The plan to use LinuxBIOS is interesting. Are there reasons driving that choice (beyond cost)?
Capability:
- we'd like to be able to boot over the mesh network for (re)install
- we may need to follow Mark Foster's fast suspend/resume path, in which case having full source may be essential to its success.
- We want interested kids to be able to see how computers really work and learn accordingly.
Some years ago when I was working on Linux on the iPAQ, we had a 12 year old who was hacking on our boot loader, and learning tremendously as a result. Those outstanding kids should also have the opportunity to learn computing deeply.
Is LinuxBIOS ready for this sort of deployment?
Millions of identical systems, mostly lacking professional administration, would seem like a magnet for malware authors. What sort of thought is being put into preventing these systems from becoming worm carriers and large-scale zombie networks?
And if they need professional administration, we've failed.
Our view is that systems cannot require professional administration at a local level: we could not deploy quickly on this scale and have sufficient expertise if this were required. Part of the IPv6 argument is exactly to allow administration to scale and to simplify administration.
Eugene Kaspersky, who has been predicting Linux doom for years, is now saying that the OLPC will result in a new wave of malware from the developing world. Do you find this outcome plausible? Why or why not?
We certainly are aware that security is a challenge: young children are not noted for choosing and keeping secure good passwords, and we are looking at other methods as a result.
We expect to deploy SELinux protecting the "standard" network services on our machines to help protect against day-0 attacks, to prevent bad guys from successfully attacking our systems and prevent such people from using our systems as a point of attack.
And keeping our systems up to date automatically is obviously essential.
As far as malware from the developing world: malware for what? Malware is very rare on Linux or Apple's OS/X systems: both systems break out of the starting gate much less insecure than Windows, and writing malware for either is inherently more difficult. And if Mr. Kaspersky's worried about kids in the developing world writing malware on the OLPC systems to attack Windows, how are the kids going to test such Windows malware since our machines are running Linux?
Malware authors working for profit (e.g. stealing passwords and accounts) are certainly going to be older than our kids, and will find a standard Windows system a much more productive development environment, and internet cafe's a much more anonymous place to launch attacks than our school environments.
Lastly, both at the school servers, and the networks supporting them, we have good places to prevent, stop, and track down any such attacks, much better than you'd find in the anonymous world of Internet Cafe's where anyone can pay for anonymous usage.
And high bandwidth back-haul from schools is unlikely to be very common, limiting the problem if it does occur. There are much better targets for zombies: e.g. systems all over the developed world where each machine has a high bandwidth broadband connection, rather than a kid's machine on a large shared mesh network back connected through a similar single connection. Per compromised machine, there may be a difference of a hundred to one of useful bandwidth.
Seems to me that Mr. Kaspersky knows not what he writes of, and is trying to gain eyeballs on his stories by sensationalism.
Given the state of the art, the chances of a security vulnerability turning up in the shipped OLPC systems must be near 100%. What happens then? How will OLPC users obtain and install security fixes?
We expect the kids machines to be updated from school servers, and possibly from other kid's systems.
The closest management tools to what we need appears to be many of the technologies developed by PlanetLab: the commercial distributed content systems are unlikely to work, presuming as they do that systems are in data centers and always/usually available over high speed networks.
At our scale, (and with the highly variable Internet connections we expect), a presumption of constant connectivity seems untenable. We'll know more as we look into this aspect of the project more fully over the next few months.
Some commenters on LWN have expressed concerns that many of these systems may be stolen from the children and used for (or sold to fund) rather less wholesome ends. Is this an issue which the OLPC team has thought about?
How could this risk be minimized?
Second, public education about these distinctive systems is a topic we've discussed with deployment countries as a deterrent.
Third, by saturating each area during deployment, rather than distributing machines piecemeal, we can expect much better mesh networking performance, but also less child from child theft.
Fourth, there will be a commercial version of the machine (that will look quite different) at some point in the project, to reduce the pressure for these unique systems. As I explained before, there are quite a few ways in which these machines are unique, so we'd like there to be fewer reasons for theft, by enabling a commercial version. These commercial machines may also help cross subsidize the children's machine, for as long as the market might bear such a price differential.
Fifth, by its nature, there is a network MAC address in each machine that can aid its tracing, in the case of theft, once a system is recovered. We are, however, very concerned about the child's privacy and safety, and so don't want the systems to go around broadcasting the hardware MAC address in the normal case.
And we're exploring some other possible identity systems as well that may help in this area.
A huge "thank you" is due to Jim, who clearly took a great deal of time to respond to LWN's questions in such detail.
A software patent attack on Red Hat
Red Hat is long been a likely target of legal attacks; the company has a high profile, customers who can be threatened, and a bank balance which is worth the trouble of coveting. So it is not entirely surprising that a small company called FireStar chose Red Hat as the target for a software patent suit. It is unlikely to be the last.The patent in question is US patent 6,101,502, which is said to be infringed by the "Hibernate" product acquired with JBoss. This patent, filed in 1998, asserts the following claim:
- selecting an object model;
- generating a map of at least some relationships between schema in the database and the selected object model;
- employing the map to create at least one interface object associated with an object corresponding to a class associated with the object oriented software application; and
- utilizing a runtime engine which invokes said at least one interface object with the object oriented application to access data from the relational database.
In other words, this is a patent on an object-oriented wrapper for data in a relational database management system. To say that this idea is obvious is to understate the case. The first thing any object-oriented programmer does is to create classes to encapsulate the data to be manipulated; of course such a programmer would create a series of objects to represent relations in an RDBMS. One would expect that it would be possible to examine a large number of object-oriented programs which work with RDBMS systems and not find a single one which lacks this sort of impedance-matching layer. So the world did not need to wait until 1998 for the authors of this patent to come up with this idea.
Thus, if Red Hat puts up a suitable level of resistance, it should be able to get this patent invalidated. But there is little comfort to be found there. There are thousands of these patents in circulation and no shortage of trolls willing to exploit them to line their own pockets. One such case can be beaten down; but there will be more than one. Perhaps many more. Software patents have long been seen as a serious threat to free software; now we are beginning to see this threat come to life.
[As an aside, there have been some allegations that at least one Red Hat employee engaged in pro-patent lobbying in Europe last year, and that, as a result, this suit represents a sort of poetic justice. See this week's Letters Page for a discussion of both sides of this issue. The statement from FFII found there would appear to establish that Red Hat's position on software patents has been clear and consistent.]
SCO: the end gets closer
Your editor misses the Good Old Days, when outlandish SCO court filings were a daily occurrence, Darl McBride's fulminations were daily press fodder, and the occasional corporate teleconference could be counted upon to keep blood pressures high in the community. One could almost get nostalgic about plowing through yet another blurry PDF file filled with bizarre legalese. The world feels a little lonely now that Chris Sontag no longer shows his face in public.Actually, the above paragraph is a bunch of hot air; LWN is more fun without the SCO Group on the front page. But a certain morbid interest suggests that the SCO end game should occasionally be chronicled as important milestones unfold. One of those milestones was passed on June 28, when Judge Wells issued an order in SCO v. IBM. For those of us who have been patiently (or, perhaps, not so patiently) waiting for SCO to feel the consequences of its lack of discretion in public and its lack of any actual evidence of wrongdoing, the time has finally come.
The SCO Group, remember, has been under court order for some time to disclose "with specificity" exactly what it thinks IBM did wrong. SCO's final answer took the form of 294 "specifics," described in a sealed filing. IBM responded with a motion saying that most of SCO's claims lacked the required level of specificity and should simply be thrown out, regardless of whether they might have any merit or not. Judge Wells's order was the court's response to this motion.
After reviewing (at length) SCO's history in the case, Judge Wells concluded that SCO's claims were, indeed, not specific enough. Not enough for the court, but also not up to the level that SCO expected from IBM. Thus:
Failure to meet the specificity requirement is not enough to throw the claims out, however; a couple of other criteria must be met. One is that the failure was willful - that SCO deliberately failed to disclose that information. According to Judge Wells, that is, indeed, the case:
Based on the foregoing, the court finds that SCO has had ample opportunity to articulate, identify and substantiate its claims against SCO. The court further finds that such failure was intentional and therefore willful based on SCO's disregard of the court's orders and failure to seek clarification. In the view of the court it is almost like SCO sought to hide its case until the ninth inning in hopes of gaining an unfair advantage despite being repeatedly told to put "all evidence . . . on the table."
One might well argue that this is a charitable view of SCO's behavior. But it makes one thing clear: the court has noticed the discrepancy between SCO's public bluster and the evidence it has actually put forward in the trial.
Finally, IBM had to show that it was being hurt by SCO's failure. The court had no trouble buying IBM's argument that it would be hard put to defend a case where it is unaware of what it has done wrong. The troubles go beyond that, though:
The end result is that IBM won big: 182 of SCO's claims have been summarily tossed out - just ten short of what IBM had asked for. On the order of 100 claims remain. This ruling is clearly a major blow to SCO's case, but just how major is hard to say: since SCO's claims remain under seal, we cannot know which ones have survived. But it is clearly a much shorter list, with much of the "methods and concepts" vapor removed. And, just as importantly, the court appears to have concluded that SCO has been given plenty of rope at this point; with luck, this whole episode might just reach a conclusion sometime soon.
Security
Prelink and address space randomization
Prelink (PDF) is a popular tool used to decrease program load time, shortening system boot time and making applications start faster. Developed by Jakob Jelinek at Red Hat, prelink relocates libraries on disk to save dynamic linking time.
When the dynamic linker loads a dynamically linked ELF binary, it has to also load and link all of the libraries before executing the program's entry point, _main(). This process involves relocating libraries—changing all addresses referenced in the library to reflect the actual addresses in memory. Relocating libraries involves iterating through each address in the library and replacing it with the real address as determined by the library's location in the process's virtual address space. Most relocations happen in the symbol table and PLT; but in rare cases there are also .text relocations which require fixed-position executable code to be patched in a slightly slower process.
The relocation process will slow down an application's launch. In order to speed up the process, prelink relocates the libraries ahead of time. This is done by scanning every executable to be prelinked, generating a graph of libraries that will be loaded at the same time as other libraries, and then calculating target addresses for each library at such that it will never be loaded at the same address as other libraries. These offsets are then stored in the shared object files themselves, and the symbol tables and segment addresses are all adjusted to reflect addresses based on the chosen base address.
Once prelink has done its job, the dynamic linker no longer has to concern itself with relocation. Libraries are loaded at the address specified in the library header and the symbol table is already correct. If anything forces the library to be loaded at a different address, then the library is relocated appropriately as usual; otherwise we can say goodbye to the load-time overhead of relocating libraries.
Kernel facilities supplying address space layout randomization for libraries cannot be used in conjunction with prelink; to do so would require relocating the libraries, defeating the purpose of prelinking. Address space randomization is a core feature of secure systems such as OpenBSD, Adamantix, Hardened Gentoo, Fedora Core, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It has appeared as part of PaX as well as part of Ingo Molnar's Exec Shield, and has been accepted into the mainline kernel as of 2.6.12 after submission by Arjan van de Ven.
The simple purpose of address space randomization is to make it more difficult to perform certain classes of attacks by changing where in memory important segments for the attack are loaded. If an attacker wants to execute injected shell code or manipulate the program to execute out of order, he obviously has to know where that code is. By shuffling memory segments around, these attacks become quite difficult; the chances of successful attack are mathematically described in the PaX documentation and Wikipedia.
In an attempt to restore some of the benefits of address space randomization, prelink is capable of randomly selecting the addresses used for prelinking. This makes it more difficult to perform certain attacks on a system, because the addresses used are unique to that system. This approach is, however, less effective than per-process randomization because the addresses stay constant until prelink is run again.
There is another implication that has to be examined with prelink. To understand this implication, let us first review a feature of prelink by examining the load address of the C standard library in two processes: a user-owned 'cat' and a root-owned 'bash'. The C standard library is interesting because, in practice, virtually all return-to-libc attacks utilize it exclusively.
user@icebox:~$ cat /proc/self/maps | grep libc | grep r-xp 4df2e000-4e053000 r-xp 00000000 08:07 81197 /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc-2.3.6.so user@icebox:~$ sudo -s root@icebox:/home/user# cat /proc/$$/maps | grep libc | grep r-xp 4df2e000-4e053000 r-xp 00000000 08:07 81197 /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc-2.3.6.so
Closely examining these quickly verifies that the address of glibc's executable code is the same between these two processes; this is consistent with the behavior of prelink. Because the library itself is relocated ahead of time, there is a preference for the dynamic linker to load it at that address. Examination of libc itself yields the below.
user@icebox:~$ readelf -S /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc-2.3.6.so | head -n 6 There are 64 section headers, starting at offset 0x12d114: Section Headers: [Nr] Name Type Addr Off Size ES Flg Lk Inf Al [ 0] NULL 00000000 000000 000000 00 0 0 0 [ 1] .note.ABI-tag NOTE 4df2e154 000154 000020 00 A 0 0 4
Computing 4df2e154 - 154, the address and offset taken from any given non-NULL segment, yields 4df2e000, the base address of libc. This makes sense; prelink rewrites the segment and symbol addresses for the library based on a specific load address, and the dynamic linker loads the library at that address to avoid relocating it. Further, any program that links with libc has to be able to read libc, and will thus be able to derive the same information.
All of this means that any program on the system using any prelinked library will be able to leak information about higher privileged tasks using the same library. This allows any attacker able to gain any form of local access—or more directly any ability to read libc—to gain information about the address space layout of higher privileged processes, including the load address of libc. As we know, this information is extremely valuable to an attacker wanting to exploit a privileged process without brute forcing library load addresses.
This vulnerability only applies to attackers with local access; but this is not an unreasonable requirement. Many web hosting companies give local shell access or allow PHP; either of these can be used to remotely fetch a copy of libc. Due to the nature of the dynamic linker and sane security design, the dynamic linker is exactly as privileged as the process it is starting; therefor, even the most stringent mandatory access policies on systems such as SELinux, grsecurity, or AppArmor cannot prevent this attack.
Besides avoiding prelinking, there is one other way to prevent this information leak from being exploited. All processes linked to a prelinked library need access to the library file and load that library at the same address; the point of exposure is the use of the same copy of the library. In order to prevent information leaking, then, you must have separate copy of each library common between any two programs you don't want to leak information about each other. This can be done with Xen, chroot jails, UML, or simply isolated machines, as long as the directory hierarchies are individually prelinked with prelink randomization. Each system will have a different set of addresses from every other system in this scheme. This of course requires more hardware, more disk space, more management, more memory, and more work.
The direct implications of this information leak depend on your exact security concerns. A web hosting company, for example, may not want to run prelink on its servers, given the risk of effectively losing the benefit of address space randomization. A home desktop, on the other hand, may only have to worry about a trojan using the information leak to stage an attack on a system service such as cups or dbus—and should probably worry about /proc/PID/maps first. While these are both essentially the concern of an attacker with local access, the likelihood of attack and the value of potential damages are different.
The prelink tool gives a useful decrease in program load time, and can help users reach their desktop and the programs they need to run more quickly. It does however have some unfortunate repercussions that must be examined, especially in security-sensitive environments relying on address space randomization.
New vulnerabilities
acroread: unspecified security problems
| Package(s): | acroread | CVE #(s): | CVE-2006-3093 | ||||
| Created: | July 4, 2006 | Updated: | July 5, 2006 | ||||
| Description: | Various unspecified security problems have been fixed in Acrobat Reader version 7.0.8. Adobe does not provide detailed information about the nature of the security problems. Therefore, it is necessary to assume that remote code execution is possible. | ||||||
| Alerts: |
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kernel: denial of service
| Package(s): | kernel | CVE #(s): | CVE-2006-2934 | ||||||||||||
| Created: | July 5, 2006 | Updated: | July 7, 2006 | ||||||||||||
| Description: | The netfilter SCTP connection tracking code can crash when faced with a "packet without chunks." This vulnerability was fixed in the 2.6.17.3 kernel release. | ||||||||||||||
| Alerts: |
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kiax: arbitrary code execution
| Package(s): | kiax | CVE #(s): | CVE-2006-2923 | ||||
| Created: | June 30, 2006 | Updated: | July 5, 2006 | ||||
| Description: | The iax_net_read function in the iaxclient library fails to properly handle IAX2 packets with truncated full frames or mini-frames. These frames are detected in a length check but processed anyway, leading to buffer overflows. | ||||||
| Alerts: |
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openoffice.org: several vulnerabilities
| Package(s): | openoffice.org | CVE #(s): | CVE-2006-2198 CVE-2006-2199 CVE-2006-3117 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Created: | June 30, 2006 | Updated: | January 4, 2007 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Description: | Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in OpenOffice.org, a free
office suite.
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| Alerts: |
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opera: integer overflow and SSL spoof
| Package(s): | opera | CVE #(s): | CVE-2006-3198 CVE-2006-3331 | ||||
| Created: | July 3, 2006 | Updated: | July 5, 2006 | ||||
| Description: | Opera before version 9.0 has an integer overflow vulnerability due to the improper handling of JPEG files. Also Opera did not reset the SSL security bar after displaying a download dialog from an SSL-enabled website, which could allow remote attackers to spoof a trusted SSL certificate from an untrusted website and facilitate phishing attacks. | ||||||
| Alerts: |
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tikiwiki: multiple vulnerabilities
| Package(s): | tikiwiki | CVE #(s): | CVE-2006-3048 CVE-2006-3047 | ||||
| Created: | June 29, 2006 | Updated: | July 5, 2006 | ||||
| Description: | The Tikiwiki content management system has an SQL injection vulnerability due to insufficient input sanitization. An attacker may be able to execute arbitrary SQL statements or inject arbitrary scripts into the user's browser. | ||||||
| Alerts: |
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Page editor: Jonathan Corbet
Kernel development
Brief items
Kernel release status
The current stable 2.6 kernel is 2.6.17.3, released on June 30. It was a single-fix release for a denial of service vulnerability in the netfilter SCTP connection tracking code. One day earlier, 2.6.17.2 had been released with a relatively large set of important fixes. The SCTP fix can also be found in 2.6.16.23.The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.18-rc1, released by Linus on July 5. A summary of changes can be found in a separate article below. Also available are the short-form changelog (too bulky to be included with Linus's announcement) and the long-form changelog.
The current -mm tree is 2.6.17-mm6. Recent changes to -mm include some extensions to the read-copy-update API, some "massive" CPU scheduler cleanup work, the removal of a number of old (OSS) sound drivers, and a set of patches shrinking the inode structure. A great many patches have been removed from -mm as they have found their way into 2.6.18-rc1.
Kernel development news
Quote of the week
So in order to avoid a lot of blind git users, please apply this patch.
Looking forward to 2.6.18
Your editor, having returned from an all-too-short vacation, was faced with the prospect of looking over the 4500 (and counting) patches merged for the 2.6.18-rc1 release. Much of what has been merged is the usual set of fixes and updates, but some more user and developer-visible patches have gone in as well. The user-visible patches include:
- The new core time system has finally found its way into the mainline;
it was covered here in
January, 2005, but has evolved considerably since then.
- New device drivers for SMSC LAN911x Ethernet chipsets,
ZyDAS ZD1211-based wireless LAN adapters,
Myricom Myri-10G interfaces, CS553x NAND flash controllers,
Amstrad E3 Delta flash controllers, Abit uGuru hardware monitoring
chips, NS LM70 temperature sensors, a number of Echoaudio sound cards,
and more.
- Generic support for hardware random number generators has been added,
along with drivers for a long list of generators.
- The Philips Webcam driver has seen a massive update which adds image
decompression support (without legal issues this time), support for a
number of new devices, and many improvements.
- A large set of NFS patches has been merged, adding, among other
things, direct I/O support.
- A netlink interface for networking bridging management.
- A netfilter connection tracking helper for the SIP protocol.
- The TCP Low
Priority, TCP Compound, and TCP Veno
congestion control algorithms.
- A new mechanism for attaching SELinux labels to network packets.
There is also a new set of hooks allowing SELinux to regulate the
kernel key management subsystem.
- Extended attribute support in the JFFS2 filesystem.
- A number of kernel include files have been cleaned up to make it
easier to include them into user-space applications.
- PCI devices now export an "enable" attribute via sysfs. The main
purpose for the new attribute is to allow the X server to enable and
disable devices without doing direct I/O memory access.
- The swapless page migration
patches have been merged, easing the movement of pages between
NUMA nodes. There is also a new move_pages() system call
which can be used to determine where pages reside and possibly move
them to a new node.
- The TCP segmentation offload code has been updated and improved.
There is a new "generic segmentation offload" layer which can emulate
TSO in software; evidently this approach yields some of the
performance benefits of TSO on hardware which does not support
segmentation offloading.
- The default disk I/O scheduler is now the "completely fair queueing"
(CFQ) scheduler.
- A massive set of serial ATA
changes has been merged, including a new error handler, rewritten
programmed I/O support, native command queueing (NCQ) support (which
should improve performance considerably), and hotplug support.
- Priority-inheriting
futexes have been merged into the mainline.
- SMPnice, a set of scheduler heuristic changes meant to improve handling of low-priority processes on SMP systems, has been merged.
Internal API changes visible to kernel developers include:
- The generic IRQ layer
has been merged. The SA_* flags to request_irq()
have been renamed; the new prefix is IRQF_. A long series of patches
has converted in-tree drivers over to the new names; The old names
are scheduled for removal in January, 2007.
- 64-bit resources are now
supported. This change affects a number of users of the resource
management API.
- The kernel lock
validator has gone in, along with a number of fixes for potential
deadlocks found by the validator.
- At long last, the devfs subsystem has been removed.
- An API and support for
the Intel I/OAT DMA engine.
- The skb_linearize() function has been reworked, and no longer
has a GFP flags argument. There is also a new
skb_linearize_cow() function which ensures that the resulting
SKB is writable.
- Network drivers should no longer manipulate the xmit_lock
spinlock in the net_device structure; instead, the following
new functions should be used:
int netif_tx_lock(struct net_device *dev); int netif_tx_lock_bh(struct net_device *dev); void netif_tx_unlock(struct net_device *dev); void netif_tx_unlock_bh(struct net_device *dev); int netif_tx_trylock(struct net_device *dev); - The long-deprecated inter_module API has finally been removed
altogether.
- A new kernel API providing access to the "inotify" functionality has
been added.
- The old scsi_request infrastructure has been removed, since
there are no longer any in-tree drivers which use it.
- The include file <linux/usb_input.h> is now
<linux/usb/input.h>.
- The VFS get_sb() filesystem method has a new prototype:
int (*get_sb)(struct file_system_type fstype, int flags, const char *dev_name, void *data, struct vfsmount *mnt);The mnt parameter is new; it allows the filesystem to receive a pointer to the target mount point structure. The mount point should be associated with the superblock in the get_sb() method with a call to:
int simple_set_mnt(struct vfsmount *mnt, struct super_block *sb);The return value of get_sb() has also been changed to an int error status. The various get_sb_*() convenience functions have had the same changes applied. The purpose of all this work is to allow NFS to share superblocks across mount points.
- The statfs() superblock operation has a new prototype:
int (*statfs)(struct dentry *dentry, struct kstatfs *stats);The old struct super_block pointer is now a dentry pointer instead.
- Some functions have been added to make it easy for kernel code to
allocate a buffer with vmalloc() and map it into user space.
They are:
void *vmalloc_user(unsigned long size); void *vmalloc_32_user(unsigned long size); int remap_vmalloc_range(struct vm_area_struct *vma, void *addr, unsigned long pgoff);The first two functions are a form of vmalloc() which obtain memory intended to be mapped into user space; among other things, they zero the entire range to avoid leaking data. vmalloc_32_user() allocates low memory only. A call to remap_vmalloc_range() will complete the job; it will refuse, however, to remap memory which has not been allocated with one of the two functions above.
- The read-copy-update API is now accessible only to GPL-licensed
modules. The deprecated function synchronize_kernel() has
also been removed.
- There is a new strstrip() library function which removes
leading and trailing white space from a string.
- A new WARN_ON_ONCE macro will test a condition and complain
if that condition evaluates true - but only once per boot.
- A number of crypto API changes have been merged, the biggest being a
change to most algorithm-specific functions to take a pointer to the
crypto_tfm structure, rather than the old "context" pointer.
This change was necessary to support parameterized algorithms.
- There is a new make target "headers_install". Its purpose is to install a set of kernel headers useful for libraries and user-space tools. A limited set of headers is installed, and those headers are sanitized on their way to the destination directory. It is hoped that distributors will use this mechanism to set up kernel headers for inclusion from user space in the future.
As of this writing, the 2.6.18 merge window has closed, so there probably will not be a whole lot of additions to the above list.
Time for ext4
A few weeks ago, this page looked at possible additions to the ext3 filesystem and the question of whether the time had come to freeze ext3 and put new features into a new ext4 filesystem again. The ext2/3 filesystem developers have now responded to that discussion with a clear answer: they will be moving on to ext4.More specifically, a new filesystem will be created under fs/ext4 in the kernel source. Said filesystem will register itself as "ext3dev," in an attempt to make it crystal clear that it is a development filesystem, not suitable for the storage of data which one actually wishes to keep. New feature work - especially changes which change on-disk formats and prevent interoperation with current ext3 implementations - will go into this new filesystem, while ext3 will continue to receive bug fixes and some safe improvements. Throughout this process, the new filesystem will retain its ability to work with the current ext3 format.
Sometime in the future, ext3dev will be declared stable and renamed "ext4." Once the last bugs have been shaken out, this filesystem will lose its "experimental" designation and users will be encouraged to upgrade. Since support for ext3 formats will be there, this upgrade should be an easy process, with no backup-and-restore step or downtime required. Further in the future, the ext3 code may be removed and ext4 would transparently handle ext3 filesystems as well.
There seems to be little opposition to this approach, so it would appear that things will happen this way. Since the addition of a new, experimental filesystem carries little regression risk, the creation of ext4 and the addition of some new features (extents, for example) could yet happen for 2.6.18.
The 2006 Linux File Systems Workshop
The Linux file systems community met in Portland in June 2006 to discuss the next 5 years of file system development in Linux. Organized by Val Henson, Zach Brown, and Arjan van de Ven, and sponsored by Intel, Google, Oracle, the Linux File Systems Workshop brought together thirteen Linux file systems developers and experts to share data and brainstorm for three days. Our goal was to discuss the direction of Linux file systems development during the next 5 years, with a focus on disruptive technologies rather than incremental improvements. Our goal was not to design one new file system to rule them all, but to come up with several useful new file system architecture ideas (which may or may not reuse existing file system code). To stay focused, we explicitly ruled out discussion of the design of distributed or clustered file systems, with the exception of how they impact local file system design. We came out of the workshop with broad agreement on the problems facing Linux file systems, several exciting file system architecture ideas, and a commitment to working together on the next generation of Linux file systems.
The Problem
Why do we need a Linux file systems workshop, when all seems well in Linux file systems land? Disks purr gently along, larger and fatter than ever before, but still essentially the same. I/O errors are an endangered species, more rumor than fact, and easily corrected with a simple fsck. The "df" command returns a comforting 50% free on most of your file systems. You chuckle gently as you read old file system man pages with directions for tuning inode/block ratios. Sure, that 32-bit file system size limit is looming somewhere over the horizon, but a quick patch to change the size of your block pointers is all you need and you'll be back in business again. After all, file systems are a solved problem, right? Right?If computer hardware never changed, we kernel developers would have nothing better to do than argue about the optimal scheduling algorithm and flame each others' coding style. Unfortunately, hardware has this terrible habit of changing frequently, drastically, and worst of all, exponentially. File systems are especially vulnerable to changes in hardware because of their long-lived nature. Much of operating systems software can be changed at will given a simple system reboot. But file systems - and their on-disk data layouts - live on and on.
What has changed in hardware that affects file systems? Let's start with some simple, unavoidable facts about the way disks are evolving. Everyone knows that disk capacity is growing exponentially, doubling every 9-18 months. But what about disk bandwidth and seek time? At the last Storage Networking World conference, Seagate presented some details of their hard disk road map for the next 7 years (see page 16 of the slides [PDF]). Their predictions for 3.5 inch hard disks are summarized in the following table.
Parameter 2006 2009 2013 Improvement Capacity (GB) 500 2000 8000 16x Bandwidth (Mb/s) 1000 2000 5000 5x Read seek time (ms) 8 7.2 6.5 1.2x
In summary, over the next 7 years, disk capacity will increase by 16 times, while disk bandwidth will increase only 5 times, and seek time will barely budge! Today it takes a theoretical minimum 4,000 seconds, or about 1 hour to read an entire disk sequentially (in reality, it's longer due to a variety of factors). In 2013, it will take a minimum of 12,800 seconds, or about 3.5 hours, to read an entire disk - an increase of 3 times. Random I/O workloads are even worse, since seek times are nearly flat. A workload that reads, e.g., 10% of the disk non-sequentially will take much longer on our 8TB 2013-era disk than it did on our 500GB 2006-era disk.
Another interesting change in hardware is the rate of increase in capacity versus the rate of reduction in I/O errors per bit. In order for a disk to have the same overall number of I/O errors, every time capacity doubles, the per-bit I/O error rate must halve. Needless to say, this isn't happening, so I/O errors are actually more common even though the per-bit error rate has dropped.
These are only a few of the changes in disk hardware that will occur over the next decade. What do these changes mean for file systems? First, fsck will take a lot longer in absolute terms, because disk capacity is larger, but disk bandwidth is relatively smaller, and seek time is relatively much larger. Fsck on multi-terabyte file systems today can easily take 2 days, and in the future it will take even longer! Second, the increasing number of I/O errors means that fsck is going to happen a lot more often - and journaling won't help. Existing file systems simply weren't designed with this kind of I/O error frequency in mind.
These problems aren't theoretical - they are already affecting systems that you care about. Recently, the main server for Linux kernel source, kernel.org, suffered file system corruption from a failure at the RAID level. It took over a week for fsck to repair the (ext3) file system, when it would have taken far less time to restore from backup.
The workshop
Now that the stage is set, we'll move on to what happened at the 2006 Workshop. The coverage has been split into the following pages:
- Day 1, devoted mostly to understand
the current state of the art: file system repair, disk errors, lessons
learned from existing file systems, and major filesystem
architectures.
- Days 2 and 3, concerned with the way forward: interesting ideas, near-term needs, and development plans.
Patches and updates
Kernel trees
Architecture-specific
Core kernel code
Development tools
Device drivers
Filesystems and block I/O
Janitorial
Memory management
Networking
Page editor: Jonathan Corbet
Distributions
News and Editorials
Live CDs Part IV: Specialized live CDs
See the previous articles in this series: Part I, Part II and Part III.The last two sets of live CDs each fell into one of two broad categories: desktop replacement or small footprint. Desktop replacement options try to be all things to all people while small footprint CDs are designed for lower end hardware or as the basis for embedded or small system computing.
This time around the set of three live CDs is more specialized, targeting a smaller niche of users. This is the ultimate use of live CDs - filling a special purpose that can't be fulfilled easily by more general purpose solutions. While the niche may be smaller, it doesn't mean the target audience is small. For example, with a games CD your audience could be quite large.
Games KNOPPIX
This special purpose CD is simply a remastered KNOPPIX LiveCD. Games KNOPPIX adds an extra set of games to the base KNOPPIX collection. It doesn't appear to complain about a lack of special purpose hardware and most of the games worked out of the box even though the test hardware did not support 3D acceleration.I tried a number of the games, though in general I'm not much of a game player. The complete list of games is on the web site. Enigma has great graphics and an interesting Breakout-like concept. There are both full screen and windowed games, text and graphical games and arcade and 3D games. There are also demos of some non-GPL games, such as Marble Blast Gold, Mutant Storm and Space Tripper but most of the games are freely available versions.
GLTron and UFO were the only disappointments but that should have been expected since no hardware acceleration was available for the OpenGL based games.
The web site is light on useful information other than providing a list of the games provided. Remastering this CD is not covered (unless you follow the outlines for remastering a KNOPPIX CD) and at least one game requires you to get permission from the author to do a remaster if the CD will be sold commercially.
As an end user I'd like to see a CD like this one that pulls the unnecessary applications from KNOPPIX and adds a front end that lets me choose the games through a nice UI instead of a buried desktop menu.
| Cleanliness: | 7 |
| Originality: | 6 |
| On Target: | 5 |
| Extensibility: | 1 |
Ultimate Boot CD
The Ultimate Boot CD boots into a text based window of options, all accessible via the function and numeric keys on the keyboard. Each option boots the kernel a different way and runs a variety of tests, including tests against the CPU, memory, hard disk and peripherals.Tests and tools include CPU and memory tests, partition management, CPU and graphics benchmarks, boot disks for recovery operations and system identification tools. Not all of the tools and tests run under Linux so this CD isn't a true Linux only solution. Tests like memtest86 run under DOS so they can get full control of the CPU without the context switching and memory management that Linux would need.
Hard disk tests are manufacturer specific. There are tests for Maxtor, Seagate and Samsung drives. Most of the filesystem tools are Windows specific and of little value to managing your Linux partitions. This is true, too, of the antivirus tools.
Multiple boot disks are provided, including the FreeDOS and OpenDOS open source systems as well as Tom's Boot Disk, BasicLinux, RIP and Trinux for Linux users. Each of these can be used for recovery of hard disk based systems that are failing to boot.
The Ultimate Boot CD allows user defined tools to be added. There is a help screen explaining how to get more information on how this can be done, which makes the CD very customizable.
Overall, this CD is well planned and implemented. It isn't flashy and don't expect a desktop environment. But do expect a large number of very useful tools for diagnosing computer hardware.
| Cleanliness: | 9 |
| Originality: | 9 |
| On Target: | 9 |
| Extensibility: | 8 |
KnoppMyth
KnoppMyth, also based on the KNOPPIX live CD, is designed as an easy to use version of MythTV. MythTV is an open source PVR (Personal Video Recorder). The design of MythTV allows users to have a separate backend server to record and manage videos, music, pictures and other features while using a remote frontend system to access the server. What KnoppMyth does is provide either a combined backend/frontend configuration for standalone use or allow a frontend system to connect to an existing backend server.The live CD boots into a text based main menu where options include running the live CD as a frontend system or installing the live CD to a disk. I selected running the frontend only. After configuring the MythTV database access information and telling the system to use DHCP, the KnoppMyth CD booted directly into the MythTV frontend menus. MythTV is a graphical application running under the X Window System. KnoppMyth did see the Via graphics hardware at boot time and loaded the Via kernel and X video drivers.
An extra menu option not found on the stock MythTV distributions is available from the main menu and is titled "KnoppMyth". This allows the user to backup their configuration, say to an NFS mounted partition or burned to a DVD. Other than that the user interface for the KnoppMyth frontend is just like the stock MythTV distribution. Unfortunately, I was running an older version of the backend MythTV server on the test network. The older server used protocol version 15 while the frontend used 26. So the backend and frontend could not communicate and no further tests could be run.
KnoppMyth is exactly what it is intended to be: an easy to use MythTV system based on a live CD. The menu interface is much simpler to use than a standard desktop which makes this an ideal consumer electronics solution. But the incompatibility with older MythTV backends is a problem. There is nothing on the web site about this unfortunately.
The system loads what looks like every possible video display kernel driver along with the appropriate Via kernel and X drivers. Had I been able to connect to the backend server, video display should have benefited from the hardware MPEG decoding available in the test hardware. Like KNOPPIX, KnoppMyth uses the XFree86 distribution instead of the newer X.org distribution.
The CD is meant as an end user distribution and not intended as a customizable solution. Therefore no information is provided on the web site on how to extend the features of this live CD.
| Cleanliness: | 9 |
| Originality: | 9 |
| On Target: | 9 |
| Extensibility: | 0 |
Summary
Over the past 4 articles you've seen a variety of ways that a live CD can be used. While there are literally hundreds of freely available live CDs, the choice of which to use is completely personal. Desktop versions abound, but niche solutions are also available to help you with whatever project you have in mind.For developers, understanding how a live CD is put together is the first step in understanding some of the issues involved with small system computing. If you need to squeeze a kernel and root filesystem down to fit on a storage limited hand held, then understanding how live CDs make use of SquashFS and UnionFS will get you started. From there, there is no end to where you can go.
New Releases
2X releases new version of free PXES Linux thin client
2X has announced an upgrade and new name for its PXES Linux thin client: 2X ThinClientServer PXES edition 3.0. This edition boasts a completely new architecture, which includes a server component allowing for central management of the connection settings and the thin client OS.Announcing Bluewhite64 Linux pre-11.0-beta
The Bluewhite64 Linux Project has announced the release of Bluewhite64 Linux pre-11.0-beta. "Bluewhite64 uses the 2.6.16.22 kernel bringing you advanced performance features such as the ReiserFS journaling filesystem, ext2, ext3, IBM's JFS, and SGI's XFS filesystems, SCSI, RAID, SATA controllers support and kernel support for X DRI (the Direct Rendering Interface) that brings high-speed hardware accelerated 3D graphics to Linux."
Xbox Linux distro achieves v5.0 release (DesktopLinux)
DesktopLinux takes a look at Gentoox. "The UK-based project team developing Gentoox, a Gentoo-based Linux operating system for the Xbox featuring Linux kernel 2.4.32 and the KDE desktop, announced its latest release on July 5, Gentoox Home v5.0. It is the team's first new release since v4.0 in June 2005."
Distribution News
Debian news
Raphael Hertzog covers the status of the python policy transition. "I know some maintainers have decided to wait before converting their packages to the new Python policy since the Python infrastructure has been evolving at fast pace before the transition announce and even a few days after. This is now over, the infrastructure is in place and will even move to testing RSN. Once that is done the new python-defaults will be uploaded (hopefully by the end of this week) and will break packages not yet updated."
Steve McIntyre provides some Bits from the 2IC, with a look at Google Summer of Code projects, the irc.debian.org move, Debconf 6 in Mexico, a new Sarge release, and several other topics.
Fedora considering default font switch
The Fedora Project is thinking about switching to the DejaVu font family as the default font in Fedora Core. DejaVu is a derivative of the popular Bitstream Vera family, which has not seen any updates since 2003; a number of distributions are already using it. The Fedora developers are looking for feedback on the fonts and the proposed change. This is an opportunity for Fedora users to help shape the appearance of future Fedora releases, with no technical skills required.More Fedora news
The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project has been announced and is available for Fedora Core 5. "What's that? You say you've never heard of the Cooperative Bug Isolation Project (CBI)? Get with it! CBI is an ongoing, award-winning research effort exploring ways to find bugs and improve the quality of open source software using lightweight instrumentation, automated feedback, and sophisticated machine learning algorithms... CBI needs *you*! The more data we get, the more bugs we can find!"
Maintenance of Fedora Core 4 will transfer to Fedora Legacy with the release of Fedora Core 6 test 2, currently scheduled for July 19, 2006.
Ubuntu Makes Opera 9 available for easy download and installation
After the launch of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, Canonical has announced the availability of Opera 9 for Ubuntu. With just a few clicks of the mouse, all Ubuntu users can download and install the latest version of the Opera browser.
Distribution Newsletters
Debian Weekly News
The July 4 issue of the Debian Weekly News is out; with this issue, DWN editor Martin 'Joey' Schulze celebrates five years on the job. Other topics include the Python policy transition, Flash support, and more.Fedora Weekly News Issue 52
This week the Fedora Weekly News covers the Open Video Contest which is open now, Announcing Fedora Core 6 Test 1 (5.90), A Fresh Look for Fedora Core 6, Phoronix: Fedora Core 6 Preview, FC6T1 mostly running on MacTel Mini, Yum Extender Update, the Ohio LinuxFest 2006 schedule announced, Red Hat Fedora 5 Unleashed Book Giveaway, and several other topics.Fedora Weekly News Issue 53
This edition of the Fedora Weekly News covers Fedora Core 4 Status Update, Red Hat CEO Says Linux Could Become U.S. Standard, Request for testing: DejaVu 2.7 font family, Mailing List for K-12 Open Source Questions, DesktopLinux: Fedora Core 6 Test 1 beckons, OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 Is Here, QEMU a Virtualization System for Open Source World, Red Hat Fedora 5 Unleashed Book Giveaway Winner, and several other topics.Gentoo Weekly Newsletter
The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for July 3, 2006 covers modular X.Org now marked as stable, new KBase project, Java Upgrades, Spanish Translators, and much more.Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter - Issue #5
This edition of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter covers Edgy release schedule, Dapper backports is open for business, Ubuntu marketing team gearing up, Pictures from UDS Paris (and personal ramblings), Artist in Chief appointments, Weekly development meeting review, Ubuntu Dapper installfest in Taiwan, and much more.DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 158
The DistroWatch Weekly for July 3, 2006 is out. "Last week was a slow one - among the major distributions, only Novell provided some excitement with the first public development release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 10. Several smaller distributions also continued their work - the SME Server project has finally released its long-awaited version 7.0, while a new and excellent live CD edition of Zenwalk Linux also made its first appearance last week. In other news, Smart for SUSE Linux and DesktopBSD's new package management tool are the focus of the news section, while the first look part of DistroWatch Weekly brings a short review of Frenzy 1.0, an excellent live CD based on FreeBSD. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the June 2006 DistroWatch donation of US$500.00 has been awarded to Gentoo Foundation."
Package updates
Fedora updates
Updates for Fedora Core 5: nfs-utils-lib (latest upstream version), xorg-x11-xtrans-devel (updates various components of the X Window System), libX11 (updates various components of the X Window System), xorg-x11-server (updates various components of the X Window System), xorg-x11-xdm (updates various components of the X Window System), httpd (update to 2.2.2), xorg-x11-xfs (updates various components of the X Window System), xorg-x11-xinit (updates various components of the X Window System), xorg-x11-apps (updates various components of the X Window System), libgssapi (update to 0.9), xorg-x11-server (bug fix), kasumi (new upstream release), nfs-utils (update to 1.0.8), nfs-utils (fixes broken upgrade path), libvirt (needed for new xen release), apr-util (update to 1.2.7), ckermit (bug fix), eclipse-changelog (update to version 2.1.0), qt (bug fixes), xorg-x11-server (bug fix), kexec-tools (avoid crash with kickstart kernel).Updates for Fedora Core 4: lvm2 (update to support 2.6.16 kernel), device-mapper (update to support 2.6.16 kernel).
rPath updates
Updates for rPath Linux 1: hplip, PyQt, sip (improved HP printer support), pcmcia-cs (include the scsi_info, ftl_check, and ftl_format utilities), hal, hal-gnome (enable the gnome-volume-manager program to show newly-mounted volumes), mutt (make system mailboxes default to read-write).Slackware Changelog Notice
There were only a few updates to Slackware this week. Click below for the short changelog entry.
Newsletters and articles of interest
Installing a firewall on Ubuntu (Linux.com)
Linux.com covers the process of installing a firewall on Ubuntu. "We'll look at two packages that configure firewalls. The first is Lokkit, an application that walks you through a few simple steps and configures a basic firewall for you. Lokkit is dead easy to use, and requires very little understanding of firewalls to set up, but it provides few options, and it's not a good choice if you want to set up a complex firewall. By contrast, Guarddog, a flexible GUI firewall configuration program, is much more complex than Lokkit. Choose Guarddog only if you know what you're doing."
Tip of the Trade: Pyramid Linux (ServerWatch)
ServerWatch takes a quick look at Pyramid Linux. "Pyramid Linux is descended from the wonderful Pebble Linux, which is based on Debian Woody. Pyramid comes with a newer kernel, 2.6.16, the Lighttpd Web server with SSL and PHP support, udev and sysfs, HostAP, a nice Web-based management console, and a bag of other excellent goodies."
PC-BSD works for community center (NewsForge)
Henry Gillow-Wiles puts PC-BSD to work in a community center. "As the IT director for a non-profit community center, I face several challenges, the most pressing being the lack of money. This means our lab is filled with donated older equipment with limited capabilities. Given this state of affairs, I am always on the lookout for free, easy-to-use open source software. I chose PC-BSD as our standard operating system because of its exemplary performance on older equipment."
Rumored death of FreeDOS greatly exaggerated (NewsForge)
NewsForge takes a look at the FreeDOS project. "Jim Hall, creator of the open source MS-DOS operating system project FreeDOS, says that while work on the project may have slowed recently, he isn't ready to throw in the towel just yet. In fact, Hall says he hopes to see version 1.0 released as soon as the end of the month."
Installing Ubuntu training videos (Linux.com)
Linux.com has made some training videos that show how to download and install Ubuntu Linux. "About the videos: They're in AVI format, encoded with the free XviD codec, compatible with media players available for almost all popular desktop PC operating systems. If -- and this is unlikely -- your computer does not have the XviD codec installed, you can get it here or through your favorite free operating system's software repository."
Distribution reviews
A first look at MEPIS's new Ubuntu-based Linux (DesktopLinux)
DesktopLinux reviews a release candidate of SimplyMEPIS 6.2. "SimplyMEPIS 6 is built on the 2.6.15 Linux kernel, with recent security patches. Unlike Ubuntu, which uses GNOME for its default desktop, MEPIS uses KDE 3.5.3. For me, KDE continues to be the better choice of the two."
Watching the Evolution of Arch Linux (OSNews)
OSNews reviews Arch Linux. "Make no mistake. Arch has seen some cool new additions lately: a special mkinitrd utility, network profiles, ACPI support, NetworkManager in the "Testing" tree and more. But what really stands out compared to the user experience of the 1-2 years ago is the package stability. Fewer buggy packages make it to -Current or -Extra trees these days and the ones that do are quickly fixed by the very helpful hackers in the Bugzilla."
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol
Development
The eSpeak Speech Synthesizer
Your author has been interested in computer speech synthesis since the late 1970s, when he interfaced a Votrax SC-01A speech synthesizer chip to his Imsai 8080 computer with some wire-wrap wire. News of the recently created eSpeak project naturally piqued his long-time interest in speech synthesis.eSpeak is a compact phoneme-based speech synthesis system that is available under version 2 of the Gnu General Public license.
eSpeak is a much simpler system than Festival, a popular speech synthesis project from the University of Edinburgh's Centre for Speech Technology Research. Unfortunately, the Festival project has been stuck at version 1.95 (2.0 beta) for the last two years.
The installation and usage document explains how to set up the software. Installation is trivial, if somewhat different than for most applications. It involves copying the binary speak file to an executable directory and moving a library directory to /usr/share. The combined executable and library files weigh in at under 500 Kb, making it suitable for use in embedded systems. Source code for eSpeak is available for those who wish to compile the software locally.
Using the software is trivial, typing "speak 'what you want to say'" causes the desired speech to be rendered and output to the speaker. Speaking the contents of a file can be done with the command: speak -f filename. eSpeak can also read its input from stdin, allowing it to be used with other applications. There are currently nineteen English phoneme sets available which provide a variety of British accents, male/female voices and tonal characteristics. German and Esperanto phoneme sets are also available. Other languages can also be supported, but the work has not yet been done.
eSpeak can output directly to the sound driver, it can also create .wav files, and send the audio to stdout. The -x option causes the program to output phoneme mnemonics to the screen.
The speech quality is quite mechanical, but is fairly easy to understand. It is not as refined as the output of Festival, but should suffice for many applications. As with most speech synthesis applications, mispronunciation is fairly common, English pronunciation rules involve many special exceptions and ambiguities, accurate text to speech conversion is a non-trivial software task.
The most recent release of eSpeak is version 1.10, released on April 29, 2006. The change log file indicates recent work on UTF-8 encoding, support for embedded pitch and amplitude modulation, improvements to numerical pronunciations, several new command line capabilities and more.
If you need a decent open-source speech synthesis application for your latest project, or simply want to play with some interesting software, give eSpeak a try.
System Applications
Database Software
GLScube: Relational, Semantic Storage for Linux
Amr Ramadan has announced the GLScube semantic storage project. "GLS³ is an open source semantic storage solution for GNU/Linux that indexes your data, extracts from it metadata and relevant information, allows you to organize it using queries and tags, provides shared schemas between applications through an API, a pseudo file system for backward compatibility, a web interface, As-You-Type searching and more."
Firebird 2.00 Release Candidate 3 announced
Version 2.00 Release Candidate 3 of the Firebird DBMS has been announced. "Firebird 2 contains a large number of new features, including derived tables, support for Execute Block, increased table sizes, new improved index code (the 252-byte index length limit is no longer applicable), expression indices, numerous optimiser improvements, enhanced security features, support for on-line incremental backups, new international language support, along with numerous other improvements and bug fixes."
Embedded Systems
BusyBox 1.2.0 released
Version 1.2.0 of BusyBox, a collection of command line utilities for embedded systems, is out. "The -devel branch has been stabilized and the result is Busybox 1.2.0. Lots of stuff changed, I need to work up a decent changelog over the weekend."
LDAP Software
LAT 1.1.4 released
Version 1.1.4 of LAT, the LDAP Administration Tool, is out with new capabilities and bug fixes.
Libraries
Cairo release 1.2.0 now available
Version 1.2.0 of the Cairo 2D graphics vector library has been announced. "We are very pleased to announce this release, the first major update to cairo since the original 1.0 release 10 months ago. Compared to cairo 1.0, the 1.2 release doubles the number of supported backends, adding PDF, PostScript, and SVG backends to the previous xlib, win32 and image backends."
Networking Tools
Announcing the NDSAD project
Konstantin Emelyanov has sent us a notice about a new network traffic collector project called NDSAD. "The NetUP ndsad utility captures IP-traffic from network interfaces and export NetFlow v.5. Data is gathered from libpcap library on Unix and from winpcap on Windows. Also you are able to use tee/divert sockets on FreeBSD and ULOG on Linux for data source."
Desktop Applications
Audio Applications
Aqualung 0.9 beta 5 released
Version 0.9 beta 5 of Aqualung, a music player, is available with many new capabilities. "This is a new milestone release after 17 months of silent development. Large parts of the program have been rewritten, refactored, fixed, etc. A multitude of new features have been added to the software, which now weighs into Open Source with about 30,000 lines of GPL'ed source code, all written by a handful of free-time developers (no, you won't need your whole hand)."
aubio 0.3.1 is out
Version 0.3.1 of aubio, a library for audio labeling, is out with bug fixes.The future of freedb
The freedb audio CD database project is falling apart: "freedb is not able to operate without Joerg and Ari. There are other - hopefully free - projects that will take over freedbs heritage in a better way and stay free. freedbs future did not seem to be kept free regarding the lastest developments, so I tried to steer against this as I felt it more important to stay free instead of getting fancy web 2.0 features. But unfortunately Joerg and Ari (the main doers behind freedb) disagreed with me and decided that they want to go another direction." If anyone wants to take over the project and domain name, the project will be allowed to continue. (Thanks to Richard Palmer.)
Desktop Environments
GNOME Software Announcements
The following new GNOME software has been announced this week:- cairomm snapshot 1.1.10 (new features, documentation work and build fixes)
- GLib 2.12 (new features and bug fixes)
- gnome-games 2.14.2.1 (bug fix)
- Gossip 0.12 (new features and bug fixes)
- GTK+ 2.8.20 (bug fixes)
- GTK+ 2.10 (new features and bug fixes)
- gtkmm 2.9.7 (new features and documentation work)
- Nautilus-Sendto 0.6 and 0.7 (new features and bug fixes)
KDE Software Announcements
The following new KDE software has been announced this week:- Amarok 1.4.1 (new features)
- ScreenKast (initial release)
KDE Commit-Digest for 2nd July 2006 (KDE.News)
The July 2, 2006 edition of the KDE Commit-Digest has been announced. "In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: PDF hyperlink and file editing support in KViewShell. DVI format support in Okular. Continued progress in "WorKflow", "GMail-style conversation view for KMail" and "KDevelop-teamwork" Summer Of Code projects. BsFilter and DSpam tools are now supported in the KMail anti-spam wizard. LastFM stream support becomes more robust and polished, alongside other notable development work in Amarok. Aesthetic modifications made in Kmplot and Kalzium. KDE 4 changes: Work begins on the "Cokoon" widget style, and KSpell2 is renamed "Sonnet" in preparation for some interesting development work."
Electronics
asco 0.4.3 announced
Version 0.4.3 of asco, a SPICE circuit optimizer, has been announced. "Changes include support for the Qucs simulator, better Ctrl-C handling, native win32 compilation, autotools support and bug fixes.Kicad 2006-06-26 released
Version 2006-06-26 of Kicad, a printed circuit CAD application, is out. Changes include translation work, gcc 4.1 compatibility, editable field names, the ability to use URLs to document components, 3D color improvements, new pad editing features, negative printing and delete improvements.
Financial Applications
SQL-Ledger 2.6.15 is out
Version 2.6.15 of SQL-Ledger, a web-based accounting package, is out with several bug fixes.
Games
Cyphesis 0.5.8 Released
Version 0.5.8 of Cyphesis has been announced by the WorldForge game project. "Cyphesis is a small to medium scale server for WorldForge games, with builtin AI. This version includes the demo game Mason which is currently in development. This release is intended for server administrators wishing to run a Mason server and World developers developing new worlds or game systems."
Trip on the Funny Boat - 1.3
Version 1.3 of Trip on the Funny Boat has been announced on the PyGame site. "We got a nice patch from Konstantin Yegupov, so we decided to make a new release with his improvements. Some finer particle effect touches have been added, along with some cannonball-to-animal collision physics, a special super shot and a retro blinking effect when taking damage. Some bugs have also been squashed, which is always nice."
GUI Packages
GTK+ 2.10.0 released (GnomeDesktop)
GnomeDesktop.org looks at the new capabilities of GTK+ 2.10.0. Improvements include: printing support, recent files support, drag-and-drop support in notebooks, new widgets and cell renderers, changes in the filechooser, changes in the tree view widget, changes in the text view and entry widgets, themability improvements and changes to GTK and gdk-pixbuf.Trolltech Releases Qt 4.2 Technology Preview (KDE.News)
KDE.News looks at the new Qt 4.2 technology preview. "The final release of Qt 4.2 is currently scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2006." 4.2 adds a new canvas, SVG support and improved integration with GTK, CUPS and DBus."
Music Applications
LoopDub version 0.2 released
Version 0.2 of LoopDub, a cross-platform application for performing live loop manipulation, is available with a number of new capabilities.MMA Beta 0.22 released
Version 0.22 beta of MMA, the Musical MIDI Accompaniment accompaniment generator is out with the following changes: "Minor (and not-so-minor) bug fixes, added options to GROOVE selections, HARMONYVOLUME setting, FORCEOUT option for keyboard tracks, and some command line fixes."
Office Suites
OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 Is Available
Version 2.0.3 of the OpenOffice.org office suite has been announced. "OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 is now ready for download, three months since the release of 2.0.2. This latest release contains a mixture of new features, bug fixes, and security patches, and demonstrates the OpenOffice.org Community's determination to maintain its position as the world's leading open-source office productivity suite."
OpenOffice.org Newsletter
The June, 2006 edition of the OpenOffice.org Newsletter is online with the latest OO.o office suite news.
Miscellaneous
GCstar, collection manager (GnomeDesktop)
GnomeDesktop.org looks at the personal collection manager GCstar. "Detailed information on each item can be automatically retrieved from the internet and you can store additional data, such as the location or who you've lent it to. You may also search and filter your collection by some criteria."
Sunclock 3.55 released
Stable version 3.55 of Sunclock has been announced. "Sunclock displays a map of the Earth and shows which portion is illuminated by the sun."
Languages and Tools
Caml
Caml Weekly News
The July 4, 2006 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with new Caml language articles.
Lisp
ECL 0.9i released
Version 0.9i of Embeddable Common-Lisp is available. "ECL (Embeddable Common-Lisp) is "an effort to modernize Giuseppe Attardi's ECL (ECoLisp) environment to produce an implementation of the Common-Lisp language which complies to the ANSI X3J13 definition of the language"."
Python
python-dev Summary
The May 16-31, 2006 edition of the python-dev Summary is online with coverage of the python-dev mailing list.
Ruby
Ruby Weekly News
The July 2nd, 2006 edition of the Ruby Weekly News looks at the latest discussions on the ruby-talk mailing list and comp.lang.ruby newsgroup.
Tcl/Tk
Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!
The July 1, 2006 edition of Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! is online with new Tcl/Tk articles and resources.Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!
The July 3, 2006 edition of Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! is online with new Tcl/Tk articles and resources.
Page editor: Forrest Cook
Linux in the news
Recommended Reading
Time for Coders to Get Political? (Linux Journal)
Glyn Moody looks back at a 1999 interview with Richard Stallman to see how times have changed. "RMS may have felt back then that the best way for him to contribute to freedom was to code, or to encourage others to code, rather than trying to change the world directly, but things have moved on: today, Stallman is becoming something of a political activist. I'm not talking about the Free Software Foundation's "Defective by Design" campaign, however entertaining and successful that has been in terms of raising awareness about the threats posed by DRM (Digital Restrictions Management or Digital Rights Mismanagement as Stallman likes to term it). What I have in mind are two recent meetings in France between RMS and highly-placed politicians there."
Patent infringement suit filed against Red Hat (No Lobbyists As Such)
Florian Mueller reports on a new patent suit against Red Hat Inc. "The Patently-O blog reported yesterday that a software company named FireStar has sued Red Hat over an alleged patent infringement. Patently-O also provides the complaint and the patent document, and quotes from Red Hats patent policy. The FireStar suit relates to a piece of software that Red Hat acquired as part of JBoss Inc.s intellectual property. It seems to me that the FireStar patent is quite broad, and if it is upheld, it will affect other companies as well."
Trade Shows and Conferences
Ubuntu Developer Summit Paris: New alliances, new horizons (NewsForge)
Benjamin Mako Hill covers the recent Ubuntu Developer Summit Paris on NewsForge. "Last week, more than 60 Ubuntu developers met in Paris to plan Ubuntu's next release, codenamed Edgy Eft. Officially, the meeting was billed as a developer summit and not a conference. Each day, groups of two to 10 attendees brainstormed, drafted, and advanced specifications in more than 60 sessions in up to 10 parallel tracks. These specifications, which will stabilize in the next week, will then be prioritized and approved by Canonical staff and will serve as the feature goals for the next release."
Success with VistA from the WorldVistA conference (LinuxMedNews)
LinuxMedNews reports on the success of VistA. "This is a report on an excellent talk that I am hearing on the factors of success with VistA. The subject is the seven critical success with Medical Software. Essentially these are the lessons that VistA has learned via hard knocks. This list is partly compiled from those who have succeeded but mostly is the result of those who have failed with VistA."
The Long View of Identity (O'Reilly)
Andy Oram discusses identity issues on O'Reilly. "Who are you online? Your digital identity is a complex bundle of information--not just what you say about yourself, but what other people say about you and how trustworthy they are. O'Reilly editor Andy Oram recently attended the Identity Mashup conference at Harvard Law's Berkman Center and reports on one of the most vital issues of privacy and usability on the internet."
The SCO Problem
Wells' Order Granting in Part IBM's Motion to Limit SCO's Claims (Groklaw)
Groklaw reports on a new order by Judge Brooke Wells which grants IBM's Motion to Limit SCO's Claims. "Here is Judge Brooke Wells's Order as text. 39 pages and 128 footnotes! Why? I can't read the judge's mind, of course, but my best guess is she is indicating to SCO not to bother to appeal this order. And if they do, she has provided her reasons -- with specificity, one might even say, sufficient to uphold her decision. You can follow along with the references on Groklaw's IBM Timeline page, where the docket numbers are provided."
For further reading, Linux-Watch
analyzes the situation:
"This means that the vast majority of SCO's claims against IBM for misusing Unix code in Linux have been thrown out.
"
Companies
Red Hat continues to make big bucks (Linux-Watch)
Linux-Watch reports on the latest financial news from Red Hat, Inc. "The first quarter of Red Hat Inc.'s 2007 fiscal year was a great one. But, because it fell short of analysts' expectations, the company's stock fell in after-hours trading. The total revenue for the quarter, which was reported on June 28, was $84.0 million, an increase of 38 percent from the year ago quarter and 7 percent from the prior quarter. Subscription revenue from RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) was $71.5 million, up 45 percent year-over-year and 7 percent sequentially."
Linux Adoption
Mobile next battleground for Linux (ZDNet)
ZDNet reports on comments by Trolltech's Eirik Chambe-Eng concerning Linux adoption by the mobile phone sector. ""Linux gives manufacturers and OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) complete control," said Chambe-Eng, who also claimed that Windows Mobile and Symbian--Linux's two great competitors in the mobile phone market--come with "agendas attached." "Manufacturers are scared of Microsoft coming in and pushing margins away from the hardware. There are very thin margins in this business, and Symbian and Windows Mobile are typically expensive," he said."
The City of Munich praises Linux at the workplace (heise online)
heise online reports on the move to Linux by the city of Munich. "The City of Munich's LiMux project center is rejecting charges by the Senate administration of Berlin that the migration to free software has gotten stuck before it ever got going. As Project director Peter Hofmann told heise online, "Open Source software at the workplace is a reality in Munich." At the end of May, his department presented the future basis client to the public at in information day. At present, the pilot phase is focusing on a software suite. The approximately 100 pilot users include Mayor Christian Ude and his deputy Christine Strobl."
Belgian government chooses OpenDocument (NewsForge)
NewsForge reports on another step forward for open document standards. "Belgium's Council of Ministers last month approved a proposal that requires federal government departments to use open file formats for exchanging documents. As it stands now, the only accepted standard is the Open Document Format (ODF)."
Legal
Patent jeopardizes IETF syslog standard (NewsForge)
NewsForge covers a new patent threat on the syslog logging protocol. "The Internet Engineering Task Force is working on a proposed standard for the age-old but never standardized syslog protocol, but their efforts may be in jeopardy thanks to a patent application by Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., of Shenzhen, China."
Interviews
Erik Kjær Pedersen (People Behind KDE)
The People Behind KDE have interviewed Erik Kjær Pedersen. Erik does Danish translations. "When did you first hear of KDE? I was on sabbatical at Odense University in Denmark 1997/98. While I was there two students lived in my house and used my computer. It had Win 3.1 on one third of the hard disk and OS/2 on another third, but the last third was empty. They wrote and asked me whether they could install Linux on the empty part, and I said yes. When I came back I tried to log into Linux, and I could see the files in the OS/2 partition. Just for fun I used Latex on one of my Tex-files, and I was very surprised that it worked without any problems. That turned me on to Linux, and shortly thereafter I noticed KDE somehow, I am not completely sure how it happened, but I think Red Hat had KDE as an option then." (Found on KDE.News)
Q&A with Firefox's Blake Ross (SeattlePI)
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has an extended interview with Blake Ross, a founder of the Firefox project. "People expect us to come up with ever-better Spread Firefox campaigns. That's especially difficult for us, because the goal of Firefox has always been just to make things simpler, and making things simpler usually doesn't mean adding grandiose new features and making sure that the next version has something that identifies it as being new, which has kind of been the (Microsoft) Office model to date, every release has to have something new so people know they got their money's worth."
Resources
The Ultimate Do-It-Yourself Linux Box (Linux Journal)
Linux Journal builds the ultimate Linux box starting with the ultimate AMD64 motherboard. "One very important consideration in our choices was, will this work with most Linux distributions "out of the box"? We installed Debian, Ubuntu/Kubuntu, Fedora Core 5, SUSE 10 and Mandriva on our do-it-yourself system. All of these distributions ran without any trouble and without the need for any additional drivers or special driver management. (We did, however, use the proprietary NVIDIA drivers, not out of necessity, but in order to make use of the SLI features of the motherboards.) We also ran Knoppix, MEPIS and Kanotix live CDs without problems."
CLI Magic: Using command history in the bash shell (Linux.com)
Linux.com presents an excerpt from chapter 9 of the Third Edition of A Practical Guide to Red Hat Linux: Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which looks at the bash history mechanism. "The Bourne Again Shell's history mechanism, a feature adapted from the C Shell, maintains a list of recently issued command lines, also called events, providing a quick way to reexecute any of the events in the list. This mechanism also enables you to execute variations of previous commands and to reuse arguments from them."
Thinking about email security (NewsForge)
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier has some thoughts on email security. "For many users, using encryption may seem like overkill, but Michael Lucas, author of PGP & GPG: Email for the Practical Paranoid , says that it's good to have the option whether you have something to hide or not. "It's simply something in my gut that says, 'I want the option to have privacy,' and I think a lot of people feel the same way.""
Managing Many-to-Many Relationships with PL/pgSQL (O'ReillyNet)
David E. Wheeler looks at PL/pgSQL in this O'ReillyNet article. "A common pattern when managing the relationship between object-oriented applications and databases is the many-to-many relationship. Object-relational mappers usually manage these relationships as collections of objects, wherein one class has an accessor that returns a collection of related objects. For example, imagine that you're creating (yet another) blogging application. You want to associate your blog entries with tags. Tags can be used over and over again for different blog entries, and each blog entry can, of course, have more than one tag. In this scenario, the blog entry class might have a method that returns a collection of tag objects."
Linux moves towards unified APIs (IT Week)
IT Week covers the Portland Project's interfaces for GNOME and KDE. "The Portland Project has released a beta version of its programming interfaces for the Gnome and KDE Linux environments. This is designed to boost development of desktop Linux applications by creating common application programming interfaces (APIs) for developers to use."
Killing That Spam With Postgrey And Postfix (HowtoForge)
HowtoForge shows how to set up a greylist spam hurdle. "Greylisting in short means that when someone wants to deliver a mail to your mailserver it will simply reply "Please come back later". That is something all RFC compliant mailservers do and when they do come back the mail is accepted. Most spammers and spam software are not compliant and not patient enough to try again. You will be surprised to see how effective this is. Anyway, follow the links below to really learn about it. There are as always pros and cons so do your homework before you put it on a production server."
Uncovering progress in FOSS-based archeology (NewsForge)
NewsForge looks at free software and archeology. "The discovery of the free software philosophy and development model in archeology is a consequence of several methodology problems that caused what some call the "great crisis" of archeology. According to researcher Benjamin Ducke, "Since the 1990s ... there has been a lot of development on fundamental quantitative methods but no software to put them into practice on a broad scale." However, Ducke continues, today there is much more awareness of what is possible and needed, as well as the notion that free software and formats can play an essential role. Many researchers have realized that proprietary archeology software is a dead end from many points of view, both scientific and economic."
Reviews
What's New in Eclipse 3.2 Java Development Tools (O'ReillyNet)
Ed Burnette reviews the Eclipse 3.2 Java Development Tools on O'Reilly. "The popular Eclipse IDE's latest release, version 3.2, is the cornerstone of an ambitious release of ten Eclipse-branded projects on the same day. But what's in it for you? Ed Burnette takes a look at the new features in Eclipse's Java Development Tools and shows you how they'll make your development much easier."
Set up a Freevo media center (Linux.com)
Linux.com looks at a Freevo setup. "Freevo is like a window manager -- an interface controlled by a remote control or the keyboard -- that provides access to various media. It is written mostly in the Python programming language, which makes it hacking-friendly. Everything you expect to find on a media center platform is present in Freevo; you can listen to music, view pictures, and watch TV and video."
NSpluginwrapper: A cross-architecture browser plugin tool (Linux.com)
Linux.com looks at NSpluginwrapper. "NSpluginwrapper is a cross-architecture tool designed to let Firefox users on AMD64 and PowerPC Linux use i386-only, binary Web browser plugins -- such as those frequently provided by closed source, commercial interests. Following a protracted delay after its initial, binary-only release back in May, NSpluginwrapper is now available with source code."
Miscellaneous
Dick Tracy's New Linux Box? (Slashdot)
Slashdot mentions a new Linux platform, the Eurotech ZYPAD. ""The Zypad is a new arm-wearable computer right out of Futurama. It can run Windows CE or Linux and has a 400 MHz CPU, 64MB Flash memory, 3.5 inch screen. The Zypad leaves the user's hands free it has no keyboard, just a touchscreen and navigation keys. Voice recognition is 'being developed.' It turns on only when you look at it, so it saves power. It has GPS and Bluetooth/WLAN/GSM connectivity."
Page editor: Forrest Cook
Announcements
Non-Commercial announcements
Microsoft to make an open source ODF translator
Microsoft has announced that it has started the "Open XML Translator Project," which "will create tools to build a technical bridge between the Microsoft Office Open XML Formats and the OpenDocument Format (ODF)." The result will be released under the BSD license.
The OpenOffice.org project has sent out a release of its own expressing its pleasure that "Microsoft has bowed to pressure from the marketplace
".
anti-DRM campaign DefectiveByDesign
DefectiveByDesign.org has announced a new petition: "The direct action campaign DefectiveByDesign.org, today called for all technologists to sign the petition calling upon Bono the lead singer of U2, to take a stand against Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). The campaign aims to collect 10,000 signatures, at which point they will seek an audience with Bono, and discuss with him the threats posed by DRM."
Austin Group announces POSIX Revision Draft 1
The POSIX(R) Revision Draft 1 has been announced by the Austin Group. It is available for review and revision until September 1, 2006.5 years of Open Source Voice over IP
Damien Sandras has put together a project history of the Ekiga project (formerly GnomeMeeting). "We celebrate this week the 5th birthday of the Ekiga project. Ekiga is the first Open Source software to bring both Voice over IP/IP Telephony and video conferencing to the desktop, since 2001. It quickly became popular, among others thanks to the compatibility with the Netmeeting software. Today, Ekiga has evolved into a mature and stable product which is not limited to Netmeeting anymore, in terms of compatibility. This was made possible thanks to the addition of another protocol, namely SIP."
ScreenKast and captorials.com
Bram Biesbrouck has announced a new community-enabled video helpdesking project. "It gets down to this: A friend asks you to help solve some computer-related problem. You fire up ScreenKast (see below), record the answer/solution from your screen, add comments, submit your captured tutorial to http://captorials.com and share it with your friend and everyone else."
Women's Summer Outreach Program 2006 Update
Google has announced the selection of six projects for the Women's Summer Outreach Program 2006. "Following on from GNOME's participation in Google's Summer of Code, we've decided to sponsor three projects in a similar fashion to the Summer of Code, but for women only. GNOME had no Summer of Code applications from women, and we think it's time to do something to encourage more women to join our development community."
Commercial announcements
froglogic Announces KDE Edition of GUI Testing Tool Squish
froglogic GmbH has announced the availability of Squish/KDE. Squish/KDE is a special, free edition of the Qt GUI testing tool Squish to create and run tests on applications developed for the K Desktop Environment.Mirus, Linspire and AOpen Introduce $399 Mini Linux PC
Linspire, Inc., partnering with AOpen and Mirus Innovations, has announced the Linspire Mini Koobox PC. "Measuring in at just 6.5 x 6.5 x 2 inches and 3.0 lbs., the basic configuration boasts a brushed matte-platinum case with clear blue plastic accents, slot-in slim CDRW/DVD combo drive with DVD-playing software, integrated Ethernet card, and is based on the Intel 915 chipset. To add to the streamlined aesthetic, ports are located in the back of the unit, including two USB 2.0 ports, one IEEE 1394 port (Firewire), speaker-out, S-video, and mic. The Mini Koobox also has a DVI monitor connector and includes a DVI-to-VGA adapter so that it can be connected to plasma-display or large-format monitors. Inside, the machine checks in with 256 MB DDR2 RAM, Intel Celeron M 370 1.5 Ghz processor, and a 40 GB hard drive."
Resources
Linux Gazette #128
The Linux Gazette for July 2006 is out. Articles include How Fonts Interact with the X Server and X Clients, Creating a Rudimentary Kiosk System using FVWM, A Brief Introduction to VMware Player, Subversion: Installation, Configuration -- Tips and Tricks, Coding a Simple Packet Sniffer, and more.RJS Templates for Rails, Managing Your Boss, and More - New PDFs from O'Reilly
O'Reilly has published several new PDF Guides, including: "RJS Templates for Rails" By Cody Fauser, "bash Quick Reference" by Arnold Robbins, "How to Keep Your Boss from Sinking Your Project" By Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene and "Your Life in Web Apps" by Giles Turnbull.
Contests and Awards
Nominations Open for 2006 Linux Medical News Freedom Award (LinuxMedNews)
LinuxMedNews has announced that nominations are being accepted for the 6th annual Linux Medical News Freedom Award. "Deadline for entries is July 30th, 2006. This is NOT a officially sponsored event of AMIA. Free and open source software isn't 'magic pixie dust' and there are people making significant personal sacrifices as well as doing difficult work to make medicine's free software future a reality. This award is intended to honor the individul or project who has accomplished the most towards the goal of improving medical education and practice through free/open source medical software."
French Atomic Energy Authority's Tera 10 Supercomputer is Confirmed No.1 in Europe
BULL has announced that its Linux-based Tera 10 supercomputer is ranked as the fastest in Europe. "Tera 10 is ranked number one in Europe and number five in the world in the 27th TOP500 listing of the world's supercomputers, published at the International Supercomputer Conference (ISC2006) in Dresden, Germany - Installed in 2005, the supercomputer is made up of 544 NovaScale computing nodes and 58 I/O management and system administration nodes, representing over 4,500 Dual-Core Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 'Montecito' processors".
Education and Certification
Novell announces SUSE learning courseware
Novell, Inc. has announced a collaboration with Thomson Learning involving the creation of new SUSE courseware. "Novell unveiled its "Train the Teacher" series, the industry's first free week-long boot camp for Linux educators. In addition, Novell is the first Linux vendor to partner with Thomson Course Technology, the world's leading technology education publishers, with the release of a series of new joint SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise courseware offerings."
Calls for Presentations
Registration Open, Call for Speakers for Gelato ICE: Itanium Conference & Expo Singapore 2006
Registration is open for the Gelato ICE: Itanium(r) Conference & Expo to be held on October 1-4, 2006 at the Biopolis in Singapore. In addition, Gelato is seeking quality technical speakers to share their expertise of Linux on Itanium architecture for this conference.lca2007 CFP open
A call for presentations has been sent out for LCA 2007. The event will be held on January 15-20, 2007 at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. "The linux.conf.au 2007 team have opened the gates for new talent to submit a presentation, paper or mini-conf proposal. Earn your place amongst the league of lca speakers such as Andrew Tridgell, Alan Cox, Eben Moglen and Van Jacobson. We are particularly keen to hear from new talent to add to the magic of lca."
CFP: CIC-2006, 15th International Conference on Computing
A call for papers reminder has gone out for the 15th International Conference on Computing, the event takes place on November 21-24, 2006 in Mexico City, Mexico, papers are due by July 7.No cON Name 2006 Congress Call For Papers
A Call For Papers has gone out for the No cON Name 2006 Congress (NcN). "This congress is thought for system and network administrators, programmers, experts and/or security auditors, and also independent self-taught computer security experts. All of them with the same objective: to share and understand new and different systems that actually form the world networks." The event will take place in Palma de Mallorca, Spain on September 29-30, 2006, submissions are due by August 15.
Upcoming Events
Registration Opens for Akademy 2006 (KDE.News)
KDE.News has announced the opening of registration for the Akademy 2006 conference. "KDE welcomes registration from anybody interested in the future development of KDE, including developers, translators, other free software projects, representatives of the software industry and ISVs interested in using free desktops and the KDE application framework." The conference takes place from September 23-30, 2006 in Dublin, Ireland.
php|works/db|works 2006
The php|works/db|works 2006 conference will take place in Toronto, Canada on September 13-15, 2006. "The theme for this year's conference is "Lighter. Faster. More Powerful." Today's applications must be able to rapidly scale to support increasingly more complex requirements and features; php|works and db|works explore how PHP and database technologies are evolving to meet these requirements."
PostgreSQL Anniversary Summit
The PostgreSQL Anniversary Summit will take place on July 8 and 9 in Toronto, Canada. "This 2-day event will feature numerous presentations and community sessions to let community members share their knowledge. Many major contributors to PostgreSQL will be there, and most of them will be speaking or leading coding sessions: Tom Lane, Bruce Momjian, Tatsuo Ishii, Gavin Sherry, Neil Conway and more. At the event we will also discuss and coordinate community advocacy and fundraising efforts."
Events: July 7 - September 1, 2006
| Date | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| July 7 - 8, 2006 | 7th Libre Software Meeting(LSM) | (Nancy 1 University)Vandoeuvre-les-Nancy, France |
| July 7 - 8, 2006 | V Jornades de Programari Lliure | Barcelona, Spain |
| July 8 - 9, 2006 | PostgreSQL Anniversary Summit | Toronto, Canada |
| July 10 - 11, 2006 | Global db4o User Conference(dUC) | (Imperial College, South Kensington)London, UK |
| July 13 - 14, 2006 | Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment(DIMVA) | Berlin, Germany |
| July 15 - 16, 2006 | Crystal Space Conference | (University of Aachen)Aachen, Germany |
| July 16 - 19, 2006 | 2nd International Symposium on Free/Open Source Software, Technologies and Content(FOSSTEC 2006) | Orlando, Florida, USA |
| July 19 - 22, 2006 | Ottawa Linux Symposium 2006(OLS 2006) | Ottawa, Canada |
| July 22 - 23, 2006 | LugRadio Live | (Wolverhampton University)Wolverhampton, UK |
| July 24 - 28, 2006 | O'Reilly Open Source Convention(OSCON 2006) | Portland, Oregon |
| July 29 - August 3, 2006 | Black Hat USA 2006 Briefings and Training | (Caesars Palace)Las Vegas, NV |
| August 4 - 6, 2006 | DEF CON 14 | (Riviera Hotel)Las Vegas, NV |
| August 4 - 6, 2006 | Wikimania | (Harvard Law School)Cambridge, MA |
| August 4 - 6, 2006 | Vancouver Python Workshop | Vancouver, BC, Canada |
| August 8 - 10, 2006 | Flash Memory Summit | (Wyndham Hotel)San Jose, CA |
| August 14 - 17, 2006 | LinuxWorld San Francisco 2006 | (Moscone Center)San Francisco, CA |
| August 14 - 17, 2006 | ApacheCon Asia | (Trans Asia Hotel)Colombo, Sri Lanka |
| August 17 - 18, 2006 | Python for Scientific Computing(SciPy2006) | (Caltech)Pasadena, CA |
| August 18 - 19, 2006 | The Ubucon Conference | (Google headquarters)Mountain View, CA |
| August 28 - 31, 2006 | Bellua Cyber Security Asia 2006 | (Jakarta Convention Center)Jakarta, Indonesia |
Event Reports
KDE at FrOSCon 2006 (KDE.News)
KDE.News covers the recent Free and Open Source conference in St. Augustin, Germany, from the KDE perspective. "Hosted by the Computer Science department of the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, the conference also provided rooms for free software projects. One was seized by the KDE project for discussion and hacking. Additionally, representatives of the KDE project gave two talks at the official conference programs, as well as two other talks that directly related to KDE. Read on for the full report."
O'Reilly Where 2.0: The Location Revolution Has Only Just Begun
O'Reilly sent out a press release for the recent Where 2.0 Conference. "At the second annual O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference, over 700 location-aware hackers, entrepreneurs, "neogeographers," and members of the mapping establishment spent two days immersed in the innovations springing up at the intersection of the Internet and location. Where 2.0, which wrapped up earlier this month in San Jose, California, explored hard technical issues such as GIS/GPS in emergency situations, Virtual Earth and Windows Live Local, NASA World Wind, the latest version of Google Earth, mapping and mobility, geospatial data, business value, and more."
Audio and Video programs
LugRadio covers GUADEC
The folks at LugRadio have produced three podcast shows, live from the GUADEC conference.
Page editor: Forrest Cook
Letters to the editor
Evidence for Red Hat's Mark Webbink's pro-software patent directive lobbying
| From: | Florian Mueller <fmueller.nosoftwarepatents-AT-googlemail.com> | |
| To: | <lwn-AT-lwn.net> | |
| Subject: | Evidence for Red Hat's Mark Webbink's pro-software patent directive lobbying | |
| Date: | Mon, 3 Jul 2006 08:00:12 +0200 |
www.no-lobbyists-as-such.com/florian-mueller-blog/red-hat-mark-webbink/
Evidence for Mark Webbink's pro-patent directive lobbying on July 5, 2005
July 3rd, 2006
In my previous blog article, I mentioned the fact that Red Hat's deputy
general counsel, Mark Webbink, lobbied in the European Parliament on July 5,
2005 (the day before the EP's decisive vote to reject the software patent
bill) to keep the software patent directive alive.
I had not anticipated the kind of Internet debate that this statement would
trigger, including some insulting emails that were sent to me, and least of
all I would have expected Mark Webbink to call into question the "veracity
of [my] statements", which is what he did in the discussion below this
LWN.net article. He knows exactly what he did.
The word "motivations" also appears in that posting. It's really simple: on
the occasion of a patent suit having been filed against Red Hat, I thought
it was time to tell the truth. Especially the free and open source software
(FOSS) community should know where certain key players stand. That will
better enable people to take a critical perspective on such initiatives as
the OSDL Patent Commons.
Contrary to what Mark Webbink claims, my related statements are not
"unverifiable". What he did on July 5, 2005 is a well-documented fact, and
here's some evidence:
From: [name and address of adviser to Michel Rocard MEP deleted]
Sent: Monday, October 31, 2005 2:53 AM
To: Florian Mueller
Cc: europarl-help@ffii.org
Subject: Re: Economist article - coordinated response needed
[cut]
Yes. The day before the vote, as I had been considered
by them as somewhat connected to Mr Rocard 8^) , I
have been quite heavily lobbied by a group comprising
Mrs Thornby-Nielsen (Sun), Mrs Moll (Google), Mr Webbink
(RedHat) and Mr Cox (IBM). All four had basically the
same concerns
[cut]
I have removed parts of the email and in particular the name of the author,
further to his request. He would prefer to stay in the background, like many
political advisers do. But europarl-help@ffii.org is a key mailing list of
European anti-software patent activists, and dozens of people received that
email directly. No one will seriously question its authenticity.
And here's an important excerpt from a follow-up email:
From: [name and address of adviser to Michel Rocard MEP deleted]
Sent: Monday, October 31, 2005 1:44 PM
To: Florian Mueller
Cc: europarl-help@ffii.org
Subject: Re: Economist article - coordinated response needed
[cut]
> They were against the rejection deal, right? I know that Mark W. and
> Charlotte T.-N. didn't want rejection.
It seemed so to me. All of them. Basically, it seemed
to me they were not likely to have no sotware patents
at all. The interpretation I gave Mr Webbink was that
it is not culturally acceptable, for most people that
come from the legal and patent world, to reject a system
from which one can make some money.
[cut]
I believe the above should eliminate all reasonable doubt about what
happened that day. While the FFII and I were asking everyone we knew in the
European Parliament to reject the proposed software patent directive, Red
Hat's Mark Webbink, along with representatives of IBM, Sun and Google,
pushed in the opposite direction.
So what did he really want to achieve? Someone pointed me to an article Mark
Webbink wrote and which in its paragraph #20 refers to the EU software
patent directive. He asks for a definition of the term "technical
contribution" (a key term in patent law) that "will eliminate the vast
majority of business method patents and will restore a substantial
non-obviousness test to software patents". If you read that carefully, it
means he accepts software patents per se. He'd just like to raise the bar a
little bit, and the FFII and I and all others who know how substantive
patent law is applied in practice can tell you that defining "technical
contribution" properly would not be a sufficient measure. It would just have
the desired effect as part of a coherent framework of patentability
criteria. Otherwise it's like a bucket has five holes and you close one: all
of the water will still go through the other holes.
In the same article, and in the Red Hat/Sun position paper that Mark Webbink
published again on LWN.net, a lot of emphasis is put on an interoperability
privilege. That, again, means to accept the patentability of software per
se, but to demand a carve-out for certain purposes. To the FFII and myself,
interoperability was not even a secondary priority. We focused on the
definition of what is patentable and what is not. If software is not
patentable at all, there's no pressing need for an interoperability
exception as far as we're concerned. Interoperability was exactly the area
in which the pro-software patent forces were most wiling to make a
concession if it allowed them to win the wider battle.
Finally, I'd like to reiterate what I said in my previous post: What Mark
Webbink did behind the scenes is not necessarily Red Hat's position as a
company, even though Red Hat has entrusted him with patent lobbying. There
are many people at Red Hat who clearly oppose software patents, and who
opposed the EU software patent directive, most of all Alan Cox.
FFII reaction to software patents/Red Hat controversy
| From: | Jonas Maebe <jmaebe-AT-ffii.org> | |
| To: | letters-AT-lwn.net | |
| Subject: | FFII reaction to software patents/Red Hat controversy | |
| Date: | Wed, 5 Jul 2006 17:03:09 +0200 | |
| Cc: | eboard <eboard-AT-ffii.org> |
(Enlarged board of the FFII in CC) Dear editors,
After reading some reactions at http://lwn.net/Articles/189693/ and seeing the way the FFII is being implicated in the ensuing discussion, we would like to make the statement you can find below.
Best regards,
Jonas Maebe Board member of the FFII
---
We, the board and membership of the FFII, who fought alongside many firms (including Red Hat) against software patents last year, and who are continuing the fight against software patents today, would like to state that:
1. During the second reading of the software patents directive last year, 21 compromise amendments (21CA) were tabled by MEPs following Rocard (Socialists), Buzek/Roithová (Christian Democrats) and Duff (Liberals), and also by the Greens, GUE/NGL and IND/DEM as groups. These amendments went straight against the Commission and Council's attempt to turn current EPO practice into law. The FFII fully supported these amendments.
2. Until the last minute, the FFII's strategy was to support both those amendments and rejection: we recommended both on the voting lists [PDF] we distributed to MEPs. Other people on our side chose to support only one of these options for either strategic or political reasons. The FFII considered both options a very good outcome, and would like to thank everyone who helped no matter which option they promoted.
3. The pro software patent lobby decided, on the eve of the vote, to start pushing for rejection rather than risk any of the 21CA being approved. This was in part thanks to the dual strategy of lobbying for both the amendments and for rejection: they were afraid that the 21CA would be approved, so they chose their second best option which happened to be fine for us as well (and MEPs knew that both were fine for us).
4. The lobbying by ourselves and others in favour of the 21CA by definition implied a position "to keep the software patent directive alive". This does not mean that these people, us included, were in favour of software patents.
5. In the end, only the MEPs had the decision taking power. The MEPs on our side were strong thanks to the widespread support which our platform enjoyed (SMEs, academics, IT professionals, the open source community, ...). Whether companies, organisations and individuals decided to formulate their support for our platform by promoting the 21CA, rejection or both was up to them as far as the FFII is concerned.
6. The final decision was dictated by on the one hand the balance of power within the political groups, and on the other the hand the unhappiness all MEPs shared about the Commission refusing their two restart requests. Rejection was therefore the ultimate compromise, and at the same time a strong signal towards the EPO stating "we are not turning your current practice into European law".
7. In conclusion: in July 2005 the FFII position was supported by Red Hat and Mark Webbink, and we have no reason to believe we no longer have their support today on the topic of software patents.
This side issue is regrettable and badly timed, considering that the EU Commission is planning to launch the next round of their pro software patents campaign next week in Brussels, promoting the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA). The EPLA is an attempt to undo the work achieved last year in Parliament, and to institute software patents through the back door, by enforcing EPO case law across all Europe.
In a nutshell, the EPLA would remove all current national patent courts, put one European-wide patent court in its place and have the people currently running the EPO appoint its judges every six years. We therefore call upon all parties to work with the FFII to continue the fight against software patents in Europe and abroad and to support us this year, as they did last year, against the lobbyists of the patent establishment.
In the long term, the way forward is clear: build on the 21CA, and the related 10 core clarifications, to reinstate a proper basis for patent law and to avoid its extension into economic areas where it does not work. At the same time, the EPO must be opened up so it is no longer exclusively controlled by the patent establishment, as otherwise we keep trying to save a tree while letting the forest burn.
Signed,
The Board and Membership of the FFII
Page editor: Jonathan Corbet