Slashdot Mirror

mike_sucks writes: "The first step to porting Debian to the Win32 platform has been made - dpkg is compiling under Cygwin. Check out the post on debian-devel and the Debian GNU/w32 port's site." Some of the posters on the debian-devel list aren't too pleased with the idea.

mike_sucks writes: "The first step to porting Debian to the Win32 platform has been made - dpkg is compiling under Cygwin. Check out the post on debian-devel and the Debian GNU/w32 port's site." Some of the posters on the debian-devel list aren't too pleased with the idea.

snotty6969 writes: "Freeze Update. Anthony Towns sent in an updated report about the Woody freeze process. We're almost into the last week for uploads of base packages. If there are outstanding bugs you'd like to see fixed, provide patches or upload now. We are also getting into the last days for ensuring that standard and task packages get included in the Woody release. At the moment it looks like a lot of packages will be removed from Woody. Among these are a whole bunch of commonly used programs like gpm, Mutt, CVS, Procmail, Apache and Mozilla. People who can fix bugs in these packages and care about them are encouraged to send in patches or upload fixed packages using Anthony's unofficial NMU guidelines."

snotty6969 writes: "Freeze Update. Anthony Towns sent in an updated report about the Woody freeze process. We're almost into the last week for uploads of base packages. If there are outstanding bugs you'd like to see fixed, provide patches or upload now. We are also getting into the last days for ensuring that standard and task packages get included in the Woody release. At the moment it looks like a lot of packages will be removed from Woody. Among these are a whole bunch of commonly used programs like gpm, Mutt, CVS, Procmail, Apache and Mozilla. People who can fix bugs in these packages and care about them are encouraged to send in patches or upload fixed packages using Anthony's unofficial NMU guidelines."

Colonel Bleep asks: "My company is finally on the road to getting serious about Unix server security. Though there's a lot more to do, the current push is to replace telnet, ftp, rcp and the like with ssh. Problem is, the security team in charge of the transition is composed mostly of Microsoft-trained techicians that hold varying opinions of open source software. Non team members, such as myself, are kept abreast of developments via email. Input is encouraged. OpenSSH came up during a recent email exchange with the coordinator. It didn't take long for the "isn't proprietary is better?" mantra to rear its ugly head. Though I use OpenSSH at home I found myself at a loss to explain why the corp might want to consider using it over commercial SSH. That's aside from the obvious open source peer review argument, of course. I haven't been able to uncover any direct side-by-side reviews of the two products but I would very much like to pass such a comparison along. What say ye?" Update: 11/14 2:40p EDT by C : Users of SSHv1 may want to take a look at this security bulletin on a potential SSHv1 exploit that is rumored to be in the wild.

The first slashback of normal time (not Daylight Savings) in a while, tonight with news of 3Dwm's continuing progress, ways brave OS X pioneers can bravely reclaim their lost MP3 files, and a word of caution on HP's upcoming digital-audio playbox.

Vivid Video, take note: NickElm writes: "The 3Dwm project, already featured twice before on Slashdot (the last time little more than a year ago), is still alive and kicking and making steady progress. This summer, we added CSG support, full VNC interaction, and our first real application (a 3Dwm clock). To top it off, Xybernaut recently donated two wearable computers to the project, perfect platforms for this kind of thing. 3Dwm packages have existed for Debian for quite some time, and we were just now adopted by Mandrake as well. What are you waiting for, download it and try it out for yourself! Still far from a complete user environment, but we're getting there..."

Do you want your iTunes iBack, little iBoy? pinqkandi writes "Apple has released some tips on getting back your data lost by the iTunes Installer for Mac OS X. If you haven't written to the partition where the loss occured, you should be able to get it back with Tech Tool Pro or Norton Utilities. Apple's tips warn to NOT use a Volume Recover feature in these utilities, but instead use their tools to recover lost data. Also, boot from a CD before recovering data, and also follow your utility's maker's directions. Unfortunately, no free utilities are listed for the recovery."

The sort of details you'll find on page 17 in small print. ARP writes "A while ago RatedPC brought us some scoop of HP's upcoming Digital Entertainment Center de100c. At first this unit seems to be a perfect addition to home theatre systems right? Well, you better forget about it if you think you are going to use it to share music or make your own CDs from your MP3 collection. What HP hasn't told us is they have been seriously whipped by DRM (Digital Rights Management). An internal FAQ has revealed that users will be unable to use CD-RWs to burn off their own CDs. You will need to buy "Digital Audio Discs" and royalties from these discs are distributed to artists via the RIAA. And you can't transfer your songs to your PC either. Without a doubt RIAA's foothold has extended much above just this. Don't be surprised if it won't play your MP3 collection because they are not digitally signed. The problem is that RIAA will be riding high on HP success with this product and their grip will be firmer when it comes to controlling what you will do with your music."

A similar problem affects the otherwise very cool-looking Terapin video recorder, which I would pick up in a heartbeat if it worked with regular CD-Rs. The HP website talks about burning tracks to CD, but makes no mention of such restrictions; I hope this is simply bad information, but it seems quite likely that "burning to CD" in this case will mean burning to industry-sanctioned CDs with their accompanying surcharge. Can anyone provide further information?

codazzo writes "Debian 2.2r4 is out. As their website states, "The fourth revision of Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 (codename `potato') has been released. This point release, revision 2.2r4, mostly includes security updates, along with a few corrections of serious bugs in the stable distribution." " You can see the press release - or get it from the FTP list.

codazzo writes "Debian 2.2r4 is out. As their website states, "The fourth revision of Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 (codename `potato') has been released. This point release, revision 2.2r4, mostly includes security updates, along with a few corrections of serious bugs in the stable distribution." " You can see the press release - or get it from the FTP list.

beton asks: "We've all come to the point where we feel the need to change distros. A friend of mine has been a loyal Red Hat user for over 4 years now, but now he'd like to try Debian. He's trying to accomplish this with minimal effort so I was wondering if there are any tools around that allow to change from Red Hat to Debian without having to start from a 'clean' PC and reconfigure everything to fit your needs. Such a tool should e.g. reinstall all your programs and should try to configure them using your current config files. I did some searching on Sourceforge and Freshmeat but I didn't find anything useful. Do any of you know such a tool or is the whole idea just impossible to accomplish?" Even limiting such a tool to the larger distributions out there, it would be a bear to implement such a tool and iron out all of the wrinkles. Of course, if all Linux distributions could agree on a file system standard, then such a tool may even be unnecessary, but I doubt that will happen in the near future. So how do you all weigh in on this issue? Would a distribution conversion tool be useful or would we all be better off with a file system standard that works across multiple distributions?

Slashed back tonight: The (slight) return of the Y2K behemoth, good news for those locked out of port 80 by the recent unpleasantness, one interested party's response to Stephen Hawking's genetic-engineering ideas, and even an update on the Scarfo key-logging story.

Better than world-wide anarchy and privation. kejoki writes: "I came into work today and nobody had voicemail. We use an ancient AT&T system 25 (Merlin) with the Audix automated attendant/voice mail system ... not my bailiwick but the boss was going nuts trying to figure it out.

He finally called his System 25 guy and found out that quite a few people were having the same problem. Inspiration hit, and he set the system date back before 31 Dec 1999 ... whammo! The voice mail returneth.

AT&T->Lucent->Avaya, of course, no longer supports the system...as a matter of fact the boss seems to recall getting a letter from AT&T saying that they'd be taking care of the Y2K problems which might be in their equipment; but another soon after saying that support for the System 25 would be dropped as of 31 Dec 1999 ... hmmm.

Oddly enough, he's had a problem with the system giving a database I/O error for a while, but since he reset the date that has also vanished.

All very interesting. At any rate, if you have a System 25 and you can't get your voice mail, set back the date!"

And in related news, Che Fox writes :"The OpenLDAP project is one of the first to be hit by a major bug due to the S1G (one billion seconds) Unix time rollover. The slurpd replication daemon, which pushes changes from the master LDAP server to the slaves, no longer works now that time has rolled over to 1 billion seconds. This means that all LDAP-using networks in the world that use OpenLDAP and slave servers to replicate the data (very common) are now broken. There is a fix available against both the 1.2 and 2.x OpenLDAP releases in the OpenLDAP CVS repository."

You may assume your former activities for the moment. Agent Green writes: "I was checking out my firewall logs this morning and noticed an unusual amount of port 80 traffic and come to find out...it seems that AT&T Broadband has lifted their port 80 restrictions on its residential network. Let's see how long this lasts ..."

Probably until the next worm that takes over everyone's port 80, whatever OS it runs under.

So what did one giant say to the other? jshep writes: "Inventor Ray Kurzweil recently responded to physicist Stephen Hawking's concerns regarding the progression of AI (previous Slashdot story can be viewed here). Kurzweil takes aim at Hawking's suggestion that we use genetic engineering to augment the power of the human brain."

The man behind the curtain is ... uh, vital to national security! camusflage writes: "Reuters has a story (courtesy of Yahoo) that says the judge in the Nicodemo Scarfo believes the "national security" gambit about as much as the /. community does regarding the use of keyloggers. The most choice quote is "I don't know what it means. It's gobbledygook. More gobbledygook," referring to the argument put forth that the keylogger is a sensitive piece of national security. An assistant U.S. Attorney indicated he would provide "classified and unclassified summaries of the system's operation and more affidavits detailing the national security aspects at stake," next Friday."

A reader writes: "Berlin ^? testing packages for Debian are available from the Debian website and should soon be moved to unstable, according to their the Berlin consortium website." The Berlin website (which looks great, IMHO) has an excellent architecture FAQ - the Berlin vs. X is very well done.Update: 09/01 12:41 PM GMT by H : A number of people have e-mailed me about some....wonkiness...if you view the Berlin vs X page using Internet Explorer. I'd advise using something else.

rstewart points to this press release, writing: "Mandrake has released version 8.0 final for the PPC architecture. Now Mac users have a choice of distributions between Mandrake and Yellow Dog. Now if only we could easily buy parts and build them cheap in our basements. " And PPC choices already include SuSE, LinuxPPC, Debian, NetBSD and more.

alen writes "I've been working with NT for a year now, and I'm getting really tired of it. So I finally decided to learn Linux, after a year of putting it off. I've got an old P2 266 that I'm going to use. Now the next question is what distro do I get? What's a good starter version? I'm just looking to get the feel of it and to play around a little. " This question gets asked periodically - it's always good to hear have a lively discussion about it - I love my Debian but have heard that Mandrake is a good starter distro.

RoweM writes "The Australian Capital Terrority will use a Debian-based, GPL'd electronic voting system in elections this October. See this article, and the vendor's press release. Note, this is not Internet voting, but an electronic vote registration and counting system--you still have to go to the polling booth :)."

Edward Betts writes: "Debian One is over, we are at LSM, and it is raining, what do we do? Try and decide the location of the next Debian conference of course, and we all know that the best place for a Debian conference is Debian's centre of mass." What an ideal location for a conference -- perhaps they can devise a mission to retrive the errant U.S. hydrogen bomb (more information too).

Edward Betts writes: "Debian One is over, we are at LSM, and it is raining, what do we do? Try and decide the location of the next Debian conference of course, and we all know that the best place for a Debian conference is Debian's centre of mass." What an ideal location for a conference -- perhaps they can devise a mission to retrive the errant U.S. hydrogen bomb (more information too).

These are Robert's answers to questions about GnuCash you posted on June 18th. He says, "Some of the answers to the questions here were the result of discussions with the other people at LDG, where others were more qualified to speak on various topics, so the readers are really getting the benefit of our collected wisdom (well, we hope it's wisdom :) )"

1) Why the GPL?
by noz
I'm not sure if this will be a very popular question, but I'm always interested in why people have chosen the GNU GPL.

Developed under the GPL, you have no need to worry about obsolescence: GnuCash will be there for you.

The GPL expresses many ideals, and there is a differing philosophy between Free Software the Open Source. Perhaps that's a bit broad, but what are your ideals and how do they relate to the GPL?

Robert:
The simple answer is that GnuCash is based on the X-Accountant codebase, which was GPL'd when Robin Clark released it based way back in 1997. If we wanted to use that code, we were obliged to use the GPL. If that code had been released under another DFSG-free license, I'm sure the developers would have been happy to continue under the same license.

There's more to it, though, as you have indicated in your question. I like the GPL, would generally use it on a project of my own, and I believe the GPL has been very good for GnuCash's development and will continue to be so.

The GPL it makes it clear to people who contribute code to GnuCash that their code will remain free forever. There's nothing wrong with corporate sponsorship of free software; in fact most of the core GnuCash developers work for the Linux Developers Group, which is sponsoring GnuCash development and intends to sell, extend, and support it. The entire management of LDG is GnuCash developers, so there's not much question of Bad People doing Bad Things within the corporate framework, but sometimes Bad Things happen anyway, and in those cases the GPL's protection is very valuable. And, for us, Bad Things really did happen.

Gnumatic sponsored GnuCash development for about a year. Like a lot of other small companies, Gnumatic got in financial trouble during the Bust. Thanks to the GPL, the work done on GnuCash during 2000 was not lost, and the developers were able to start a new company (LDG) to continue the work. This was an inconvenient distraction, but not a fatal blow to the project, as it was to the products of many other companies who went out of business during the current downturn.

Also, having GnuCash under the GPL helps us at the Linux Developers Group continually improve our tools without having to argue with clients about it. We are aiming to make the GnuCash code base a useful tool set for small-business accounting, ecommerce, and general financial solutions consulting. When we talk to clients, we don't have to try to convince them to like the GPL, since there's no choice involved. If we start from our tools, the work is under the GPL, period; that's the way the license works. We don't have any choice but to put our improvements back under the GPL, and clients seem to understand "we have to do it this way" better than "we really, really think it's a good idea to do it this way".

2) Online Banking Plugins?
by Tin Weasil
Online banking is a great feature that I would love to see incorporated into GnuCash. I realize that there are probably a ton of obsticles to making this a reality, so here is my question:

Would it be possible to incorporate some sort of perl plugin to GnuCash that would go out to a bank's web site, access the banking account information on the site, access the relevant data and then format it in a way that could be pasted into the existing GnuCash data?

My bank, Region Bank, allows customers to access their checking account via a web browser. I hate to see this resource going to waste.

Robert:
Banks generally provide machine-readable account information in a couple of formats: QIF (Quicken Interchange Format), which is an old and broken text export format used by just about every personal finance program, and OFX (Online Financial Xchange), with its first cousin QFX (Quicken Financial Xchange), which is an SGML/XML protocol for both getting information and initiating on-line banking activity such as funds transfers.

If your bank provides downloadable QIF files, as many do, you can import them into GnuCash easily right now. We are working on the ability to use GnuCash's built-in web browser to log on to the bank with SSL and download the QIF directly into GnuCash without having to save to a file, but until then, it won't break your arm to download with a normal browser and import the file into GnuCash.

At the moment, GnuCash doesn't support OFX, but we are working on it. OFX support is definitely in the top 10 most demanded features; however, it's a very large and complicated specification and will take some time to get right.

Non-US users have other protocols that will have to be addressed one at a time. For example, Germany uses a system called HBCI. At least one German GnuCash developer (Christian Stimming) is working on HBCI support now, but I have no idea how long it will take.

Even given significant developer and user interest, it's going to be challenging to get environments where we can test any implementation (you need some kind of test account with somebody who runs the kind of server you wish to talk to, and they don't just give those accounts away willy-nilly). Having corporate sponsorship of GnuCash will hopefully prove to be useful here. We might also run into the kind of NDA-type issues that I'll discuss in my answer to question 5, which might get a little nasty.

So, in summary, you can do some things now to get information from on-line sources in QIF format. OFX downloads and interactive banking activity are in the nearby but not immediate future.

3) Custom Reports
by jmauro
Is there any possiblity or chance that custom reporting mechnisms can be added into GNUCash? (I.E. A number of rules can be set up to group certain transactions into groups and generate different reports based on other sets of rules.) It is the one thing in the 1.4 release that I thought was needed. The reports that were there seemed limited and I resorted to copying data into gnumeric to generate the reports I wanted. Does 1.6 correct this, or am I still limited to a number of default reports? Is there currently work on this area, or if not where in the code can I best look to start to add this capablity.

Robert:
The GnuCash reporting system is designed to provide both a bunch of reports that are broadly customizable and a straightforward framework for adding your own totally custom reports. We are partway there on both counts, but in any case the improvement since 1.4 is pretty great.

The set of reports that ships with gnucash-1.6 is much better than the set that shipped with 1.4, and includes several totally new features, like piecharts and bargraphs, style sheets, and save/restore of your customized reports. You can do most of the standard reporting stuff to look at your income, expenses, and assets by category and within date ranges, or list transactions matching certain patterns. The reports and graphs related to stock portfolios are pretty limited, but we are trying to find interested folks to work on these and other "sophisticated investor" features during the current development cycle.

You can customize every report through a GUI configuration interface, which generally allows you to control the appearance of the report, date ranges, what accounts are examined, etc. You can also select a "style sheet" for each report. The style sheets are separately editable, so you can build and save a "business" style sheet with your company logo and so on that you can apply to any report.

Writing custom reports requires a little knowledge of Scheme at the moment, but the ability is there and there are good examples to work from. The Scheme report generation system is very powerful and allows you to do absolutely any kind of analysis that you want to do, but it's a little intimidating for new users.

We are looking at a simplified interface using something like KDE's Kugar system, which is a simple report specification language. It's open-source so we may just steal it directly. There's a useful customization "sweet spot" that we haven't hit yet (more powerful than changing colors and titles, but less than a complete new report).

4) XML and billing
by LL
Currently there are a number of XML billing initiatives such as XMLPay, VisaXML, etc... How do you see these trends influencing the design and development of GNUcash ... in particular do you think that your users are only looking for a simple view/format/verify client (think IMAP server + XML extensions) while GNUcash moves towards being the agent of record (aka a specialised ASP?) Of you do see GNUcash as a drop-in replacement for existing monolithic accounting packages? In summary, given that the market for electronic businesses and purchases (greater use of international currency, direct attachment to electronic settlement, near real-time risk management) is going to change, how do you think GNUcash should respond?

Robert:
The issues here are similar to those in the online banking question above. We're working on supporting a lot of this stuff but it's a bit tricky.

We are talking to people from CheckFree and PayTrust about direct integration with their services, and we have a bit of code called gPal by Alp Toker which is a GTK Paypal interface; we're going to try to steal parts of it to add direct Paypal support in the soon-ish timeframe.

Right now, GnuCash doesn't really have the infrastructure needed for a "Make it so" button; it's designed to be a record of financial transactions you've done, not an agent for actually performing the transactions. We want to change that because people are really foaming at the mouth to get online bill payment working.

As far as the XML-based initiatives you mention, I'm not familiar with them. If they look like they will be widely used, it makes sense to try to support them; I'm guessing they will be at least kissing cousins to OFX/QFX, which means that once we get those working we should be able to reuse some work.

5) Cool stuff, but...
by RareHeintz
Is anything being done to make GnuCash competitive with Quicken and other products? The tour at the web site depicts a competitive feature set, but there's more to it than auto-incrementing check numbers: I, for one, would rather use the GPL'ed alternative, but most consumers will look for convenience-related features - for example, integration with their favorite online bill-paying service.

Though my question is about GnuCash specifically, I guess it does address the larger issue about how Open Source projects compete for market share and mind share with the products of well-capitalized corporations that can form strategic partnerships that (despite the shortcomings of Closed Source software generally) offer real value to consumers. Any thoughts?

Robert:
Everything we do with GnuCash is aimed at making it competitive (ultimately, superior) to Quicken and other products. We want our program to be people's choice because it's the best available, not just because it's free (in both senses). Quicken is still ahead of GnuCash in many areas, and as you point out, sometimes closed-source companies have big advantages. All I can say is "We're working on it".

The Linux Developers Group, as a company, can make the kinds of partnerships you describe and pass the results on to our clients and the GnuCash community as a whole... but we won't be in the business of violating other people's copyrights, and that will probably mean controlling access to information we receive from third parties.

For example, people want real-time stock quotes. Well, you have to pay for that, and we would get our pants sued off if we tried to buy a feed from Reuters and redistribute it to everybody and their dog for free. We are in the process of setting up direct integration of real-time quotes in Gnucash as a paid service for our customers; the code to get the quotes is free software, but you have to have authentication to use the service. That means we can have a meaningful agreement with an information source to get the quotes and pass the cost on to our customers.

This may end up happening for other services as well. We won't write proprietary extensions to Gnucash, but there may well be information that we don't own that we can only share with customers under a specific agreement with an outside party. In these cases, the code to get the information will be free but the information won't be.

6) Documentation
by quartz
Will the next major release feature some decent documentation? Extensive documentation is the only thing I miss from GNUCash. Having only recently come to live in the US, I have enough trouble understanding the local economics, so it would be good to have a nice tutorial for my personal finance management program as a starting point.

Robert:
Hey, I've *never* lived in the US, so I still have a great deal of trouble understanding just what those crazy Yanks* are up to :)

As to the documentation, we do our best, and, to be honest, I think our best is better than many of the open source projects out there. I revised, with help, a fair bit of the documentation for this release, and as well as documenting just about every new feature, we wrote a quickstart guide for new users, as well as a "what's new" guide for people upgrading for 1.6. Now, if only I can figure out a way of speeding up the process of taking a squillion new screenshots (didn't get that finished, but I'll try to get them done for 1.6.1) I'll be happy.

However, what people like yourself seem to be asking for is a tutorial on basic personal accounting, using GnuCash for the examples. We provide a little of this in the documentation (for instance, Chris Browne wrote some nice clear explanations of depreciation expenses) but there's certainly room for a lot more of that kind of thing. What would be *really* ideal is if somebody wrote a book on "managing your personal finances with GnuCash" and possibly even bundled a GnuCash CD. Hmmm, there's an idea . . .

I also wrote an introductory tutorial-style article for the April Linux Journal. Unfortunately, it's not online (unless you're an LJ subscriber), and it talks about GnuCash 1.4.x so some things are a little out of date, but if people can find it, it might help a little.

*To an Aussie, a "Yank" (or "Seppo", the derivation of which is kind of amusing but a little difficult to explain) is a citizen of the US. While it's often prefixed with "crazy", "loony" or a variety of epithets, we're casting slurs on all US citizens rather than a subset :)

7) Palm Conduit?
by woggo
I'm likely not alone in my need to be able to sync my finance software with my Visor. Are there any plans to link GnuCash to a Palm-based money manager program, a la Quicken and PocketQuicken? Or are there any plans to develop a new, GPLed "PocketGnuCash"?

Robert:
I have a Palm myself, and I'd really like this feature. I looked at doing something about it ages ago (just using the Palm's builtin expense tracker), but the old 1.4.x binary file format didn't support storing the required metadata (whereas storing metadata with the new XML file format and the engine improvements is almost trivially easy). However, by the time the new file format arrived, I was too busy trying to write reports and other stuff.

The PalmCoins project, moreover, is working on a proper GPL'd Palm-based financial application. Their stated goal is to fully support synchronization with GnuCash, and we'd be overjoyed to have that kind of functionality available. If you really want it too, go help these guys out!

Another possibility that we have started thinking seriously about is raised by the availability of Linux-based handhelds. The GUI-independent parts of the GnuCash codebase are actually pretty small and wouldn't tax a reasonably well-specified handheld device. Combined with a stripped-down GUI, a handheld version of GnuCash would IMHO make a pretty enticing application for handheld users and manufacturers . . .

8) Integer based currency type
by kbrown1
A while ago I was hesitant to use GnuCash because I discovered that it uses floating-point numbers instead of integers to store currency values. What have you done to work around the round-off errors inherent in such a system, and do you plan to migrate to an integer based system? If so, when?

Robert:
GnuCash 1.6 stores all quantities and performs all calculations using an exact (integer-based) numeric representation. Our code was the result of extended, er, "discussions" on issues of currency representation and rounding, and consequently it provides pretty comprehensive facilities for determining and specifying the appropriate precision, and exactly how results should be rounded (or not) to that precision, if required.

In practice, errors that were actually the fault of the floating-point representation were very rare, but "very rare" doesn't really cut it if we want GnuCash to become a <buzzword>enterprise-ready</buzzword> business accounting system. Getting this stuff right took a lot of time and effort, and doesn't result in any new user-visible features. We really have tried very hard to get the bedrock good, so that we can add even more gloss in future releases.

9) Taxes
by ichimunki
Moreso than simple home accounting software, I'm interested in electronic tax filing. Any plans to integrate GnuCash with any existing filing services, or to integrate tax features into the program (if there are any, I apologize for overlooking them)? As tax preparation and filing are services many of us are comfortable paying a fee for (especially online), I don't wonder if there isn't a revenue stream in there somewhere, as well.

Robert:
There are some tax-preparation features in GnuCash 1.6 (via the Tax Report and TAXTXF export), and we hope to get more soon. The problem with tax preparation is that the rules are constantly changing and they are different for every town, state/province, and country.

We haven't really looked at integration with existing filing services, but that sounds like a pretty reasonable approach. You'd have to ask the author of the Tax Report, Richard "Gilligan" Uschold, how his current work could lead to that.

My only concern with electronically submitting tax forms is that I'd imagine you could face large fines (or, highly unlikely as it may be) prison, for submitting an incorrect tax return, not to mention the risk of security holes . . . so it's a feature that you'd have to plan with some considerable care. However, I'm not sure what the other developers, particularly US-based ones, think of the idea.

One area of tax preparation which I do personally intend to look at is GST/VAT/Sales Tax. In jurisdictions with a value-added tax, the ability to track and conveniently report the amounts of that tax collected at sales time, and included in goods purchased by your business is essential. There has been some debate on the lists as to how we tackle it, and hopefully soon we'll be able to resolve such debate and actually get on with implementation.

10) Illuminati & Mafia (+5, funny)
by FortKnox
I heard that GnuCash is the Accounting program of choice for the Mafia and Illuminati (the whole Trilateral Commission, I believe). My question is: Do you plan on adding features for efficent money laundering to help your best customers?

Robert:
/me checks over his shoulder to make sure no-one's looking

Well, actually, the true world conspiracy is cricket. The Mafia and Illuminati are really just small pieces in the plan - as is Linux. While big US corporations attempt to lock up American sports in pay-per-view and sponsorship deals, we're steadily working on open-source server and streaming media solutions, which we'll spread far and wide . . . and all that will be left to broadcast is . . . cricket. We'll make ourselves incredibly rich selling cheap-n-nasty sports memorabilia to every sports bar in America (cricket has such long periods between any action, it's perfect for lots of advertising slots), as well as online betting with reputable subcontinental and middle eastern bookmakers - and that's where GnuCash fits in . . .

oh wait, there's a bunch of guys in suits and sunglasses at the door, oh, f*&Y*&, help me please, they're dragging me away from the keyb67*

---------------
- Robert Merkel
rgmerk@mira.net

LinuxTag started today. Many of the usual exhibitors can be seen, and the floor is quite busy. Especially noteworth is the crowded KDE booth where they are excited about the 2.2 Betas. kazekiri sent us a report from Slashdot/Japan which you'll need to translate to read, but apparently one of the hotels was closed for hygiene reasons, and many of the developers are without a place to sleep. So now they are staying in a gymnasium! Fortunately for me, my hotel is open and I got a good nights sleep (after 36 hours without any) and am preparing for my keynote Saturday afternoon, and a Q&A session Sunday afternoon. If you're in Stuttgart, check it out, just don't try any of that Deutsch on me, I barely passed that class.

Patrick Mullen writes "The Duke of URL has just posted their review of XFree86 4.1.0. The review covers its new features, the fixes since 4.0.3, performance (2D and 3D) and even takes a look at what ground has been made in ATI, NVIDIA, 3dfx, and Matrox's drivers." Compares performance to windows where applicable and to X403. Looks like the speed gains are real. Hope it gets put into sid soon for us apt junkies.

CarrotLord asks: "Looking at the recent release of IBM's Small Business Suite for Linux got me wondering about distribution compatibility and standards. Personally, I run Debian, and am considering a move to Progeny. However, I am concerned by the fact that many products (particularly commercial ones) are available for only a particular subset of distributions (usually RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, TurboLinux and Caldera, but rarely Debian-based distributions or the BSDs). What is the current state of play, particularly in regards to tools for developers to enable them to create and test installation packages for various distributions?" Such a tool would go a long way in removing the force behind the "Linux fragmentation" argument that most of Linux's detractors often refer to.

"How are the LSB and the FSSTND affecting consistency between distros? What about RPM and APT? What tools are there available for developers of software to ensure that their software runs on the widest variety of systems? Is there some software development or packaging tool to assist developers in making distribution-independant software, so they can create files in dpkg, RPM and tgz formats for any distribution without much additional effort on their part? What about tools to test their software installation on individual distributions, and assist with the resolution of problems? Should this be up to the individual distributions, or should be have a unified approach?"

CarrotLord asks: "Looking at the recent release of IBM's Small Business Suite for Linux got me wondering about distribution compatibility and standards. Personally, I run Debian, and am considering a move to Progeny. However, I am concerned by the fact that many products (particularly commercial ones) are available for only a particular subset of distributions (usually RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, TurboLinux and Caldera, but rarely Debian-based distributions or the BSDs). What is the current state of play, particularly in regards to tools for developers to enable them to create and test installation packages for various distributions?" Such a tool would go a long way in removing the force behind the "Linux fragmentation" argument that most of Linux's detractors often refer to.

"How are the LSB and the FSSTND affecting consistency between distros? What about RPM and APT? What tools are there available for developers of software to ensure that their software runs on the widest variety of systems? Is there some software development or packaging tool to assist developers in making distribution-independant software, so they can create files in dpkg, RPM and tgz formats for any distribution without much additional effort on their part? What about tools to test their software installation on individual distributions, and assist with the resolution of problems? Should this be up to the individual distributions, or should be have a unified approach?"

Carlos Laviola writes: "Ben Collins is the new DPL. The results of the 2001 leadership election have been posted a few minutes ago on the debian-devel-announce and debian-vote mailing lists. The announcement is here. Congratulations to Ben Collins and the other candidates!"

Paul Nelson, writing "We are educators who think using open source software in public agencies is the responsible thing to do," says "We have released a turn-key terminal server distribution based on RH7 and the LTSP packages. Simply install Linux and start plugging in your diskless terminals. Very little or no configuration is required. We've included some cool educational software and have (with permission) bundled StarOffice as part of the install. To kick things off we have 1000 Intel Celeron processors to give to schools building Linux terminals. We also have some Xeon processors to help schools building servers. Our goal is to have 1000 terminals in 100 schools by one day (July 4th.) For more info including links to download the CD-Install image (650mb) head for http://www.riverdale.k12.or.us/linux/." Any parents (or other aggrieved taxpayers) out there might be interested in showing this off at a PTA meeting. You may also be interested in the Simple End User Linux and the Debian Jr. projects.

An anonymous user wrote in to tell us (and Timothy called RH and confirmed, this change was made a few weeks ago) that you no longer can Freely and Anonymously use Red Hat's Update Agent to download updated package DBs, and update packages. You must register, and pay $9.95 for the service. Of course you can still update manually, but how long before other services pop up to take its place? And Debian still does apt without me having to tell them where I live. This is unfortunate, but not unsurprising. I want RH to make a buck too, but this seems like a pretty crappy way to do it. Update: 03/19 03:21 PM by T : An unnamed reader points to this FAQ on the change, too.

Daniel Quinlan writes "Today, the Free Standards Group released version 1.2 of the Linux Development Platform Specification and let loose with the public review of FHS 2.2-beta that will be used in the Linux Standard Base (and is already being used by distributions). Also of note, the Linux Standard Base has a new chairman, George Kraft IV, and the LSB specification is nearing completion. Really."

The Open Source Initiative has modified their official definition of an open source software license. The change itself is minor, but they're also calling for more input on other possible improvements to the definition - see below for more.

Russ Nelson writes: "We changed the Open Source Definition today. Some people had the idea that "may not" in Section 1 meant that they had a choice. We changed it to "shall not". Other changes may be in the offing. The OSD says nothing about use licenses or patents, for example.

"A use license is largely unenforcable by itself. How can you tell what people are doing with software if anyone is allowed to redistribute it to anyone they want? Some parties have tried to enforce a use license by requiring the non-removal of certain parts of the code. This is, in itself, already prohibited by the OSD, however it's best not to rely on indirection to keep use licenses off Open Source software.

"Patents are a problem that have been anticipated by some licensors. In part the furor over the APSL 1.0 was produced because they reserved the right to revoke the license if it turned out that they were licensing software patented by someone else. A number of new licenses have specifically included terms that require contributors to license any applicable patents. And yet the OSD does not require this. What is the good of an OSI Certified piece of Open Source unless you can use it? And you certainly shouldn't allow someone to sue any contributor over patent infringement and still have a license to use the software.

"Are there other lapses in the Open Source Definition? Send them to me and I'll summarize for the board. Speaking of the board, Brian Behlendorf (Apache/Collab) and Ian Murdock (he put the ian in Debian/Progeny) have resigned, and Guido van Rossum (creator of Python) and Michael Tiemann (co-founder of Cygnus) have taken their place."

SquadBoy writes "The fine people at Debian have created a Telemetry Box Distribution this is what they have to say about it. "Version 1.0 of the Telemetry Box Distribution has finally been released. The Tbox distribution is a Debian GNU/Linux 'potato' based custom Linux version for remote monitoring and maintenance of networks. A telemetry box allows remote management and diagnostics. It uses a customized version of netsaint to gather data. Netsaint has been enhanced so that the configuration is possible via the Tbox Webinterface through SQL structures. Netsaint logs into a SQL table. Tools on the Tbox can then display the data in a variety of ways (graphs or reports)."" Storie's a bit old, but it's a cool little box.

SquadBoy writes "The fine people at Debian have created a Telemetry Box Distribution this is what they have to say about it. "Version 1.0 of the Telemetry Box Distribution has finally been released. The Tbox distribution is a Debian GNU/Linux 'potato' based custom Linux version for remote monitoring and maintenance of networks. A telemetry box allows remote management and diagnostics. It uses a customized version of netsaint to gather data. Netsaint has been enhanced so that the configuration is possible via the Tbox Webinterface through SQL structures. Netsaint logs into a SQL table. Tools on the Tbox can then display the data in a variety of ways (graphs or reports)."" Storie's a bit old, but it's a cool little box.

mojo-raisin writes: "After more than a year of development, the first release of OMS has been made on www.linuxvideo.org. For those of you running Debian see this message for an easy installation to your system." Looks like you need a cutting-edge libc6, among other things.

reptyle asks: "Over Xmas dinner, a friend of the family told us she was considering launching a partnership between her employer FNMA (colloquially known as Fannie Mae; they are a semi-private company that guarantees mortgages) and Microsoft to provide training and eventually, surplus hardware to private individuals and non-profit outfits. I lamented this choice and she suggested that I e-mail her names and URLs of companies as alternative recommendations. So far I have come up with: Debian, Red Hat (distributions), VA Linux, Penguin (hardware companies), and maybe a few non-profit advocacy groups, but I think the list is still a bit too short. I can't think of any other entities that might be appropriate so I figured I'd ask Slashdot readers for help in providing other organizations that I may have missed. I don't care whether the organization uses Linux or BSD, just as long as it's not a proprietary model."

Tor asks: "Is there a way to get mouse wheel support (button 4 & 5 events) under Solaris/Sparc? OpenWindows seems to support only 3 buttons, since that's what Sun mice have. XFree86 exists for Solaris/x86 and Linux/Sparc, but not Solaris/Sparc. Why do I need this? I have a Linux laptop next to my Sun workstation, and merge the two displays using David Chaiken's excellent x2x utility. This works great! I have patched it to allow mapping of extra buttons to keyboard events (like x2vnc), but would really like button4 and button5 events to be passed on to the applications on the Sun side."

wish bot sent in a link to a ZD Net story that talks about how Linux distributions are too big. Many valid points... of course IMHO my distribution is exactly the right size, and I apt-get all the bloat if I want it, later.

A few people noted that Debian has brought the 'Testing' Tree on-line. So now we have Stable (currently potato) for production boxes, Testing (woody) for settling things down before an eventual release, and a new unstable tree for those of us who'd just rather things randomly break. Here's a bit more info if you're curious.

A few people noted that Debian has brought the 'Testing' Tree on-line. So now we have Stable (currently potato) for production boxes, Testing (woody) for settling things down before an eventual release, and a new unstable tree for those of us who'd just rather things randomly break. Here's a bit more info if you're curious.

mirko writes "After some time with almost no news about it, Doctor Dobb's journal finally choosed to break the silence and to deliver quite a comprehensive article (also available here) about the forthcoming Debian Hurd ^[?] operating system."

Netsnipe writes: "Shortly after the release of Progeny Debian Beta 1, I wrote an article on DebianPlanet called "Blurring the Line Between Pure Debian and its Commercial Variants" questioning the standing of commercial variants of Debian among the many purists to Debian's non-commercial principles who would find it hard-pressed to stray from mainstream Debian. The article's accompanying poll illustrated that an overwhelming 58% of respondents would not use a commercial variant of Debian as opposed to 32% who would. Ian Murdock, a former founding member of Debian GNU/Linux and now the founder and CEO of Progeny Linux Systems has written an interesting reply to my article where he defends Progeny despite its commercial leanings and explains how he feels it stands within the Debian scene. "

sammy!! writes "Debian unstable now has XFree86 4.0, so use apt-get or dselect and start downloading the new packages!" There are still a ton of issues with it, but I've been using the XF86 debs for several months on my desktop, with no significant problems.

Scooter[AMMO] was one of the first with this report: "According to Turbolinux CEO Paul Thomas, the future will see Linux boiled down to one generic distribution. Catch the scoop here. How can this claim be made? How can a system like Debian throw away all its guidelines to create a generic distribution? I won't give up apt, and I sure don't see RH accepting it. Why should Peter let the uber-stable power user-oriented Slackware head towards the bug infested hail-the-script-kiddies Red Hat? Standards are great, but aren't the ideals of different distributions what give Linux its flavour?"

Forager writes: "Tux the Penguin is no longer just a logo. He's also a racecar. Sort of. Sunspire Studios has just released the game Tux Racer for the Windows and Linux operating systems (OpenGL required). From their website: "Tux Racer lets you take on the role of Tux the Linux Penguin as he races down steep, snow-covered mountains. Enter cups and compete to win the title! Tux Racer includes a variety of options for gameplay, including the abilty to race courses in fog, at night, and under high winds." Great graphics. Slick gameplay. Cool stuff. Getting great reviews, too. Oh, and did I mention it's totally free? Very cool stuff indeed." Quite cool looking. It's in apt so Debian users can just 'apt-get install tuxracer' and check it out. It ain't no Mario Kart 64, but then again, what is? Screenshots are impressive too.

A slew of people wrote in about the release of Netscape 6, PR 3 this morning -- Windows version, Linux 2.2, and Mac, assuming you speak English or Japanese. The word from Netscape is that French and German will be "soon." 'Course, I still think that apt-getting a certain Mozilla is all ya need, but hey.

msnomer writes: "Debian is planning to replace their installer for Woody, their next release. Plans are to have it be highly modular, using debian packages as the modules. The discussion is going on in the debian-boot mailing list; you can also read the design draft on the web site." This looks very interesting -- as a recent Debian recipient (victim?) at the hands of an expert, I must say the install is pretty intimidating. This sounds like a smart area to focus on, but what would an ideal installer consist of, anyhow? Give examples, double space;)

msnomer writes: "Debian is planning to replace their installer for Woody, their next release. Plans are to have it be highly modular, using debian packages as the modules. The discussion is going on in the debian-boot mailing list; you can also read the design draft on the web site." This looks very interesting -- as a recent Debian recipient (victim?) at the hands of an expert, I must say the install is pretty intimidating. This sounds like a smart area to focus on, but what would an ideal installer consist of, anyhow? Give examples, double space;)

the_quark writes: "According to this ZDNet story, RedHat will be rolling out a subscription update service with 7.0, which will be available by FTP on Monday." They're also announcing the "Red Hat Network" which essentially adds something like Debian's apt-get function that I've been using for a couple years now *grin*. BTW, has anyone played with gnome-apt? Not bad.

Floris pointed us to an excellent article over at Freshmeat discussing the problems with RPM. It compares RPM to the other alternatives (mainly Debian's apt system) and discusses where the problems are. It's not a distribution war thing, this is a serious problem that needs discussing. Read the story and chime in.

James Cownie asks: "The Linux kernel development is an open process, we all know that, but, as an unknown in the community it seems impossible to attract the attention of anyone on the kernel list. I'm not trying to reimplement huge kernel subsystems or do anything major, but I found a genuine kernel bug, documented it and submitted a patch on the kernel mail list; to be met with complete and utter silence. Just as if no-one had read my mail at all. I can stand and react to abuse, or requests to fix my patch, or whatever, but what can I do in response to silence?" UPDATED

"I can't mail Alan Cox (who seems the right person for a fix to 2.2) directly because he rejects all mail from folks he doesn't know. Since the bug causes problems for gdb I mailed the gdb developer list, but also met with silence. So, how can I get someone to take notice? If no-one does, what's the point of an 'open' process? I may as well not bother."

First off, a good deal of patience is necessary when dealing with developers, they can be extremely busy when it comes to dealing with the pressures not only from their day jobs, but also from their code, their other hobbies and whatever time is left over for them to have lives to themselves. Even on internet time, certain things (like bug reports) will slip thru the cracks and seemingly fall into the ether...a few times, this might be the case, most often though, it is not and the developer just hasn't gotten to your bug/comment/suggestion yet.

A suggestion to developers: If you haven't looekd into this, it might not hurt to automate some form of reply stating your situation so that you don't alienate users by your non-response.

Thoughts?

Update: 09/05 11:50 PM by C : Alan Cox had this to say via email:

"I can't mail Alan Cox (who seems the right person for a fix to 2.2) directly because he rejects all mail from folks he doesn't know."

This is wrong. I reject mail from sites in ORBS, RBL or other major spam block lists.

A few things I'd suggest:

1. There is a REPORTING-BUGS file in 2.2/2.3 kernels
2. You should start with MAINTAINERS in the kernel for kernel bug reports
3. If its a vendor supplied kernel start with the vendor bug report system such as http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla [for Red Hat]. ( C : There's also Debian's bug reporting system at http://www.debian.org/Bugs, and the one for Mandrake-Linux at http://www.linux-mandrake.com/bugs, for other flavors of Linux, check your vendor's homepage)

#3 is important. Vendor kernels rarely match the default due to timing issues, desire to ship stuff like USB, Reiserfs, 3D acceleration and more."

As I said, the developers are listening. You just might need to take the time to find the right communication channel. For a bug report to be worth something, it has to end up in the right place.

Ur@eus writes "There are some nice screenshoots of Red Carpet available from the Helix site. Red Carpet is Helix Code's upcomming package manager and it looks really great. Look here for the screenshots." This is a quite amazing looking little application... even looks to support Debian, so I'm happy as a clam. Very pretty and well designed. It'll be cool to test it out for real.

truefluke writes: "This was forwarded to me, from a friend who is a very loyal Debian supporter, with the cool news that Debian could become 'more up to date more often'. This news appeared here on the Debian news source. A good idea, and prob incentive for more folks to try out Debian without resorting to the old saw of 'too old / too slow.'" Debian developer Anthony Towns says in the list posting mentioned there that "[t]his is a (mostly finished) project that will allow us to test out distribution by making it "sludgey" rather than frozen[.]" Sounds like the same logic behind the Caldera "Technology Preview" and Red Hat's Rawhide -- give people more of what they want of The Bleeding Edge, without getting reckless with the official release.

With a planned move to San Francisco next summer, last week saw San Jose's last Linux World Expo, at least for now. The future as always is stubbornly uncertain, but it's impressive that the serendipitous combination of Free tools (from GNU) and a Free kernel (from Linus) has inspired enough interest and prosperity to excite a larger group of people each year. If you've not had the chance to attend one of these expositions, we hope this article will give you a flavor of what it's like. Note: Here are a few pictures from the floor (Day 1 & Day 2) contributed by Sensei^); do you have any cool shots to link to in comments?

First, the prelude: If you've worked on the pre-show aspects of anything from a high-school play to a LAN party, you know all those booths, displays, people and computers don't materialize by themselves. For several days before the show floor opened on Tuesday, forklift crews zipped cargos of wooden, fiberglass, plastic, aluminum and steel cases from moving trucks to exhibit spaces. These contained banners, snap-together modules, computers, lighted signs -- and Yes, more gratis logo-imprinted toys than you can wave a TuxTops LED light at.

Spiderwebs of CAT-5 and electric cord (run beneath the show floor) sprouted from the centerpoints of many booths, with strands for each computer to be connected to the Net during the show. Rolls of padding and carpet came next, then the slow assembly of display booths. These ranged from no-nonsense fabric partitions that housed companies like TuxTops and Sendmail (and legions of volunteers from PerlMonks, the Simple End User Linux project, Flightgear, and many others), to elaborate constructions with motorized signs, projected lasers and huge illuminated logos. Note: Slashdot (the site) was put together last week mostly from the comfy chairs of the PerlMonks booth.

The "C" (as in conference) part of LWCE got started on Monday, and for the days that followed, attendees got instruction -- on everything from Linux security to evangelizing Free software to their bosses-- in half-day doses. Meanwhile, the setup work continued into the wee hours, as exhibitors raced the clock to make sure that at least their signs, if not their networks, were up for the next day. And at the OSDN booth (home of the red-carpeted Slashdot stage and beanbags), prep work included stacking thousands of boxed distributions of Debian, and attempted to pawn a few copies off on every passer by.

Tuesday morning, at a shade before 10:00, visitors willing to miss Michael Dell's keynote began to stream into the halls, on a quest to find new distros, old friends, and swag. It's amazing what companies will give away in order to snag a little nook in your brain. Besides the usual trinkets (keychains, T-shirts, stickers) and the distributions that a Linux show would be empty without, booth visitors were handed everything from knives (Sendmail) to cute monkeys (Helixcode) to embarrassing pictures of themselves (BSDi), as well as too many toys with embedded LEDs to bother counting. Rather than a full swag accounting (which would only annoy those unable to attend), let me just say that you won't hurt for toys when the chance presents itself. (CT:I just wanted to note that VA gave away 2300 pounds of shrink-wrapped boxed Debian. Like 5000 copies. It was beautiful)

The things on display around the LWCE floor were more interesting than the toys, though. (And unlike a museum, most were available for hands-on demonstration, not hidden behind glass.) Indrema showed a prototype player (not in the sleek black box you see on their Web site, but still sporting that cool blue LED) hooked up to a HDTV display, playing a very fast game of Quake. (CT:Actually it was an HDTV demo, they promised the real deal will be less vaporous before I have children) In the Intel booth were server clusters populated with quad Itanium processors, demonstrating failover when one system was rudely but intentionally shut down. The amazing-like-emacs-is-amazing Flightgear project showed a really nice looking demo which is enough incentive by itself to invest in a better video card for my system so I can play with it.

Both Helixcode and Eazel made their first LWCE appearance this time around, exciting for those filling their anti-FUD cannon for the perpetual "Linux is tough to use" argument. The Eazel folks showing off Nautilus seemed to be all but cackling as they showed off the smoothness of the zooming information available for documents and the cool music-integration abilities it contains. It would have been cool if they'd had some sample CDs, but they promise a developers' release soon. (CT:They also promised .deb's, but I'll believe it when I see it. The UI was awesome, I just hope that someone hacks in something like the GUI command line in EFM)

Considering that Sun was showing off the GNOME desktop on Solaris (hinting at its inclusion in stock Solaris systems sometime very soon, too) and that the GNOME project itself was not only in one of the small booths against the wall but the subject of a big announcement -- about the advent of the GNOME Foundation -- it looks it's showing up everywhere. Happily, there seems to be no shortage of room for window managers right now: the KDE folks were also there not only in their own booth, but showing up in software demonstrations all over the floor, as SuSE, Caldera and others demonstrated the very slick KDE 2.0. (Can't we all just get along, anyhow?)

SuSE, by the way, was the only distributor I noticed showing off Linux on Apple hardware, and their current distro was sweet and fast on a G4. Beyond the curious lack of Apples, and the obvious ubiquity of x86 machines, there were machines based on everything from microcontrollers to StrongArm, MIPS, Alpha, Itanium ... even the IBM S/390s which have gotten attention for the ridiculous number of concurrent Linux systems they can support.

For all the cool hardware and cusp-of-reality, bleeding-edge distros, it's interesting that the announcement which seemed to generate the most buzz of the entire show was the long-awaited release of Debian's Potato. Considering the reputation that Debian has for intelligent upgrading, stability, and diligence in guarding the license of the software which makes it up, it's not as surprising as it might otherwise be that Debian's new release made people sit up a bit more than the newest offerings from the large commercial distros.

(CT: Also extremely impressive was the Pocket Linux booth, where they actually had iPaq's running Linux. The first dude that demoed the box to me was very nice, but what I really wanted to see was X11 running on it ... oddly enough, I encountered one of his cohorts in the bar later that night who showed it to me: X, xeyes, xterm, and twm running on an iPaq. When they get the wireless action going on these things I'm totally there ... I'll just need to hack minimalist interfaces onto pronto and my MP3 player software and use the thing as a portable X terminal on the local 802.11 wireless lan. Yum.)

Oh, and there were people on the floor as well -- close to 20,000, all told. I met some folks I've known previously only through IRC, and quite a few I might never have otherwise encountered.

It's interesting to see in the space of a few hours many of the smart people who you may experience vicariously through writings, speeches, code, art or IRC chatter -- and it also belies the idea that software celebrities of the Free software world are becoming celebrities of the traditional variety, since everyone from ESR to Jon "maddog" Hall (and Linus himself) are willing to talk to anyone who catches up with them long enough to say hello. The atmosphere (especially outside the mondo corporate-castle booths) is mellow and accomodating, and suprisingly so even within most of those castles. There were undoubtably personality conflicts at work, but it seems like most people have the good grace to deal nicely with each other for these few days at least.

At the close of each day, people shuffle out to drop laptops, T-shirts and bags of stuff at their hotels, then thousands of them show up to parties sponsored by companies from AMD to Red hat to VA, which are full-blown events in themselves. Mandrake's party, for instance, had go-go dancers in cages, which may be the most bacchanal thing I have ever witnessed. Ironically, though, many coders couldn't attend even events sponsored by their own companies, or thrown in the honor of their projects, because of strict carding policies. Wouldn't a chem-free party or two be a thoughtful way to include people?

(CT: This has been a consistent problem for several years. Although I know at "Someones" party (no names *grin*) they weren't carding, and I recieved many a happy note from fellow attendees proclaiming that they were able to get in. The parties themselves weren't bad: the OSDN/Potato release party was fun, with San & Zak spinning the tunes (next time we'll force CowboyNeal to scratch for us under threat of death). They had 2 buildings: one was a pool hall, where we tormented The Pope for nearly an hour, carefully distracting him, and then returning his balls to the table. He never noticed. We also met up with Nitrozac from After Y2k, and I snuck accross the street to the Eazel party for a bit, and got to meet Dave "You might remember me from cheat codes in some first person shooter" Taylor.) Attendeees mostly filed out for flights or drives home Thursday and Friday, but some are still in San Jose for the Intel Developers Conference, or otherwise enjoying the Northern California weather. It's a strange familiarity that many of them will feel when the next big conference rolls around, to see many of the same fellow attendees or workers -- of course, by the time the next big conference happens, perhaps we'll all be too excited by the release of 2.4 to notice.

Tonight at The Usual is our now traditional LWCE mega party. This time it's brought to us by OSDN, VA Linux, and all the assorted sites like Linux.com, Themes.org, SourceForge, ThinkGeek and what have you. The party is of course to celebrate the Debian 2.2 release. Music will be provided by San 'NeTTwerk' Mehat DJing and featuring Jon 'CowboyNeal' Pater scratching. The party starts at 8pm and continues well past my bed time.

batsman was among the countless folks to announce that Potato is now Stable... i.e., Debian 2.2 has been released. The ISO is available, but I'm not linking (not because I'm an elitist (although I am) but to at least try to let the mirrors do their thing). No official word outside of mailing lists, but the 'stable' directory is now Potato. Congrats to all the ever slaving Debian developers... time to dist-upgrade those boxes that aren't already running woody! It's official now since the release is on Debian's site *grin*