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Linux and Open Source News for 21st March 2005
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2022551
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Source: InfoWorld: Security SALT LAKE CITY, Utah - Novell on Monday introduced a new vuced a new version of its ZENworks systems management suite that is designed to offer full lifecycle management for Linux and Windows systems.
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Digital Media
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Source: Playlist News Apple on Monday confirmed they have closed what's described as "a security hole" in the iTunes Music Store that allowed users to purchase songs without DRM attached. As a result of closing the hole, users of iTunes older than version 4.7 will need to upgrade in order to continue purchasing songs. This update also locks out users of PyMusique, a software application for Windows and Linux that served as an alternate interface to the iTunes Music Store.
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Enterprise Computing
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Source: CNET News.com: Enterprise Package includes Suse Linux Enterprise Server, Novell Linux Desktop, GroupWise server software and eDirectory.
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General
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Source: OSNews Focusing on the best desktop candidates for deployment in enterprises, this article takes a look at Novell Linux Desktop 9.
Source: Slashdot Org latest news headlines lamasquerade writes "A major Australian newspaper has a lengthy and detailed feature on open source/standards, avoiding vendor lock-in, and specifically the increasing uptake of Firefox by major organisations' IT departments. It touches on security and price advantages of open source but mainly focuses on open standards -- the perils of vendor lock-in, and their importance to technologies like the Internet and digital music. Linux, OpenOffice.org and even Bugzilla get a mention and all told it is a very pro-open source/standards article, especially considering it is in a mass-circulation publication."
Source: RootPrompt.org -- Nothing but Unix 22 Mar 2005: Bugzilla is a defect or bug tracking system -- a system that allows individual or groups of developers to keep track of outstanding bugs in their products. This type of system lets users track bugs and code changes, communicate their actions with other teammates, submit and review repair patches, and manage quality assurance.
Source: RootPrompt.org -- Nothing but Unix 22 Mar 2005: "When you look into the Novell Linux Desktop (NLD), you find a product that fits an analyst's picture of a mature open-source model. Last week, we asked some hard questions about that model with regards to Xandros and were left wondering. When you ask the same questions of Novell, the answers come out positive:" Story
Source: Slashdot Org latest news headlines Linzer writes "Mandrakelinux just issued this press release presenting (1) a new one-year release cycle, with a year-based naming scheme and (2) their updated development roadmap. In a nutshell: the upcoming 10.2 becomes a transitional release, labeled 'Limited Edition 2005.' Next fall will see Mandrakelinux 2006, merging Mdk and Conectiva know-how (and possibly some know-not?) For the amnesic: Mandrakesoft and Conectiva recently merged." Not everyone is pleased, though: Tingulli 3 writes "As a member of the Italian Mandrakelinux translation team , I spent nights translating some packages to be on schedule for the 10.2 release. I was quite disappointed when I discovered that a new roadmap has been announced and that there will NOT be any 10.2 release, without anybody announcing it to the community."
Source: InternetNews
Source: OSNews "Mandrakesoft, publisher of the Mandrakelinux operating system, today announces adjustments in the 2005 Mandrakelinux release schedule. Several changes will occur: (1) a new release cycle for retail products, (2) a new naming scheme, (3) the integration of Conectiva's technology into Mandrakelinux, and (4) the immediate availability of a transitional product." Read the rest of the press release here
Source: Slashdot Org latest news headlines Bender asks: "Most on Slashdot seem to be concerned with getting Free/Open Source software to be compatible with hardware (firmware, register sets, etc). My question is from the other side of the table: I'm in the hardware business and I'm wondering if there are any central guidelines to better guarantee compatibility with Linux/*BSD. As an example, to guarantee that our hardware runs Microsoft Windows, we have to conform to the Windows Logo Program Requirements. These requirements dictate (among other things) firmware interfaces, debug ports, and DRM. Some of these requirements, if not implemented carefully, could trigger incompatibilities with non-Microsoft operating systems. Is there a Linux/*BSD equivalent to the Microsoft requirements to allow hardware designers to build OS agnostic systems?"
Source: Slashdot Org latest news headlines Pig Hogger writes "Many people claim that the validity of the GNU Public License has not been tested in court in the US. Well, it just had been, in Michigan, in a case that validated open-source car diagnostic software against the pretension of automakers who want to keep it secret. But don't take my word for it; read the story on GROKLAW." It's actually the Society of Automotive Engineers involved here; DrewTech (the developers in this case) nicely donated half of their settlement money to the SAE.
Source: OSNews 2003 was the year with Gentoo written all over it in the Linux universe. Last year was Ubuntu's & MEPIS'. I believe that Arch Linux's year is the current one. Read more for a comparison of Arch to existing distributions, and why we think it rocks and where we think it still requires some work. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article
Source: Slashdot Org latest news headlines An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet has published a step-by-step explanation of Microsoft's proposed server interoperability license, which was just rejected by the European Commission. The EC said the license excluded open-source vendors and charged unjustifiably high royalty fees -- all bad for business."
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Industry
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Source: Computerworld News They allow you to easily run the OS from portable media, but security risks result.
Source: Computerworld News After six years as Sun's open-source champion, Danese Cooper has left the vendor to work on open-source projects at Intel
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Lang: Java
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Source: java.net weblogs Advantages of binaries . . . also Spotlight: HAT: the Heap Analysis Tool Weblogs: Inderjeet Singh on UI design Also in Java Today: The Code Quality Myth and Building Modular Applications with Seppia Projects and Communities Relaunched Java Linux page and A Design Pattern for Factories with Generics Forum posts: Math performance with Hotspot and the Pattern Enforcing Compiler
Source: java.net News Sun's "Open Source Diva", Danese Cooper, has left the building. She's left the company to work for Intel. "Cooper was the self-described open-source diva at the server and software company, representing outside members of the cooperative programming movement to Sun and vice-versa. She will continue her open-source work when she joins the chipmaker on Monday, but in an interview, she declined to share specifics."
Source: java.net News The SableVM project has released version 1.11. The new release includes an update to GNU Classpath, and fixes to serious bugs with version 1.10 causing problems with Swing and AWT applications.
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OS: Linux
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Source: Linux Today "As you investigate various Linux Distributions, you will soon notice that some Distributions excel at certain tasks over other Distributions "
Source: Linux Today Today's security advisories: curl (Conectiva Linux); xli (Debian GNU/Linux); Xzabite dyndnsupdate (Gentoo Linux); and kernel and mysql (Trustix Secure Linux).
Source: Linux Today "Almost exactly four years ago, in my January 2001 column for Linux Magazine I wrote a rather long diatribe about how many predictions in Stanley Kubrick s 2001: A Space Odyssey (based on the novel by Arthur C. Clarke) have been left unfulfilled "
Source: Linux Today "2003 was the year with Gentoo written all over it in the Linux universe. Last year was Ubuntu's & MEPIS'. I believe that Arch Linux's year is the current one "
Source: Linux Today "About five minutes after Linus Torvalds first let the world know about Linux 0.01 back in the dawn of time, aka Aug. 25, 1991, the first fight over which was the best Linux distribution began "
Source: Linux Weekly News
Source: Linux Today "To all of you super star programmers, high and mighty guru level systems people, build anything with duct tape and bailing wire engineers, and visionary marketing wizards there's a monster on the horizon that threatens to gobble up the high tech world, possibly even Linux and open source "
Source: Linux Today "The KDE Foundation last week rolled out the newest version of its open source desktop environment, KDE 3.4, with improvements in disabled accessibility top on the list "
Source: Linux Today "It's been about nine months since Computer Associates' Ingres database set sail on open source waters and--save for some criticism generated with CA's introduction of yet another open source license--the waters have been relatively smooth "
Source: Linux Today "Mobile Linux users face some interesting (OK, vexing) challenges when they want to plug into different networks. Any Linux system will easily support all manner of networking profiles--dialup, ISDN, Ethernet, wireless--the tricky bit is configuration "
Source: Linux Today "Figures showing that the number of Red Hat servers on the web is falling while the number of servers running the company's community Linux distribution, Fedora, is increasing, are not of particular concern, a company official in Australia says "
Source: Linux Weekly News
Source: Linux Today "Turbolinux achieved profitability in Japan and China for the first time last year and is now looking to expand its operations in India, its chief financial officer (CFO) said Wednesday "
Source: Linux Today PC Pro reports that a recent Linux to Microsoft migration may be tied to lack of available Linux developers. Over at ONLamp, Jono Bacon gives his analysis of what happened. Articles within.
Source: Linux Weekly News
Source: Linux Today "It's a sad day when an ancient fork bomb attack can still take down most of the latest Linux distributions "
Source: Linux Today "Earlier this week, open-source developer Harald Welte personally handed warning letters to 13 technology companies that he says are using Linux in violation of the license that governs the software "
Source: Linux Today Last week EDS Global Alliances lambasted Linux as not being "a suitable operating system for the largest of enterprise customers." Yet a little digging reveals an EDS case study that indicates the "Linux environment provides a level of security and stability unavailable elsewhere." Articles within.
Source: Linux Weekly News
Source: Linux Today "MySQL AB CEO Marten Mickos won't reveal the release date of MySQL 5.0, but he does promise that it has all the goodies requested by database developers and corporate users "
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OS: Macintosh
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Source: MacNN Mozilla.org has launched a new website for Camino 0.82, its open-source browser effort for Mac OS X
Source: MacNN Mozilla.org has released Camino 0.82, an update to the open-source browser effort for Mac OS X that
Source: Studio Log REAL Software announced today the company is shipping REALbasic 5.5.5, an update that improves reliability in REALbasic and improves the user experience for VB Project Converter. VB Project Converter is a utility included for free with REALbasic that helps Visual Basic developers port existing applications to REALbasic where they can be cross-compiled for Linux and Macintosh.
Source: Mac Central latest headlines REAL Software on Monday announced the release of REALbasic 5.5.5, an update to its development environment for Mac, PC and Linux operating systems. This release emphasizes a continuing effort REAL Software has made to reach out to Windows developers who are experienced with Microsoft's Visual Basic (VB) environment; it includes improvements to REALbasic's VB Project Converter, which helps port existing VB applications to REALbasic, where they can be cross-compiled for Mac OS X and Linux.
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OS: Windows
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Source: ONDotnet.com It's perhaps the most controversial project in the open source world, but this mostly stems from misunderstanding: Mono, the open source development platform based upon Microsoft's .NET framework. Immediate reactions from many dubious Linux developers have ranged from confusion over its connection with .NET to wondering what the benefits of developing under it are. Throughout the course of its four years of intense development, sponsored by Novell, Mono founder Miguel de Icaza has had to frequently clarify the .NET issue and sell the community on it. In this new interview, Howard Wen asks Miguel to explain himself one more time.
Source: Neowin.net It's only a matter of time before Apple's newly redesigned Mac operating system becomes a happy hunting ground for malicious hackers, according to a research report from security vendor Symantec. The Symantec Internet Security Threat Report, which tracked malicious hacker trends between July and December 2004, said increased sales of the low-priced Mac mini to less security-savvy computer users will lead to a bigger risk.
"Generally speaking, the Macintosh operating system has been relatively immune to malicious activity, particularly compared to other operating systems like Linux and Microsoft. With the introduction and popularity of Mac OS X, however, Apple has become a target for new attacks and vulnerabilities," the report stated. "Mac OS X has begun to not only capture the attention of users but of vulnerability researchers as well," the report added.
News source: eWeekRead full story
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Security
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Source: InfoWorld: Security Novell extends lifecycle management for Linux
Novell this month took the wraps off its Linux management system, with an emphasis on lifecycle-management capabilities. Intended to lower the overall costs of an IT operation, ZENworks 7 Linux Management taps policy-based automation to deploy and centrally manage Linux-based resources. Version 7.0 works with Suse Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux and features new imaging, configuration lockdown, remote management, inventory, and software-management capabilities. Novell has integrated the product’s management features in with its Linux Desktop and Suse Linux Enterprise Server 9 products. Another new capability allows IT workers to use Web-based administration through the product’s Control Center, a task-oriented management console for deploying, managing, and maintaining Linux systems.
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Software: Linux
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Source: Freshmeat Daily News Prometheus QoS (Quality of Service) is an ISP-oriented tool for easy manipulation of the IP traffic shaping and
sharing features of the Linux kernel.
It generates multiple nested HTB traffic control classes with fine-grained rate and ceiling values and implements
optional daily (or simply periodical) data transfer quotas and data transfer statistics (as HTML). It is compatible with NAT (both asymmetric and symmetric), yet still provides good two-way shaping and prioritizing for both uploads and downloads.
Changes:
Transfer of unused data limit from a previous run
using a credit file is now supported. Support was
added for "soft fair use policy", which reduces
just HTB prio instead of HTB ceil. Some other
minor feature enhancements were made.
Source: Freshmeat Daily News Conary is a distributed software management system
for Linux distributions. It replaces traditional
package management solutions (such as RPM and
dpkg) with one designed to enable loose
collaboration across the Internet. It enables sets
of distributed and loosely connected repositories
to define the components which are installed on a
Linux system. Rather than having a full
distribution come from a single vendor, it allows
administrators and developers to branch a
distribution, keeping the pieces which fit their
environment while grabbing components from other
repositories across the Internet.
Changes:
Installing and updating were made faster by moving
some hot code paths from Python to C and by
enabling the small rollback feature announced in
0.50.4. A few bugs in shadow merging and group
installation were fixed. The loadRecipe syntax was
changed to be more flexible and useful when
building a derivative distribution.
Source: Freshmeat Daily News FOX is a C++-based toolkit for GUI development. It includes a rich set of widgets and has powerful yet simple layout managers, MDI widgets, and mega-widgets. FOX incorporates support for XDND for drag and drop, X clipboard and X Selection, watching other I/O channels and sockets, timers and idle processing, object serialization and deserialization, a registry to save persistent settings, and 3D widgets using Mesa or OpenGL. FOX works on Linux, IRIX, Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, Tru64 Unix, Windows 9x,NT,2K (VC++, GNUWIN32, Borland, VisualAge C++), FreeBSD, and Sequent.
Changes:
Unicode tables were added. The fxchar.h header
file provides functions operating on 32-bit wide
Unicode characters. They support the full range
from U+000000 to U+10FFFF. FOX will support wide
characters, but most functions will work on UTF-8,
which is a more compact and manageable
representation of Unicode characters. Scroll
capability was added to FXTabBar and FXTabBook.
The "remove" APIs in various container classes
were renamed to "erase", which more closely
resembles STL container classes' nomenclature.
Mouse wheel support was added for FXComboBox,
FXListBox, and FXTreeListBox.
Source: Freshmeat Daily News libASSA is an OO C++ UNIX networking library based on some of the design patterns such as Configurator, Reactor, Acceptor, and Connector collectively known as Adaptive Communication Patterns described in various papers published by Dr. D. C. Schmidt.
Changes:
This release brings many cosmetic changes along with ports to Solaris 8/9, FreeBSD-5.3, and Linux/gcc-3.4.2.
Source: Freshmeat Daily News ezUserManager is a script that allows administration of
.httpasswd files. It features a signup form, forgotten
password form, and an admin form with the ability to modify
and delete users. It offers email activation, and supports
both encrypted and plaintext passwords.
Changes:
Web-configuration was added. An option was added
to choose whether an admin must approve users
before becoming active. A log-out function was
added in the admin-area. An option was added for
choosing which languages to display in the
language-bar. More languages were added. A
stylesheet was added for better customization of
apperance. A bug with file-permission check on
.htpasswd-file was fixed. A bug which allowed
users with status "New" or "Disabled" to use the
forgot-password function was fixed.
Source: Freshmeat Daily News ELOG Electronic Web Logbook is an electronic logbook with a Web interface. It can be used to maintain personal or shared logbooks, with the ability to add attachments to logbook pages. Logbook entries can be categorized with user-defined classes, and queried using filters on these classes. Automatic email notifications can be generated on new entries based on the classes. The ELOG server is a small stand-alone C program, which runs under Linux and Windows. No other packages are required. The logbooks are saved in plain ASCII files for easy and fast access.
Changes:
Several small eahancements and bugfixes were made.
The password file format has been switched to XML.
Source: Freshmeat Daily News The Netfig Platform is an Eclipse-based product
for configuring network devices. It provides a
text editor with autocompletion and error
underlining, a console connection to the device,
and automatic document access to related product
manuals. At this stage the tool is specific to
Cisco IOS devices.
Changes:
The big news for this release is a significant improvement in memory performance which has eliminated several problems. There were also some minor bugfixes and a fix to the Motif Linux distribution which contained softlinks that were not being correctly reproduced in the zip file. Registered users can update automatically by selecting "Help-Update Software-Find and Install".
Source: Freshmeat Daily News RealPlayer plays streaming audio and video over the Internet in real-time. It plays RealAudio, RealVideo, MP3, 3GPP Video, Flash, SMIL 2.0, JPEG, GIF, PNG, RealPix, RealText, Ogg Vorbis, and Ogg Theora. It is available for Windows, Macintosh, Pocket PC, Nokia 9200 Series, Nokia 7650, Palm OS 5-based handhelds, Linux, Solaris, and many Unix variants.
Changes:
This release addresses recently discovered
security vulnerabilities that made it possible for
an attacker to run arbitrary or malicious code on
a customer's machine. Furthermore, support was
added for U-Law and A-Law encoded AU and wav files
and for chained Ogg. Opening content in an
existing RealPlayer instance was fixed.
Source: Freshmeat Daily News IPC (Isotopic Pattern Calculator) is a tool for mass spectrometry that calculates the isotopic distribution of a given chemical formula or peptide sequence. It uses gnuplot to visualize the results.
Changes:
Some compiler and run-time GTK warnings were
removed. An option to give a number of charges for
calculating m/z ratios was added. An option to
give the decimal place to which the result is
rounded was added. Shortcuts for compute and
formula type toggle were added.
Source: Freshmeat Daily News /etc/net represents a new approach to Linux
network configuration tasks. Inspired by the
limitations of traditional configuration
subsystems, /etc/net provides builtin support for
configuration profiles, interface name management,
removable device support, full iproute2 command
set support, interface dependency resolution, and
a QoS configuration framework. /etc/net provides
support for the following interface types:
Ethernet, WiFi (WEP), IPv6/IPv6 tunnels, PSK IPSec
tunnels, VLAN, PLIP, Ethernet bonding and
bridging, traffic equalizer, Pent@NET, usbnet, and
PPP. Due to its modular design, support for new
interface types can be added without overall
design changes.
Changes:
A lot of code cleanups were done, leading to
bugfixes, better performance, and some
incompatibility with previous releases. Initial
configuration examples were added. Initial
multihost configuration support was implemented.
Source: Freshmeat Daily News ASFS is a filesystem driver for the Linux kernel
that adds support for the Amiga SmartFileSystem.
It supports both read and write, however, write
support is in an early beta stage.
Changes:
Native Language Support (NLS) was added.
Source: Freshmeat Daily News KMail is a fully-featured email client that fits nicely into KDE. It has features such as support for powerful filters, PGP/GnuPG privacy, inline attachments, drag and drop support of messages and attachments, support for multiple POP3 and IMAP accounts, and integration into the Kontact personal information management suite.
Changes:
Support for emoticons/smilies, X-Faces, KWallet, IMAP namespaces, and quick insertion of common phrases was implemented. Recipient display and selection was improved in the message composer. Home directory cluttering was reduced, as ~/dead.letter is no longer used. Numerous bugfixes were made, especially in the IMAP and message threading code. The program is now included in the KDEPIM package, and this release is part of the KDE 3.4 release.
Source: Freshmeat Daily News GNU nano (Nano's ANOther editor, or Not ANOther editor) is an enhanced clone of the Pico text editor.
Changes:
This release finally includes the long-awaited support for UTF-8. It also includes the ability to insert UTF-8 characters using verbatim input, the ability to delete all text from the cursor position to the end of the file via ^W^X, I/O improvements so that pasted text displays faster, status bar prompt improvements to make more edit window shortcuts work in it, and a new option to use the second line of the screen as part of the edit window. A fix for a long-standing bug where the program would keep running if the terminal it was in died unexpectedly was included.
Source: Freshmeat Daily News Solfege is an ear training program for GNOME 2,
but can also run with only the GTK+ libraries. It
even runs in Windows.
Changes:
Some more strings that were not marked for translation were found. Some bad English was corrected, and the French and Italian translations were updated. lessonfile_editor is now usable and includes SVG icons as well as the PNG icons that are used when running. The Windows build now uses the default GTK+ theme instead of wimp due to font problems.
Source: Freshmeat Daily News CVTSA is a suite of tools that allows users to
administrate a GNU/Linux system via the Web or email, without running daemons and opening ports on their own computer. WEBCVTSA is a tool that allows users to administrate a GNU/Linux system by using a form on a Web page to post commands. It supports Blowfish encryption and has a lot of interesting applications.
Changes:
Some little bugs were fixed and a logging option was added.
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Software: OpenSource
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Source: NewsForge Commentary: EDS, the giant computer services company, apparently doesn't like Linux much right now. EDS vice president of Global Alliances Robb Rasmussen recently told ZDNet Australia, "From a corporate perspective, we are not confident where Linux is right now today. A large enterprise needs to be sure because it relates to securifying [sic] the environment. We see some of the same things occurring that did to Unix -- it could splinter into many different types of languages. We are quite cautious about Linux and its deployment." Uh huh. But companies that issue anti-Linux statements like this often end up embracing Linux before long. That's why I want to extend a welcoming hand to EDS instead of getting upset over that egregious statement.
Source: SourceForge New Releases Open3DMath 0.2.0 released (Linux, Win32)
Source: NewsForge In the last couple of years, the development teams of the various desktop environments, such as GNOME and KDE, have made great strides in the right direction to making the Linux desktop more attractive and visually pleasing. Just with a standard KDE install, I get the occasional "Hey, that looks nice" from friends. When I discovered a program named Karamba for KDE a while back, that suddenly changed to outright "Wow!"
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Weblogs
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Source: O'Reilly Weblogs The wonderful Matt Sergeant (whose fingers have been in many pies, from Perl's XML modules to the SpamAssassin spam-filtering system) has started a mailing list for geeks who are interested in digital photography. This is a place where you can discuss using your D70 on Linux, or where you can discuss how to improve your pictures in Gimp, or just ask how you could improve a particular photo. (I've already seen the RDF discussions begin )
Source: O'Reilly Weblogs Microsoft have today announced a deal with the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors in which they have moved from Linux to Windows. I sat in a meeting that explained the deal, and this is the score
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