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The following was written by Slashdot reader Peter C. Norton

Scott Ananian (cananian@mit.edu) and I have been working with the LinuxOne "LinuxMac 0.9" product here at LinuxWorld Expo to figure out what's going on with the product, what it is, and whether there is value in their product. Scott was particularly interested and well informed about Macintosh hardware, since he works on maintaining the part of the kernel that supports Linux on Mac 68030 hardware (the old mac se/30, some the mac ii's, etc.).

In a way, we're following up on the information at: this page.

You'll see an assertion from a representative of LinuxOne that the LinuxMac product is a result of proprietary technology developed in a prior business by a company owned by the founder of LinuxOne. I can conclusively assert that based on using the pre-release of this product that this is currently completely false. Also, the program claims to be version 1.0, though the floppy says 0.9.

First of all, the floppy that they are selling to users contains a single RPM package, whose contents are as follows:

/root/Desktop/LinuxMac.kdelnk
/usr/local/bin/CLFormatter
/usr/local/bin/CommonLink
/usr/local/bin/cl
/usr/local/bin/cm
/usr/local/bin/hformat
/usr/share/common-link/linuxone-logo.bmp

The main program is CommonLink. Notice the "hformat" command? That's the utility that comes with the HFS Utilities that LinuxOne's representative claimed isn't even on their development network. However:

[root@col /root]# /usr/local/bin/hformat --license

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
[root@col /root]#

There isn't any source code on the floppy, though, and I expect to be talking with LinuxOne about this.

Anyway, the CommonLink application itself is a KDE-based gui that talks launches a mounting application or a formatting application. Each one gives you the option to do these things with a "Windows 95" "Mac" or "Linux" option. The mounting application has no logic internally to mount any media. It calls the system-standard "mount" utility. Scott and I have confirmed this - there is no possibility that we're wrong about this. After mounting the floppy with the mount command, it invokes the KDE File Manager, KFM, to present the floppy to the end user. Conclusion: they wrote a very small gui in C++ to invoke standard utilities.

The second utility, the formatting program, calls the standard linux fdformat utility (a low level formatter to prepare a floppy for any use), and then it calls hformat to put a mac filesystem on it.

If a "quick erase" (ala the windows formatting stuff) is done, then it just runs:

hformat -l MacFloppy /dev/fd0H1440

Though if you put s space in the name after -l it breaks (a beginner's programming error).

Conclusion: This is just another simple gui which uses utilities which are not written, maintained, or contributed to by LinuxOne or its staff.

In short:

The LinuxMac product contains no proprietary technology. It relies on standard linux kernel modules for filesystems (confirmed through testing), and it relies on standard system utilities to access floppies (again, confirmed through testing).

In addition, the utilities are only useable by root. There is no way a user could use these utilities to format or mount a floppy without the root user making changes to the system.

Please let me know if you're interested in the details of the testing, or if you have any other questions.

The following was written by Slashdot reader Peter C. Norton

Scott Ananian (cananian@mit.edu) and I have been working with the LinuxOne "LinuxMac 0.9" product here at LinuxWorld Expo to figure out what's going on with the product, what it is, and whether there is value in their product. Scott was particularly interested and well informed about Macintosh hardware, since he works on maintaining the part of the kernel that supports Linux on Mac 68030 hardware (the old mac se/30, some the mac ii's, etc.).

In a way, we're following up on the information at: this page.

You'll see an assertion from a representative of LinuxOne that the LinuxMac product is a result of proprietary technology developed in a prior business by a company owned by the founder of LinuxOne. I can conclusively assert that based on using the pre-release of this product that this is currently completely false. Also, the program claims to be version 1.0, though the floppy says 0.9.

First of all, the floppy that they are selling to users contains a single RPM package, whose contents are as follows:

/root/Desktop/LinuxMac.kdelnk
/usr/local/bin/CLFormatter
/usr/local/bin/CommonLink
/usr/local/bin/cl
/usr/local/bin/cm
/usr/local/bin/hformat
/usr/share/common-link/linuxone-logo.bmp

The main program is CommonLink. Notice the "hformat" command? That's the utility that comes with the HFS Utilities that LinuxOne's representative claimed isn't even on their development network. However:

[root@col /root]# /usr/local/bin/hformat --license

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
[root@col /root]#

There isn't any source code on the floppy, though, and I expect to be talking with LinuxOne about this.

Anyway, the CommonLink application itself is a KDE-based gui that talks launches a mounting application or a formatting application. Each one gives you the option to do these things with a "Windows 95" "Mac" or "Linux" option. The mounting application has no logic internally to mount any media. It calls the system-standard "mount" utility. Scott and I have confirmed this - there is no possibility that we're wrong about this. After mounting the floppy with the mount command, it invokes the KDE File Manager, KFM, to present the floppy to the end user. Conclusion: they wrote a very small gui in C++ to invoke standard utilities.

The second utility, the formatting program, calls the standard linux fdformat utility (a low level formatter to prepare a floppy for any use), and then it calls hformat to put a mac filesystem on it.

If a "quick erase" (ala the windows formatting stuff) is done, then it just runs:

hformat -l MacFloppy /dev/fd0H1440

Though if you put s space in the name after -l it breaks (a beginner's programming error).

Conclusion: This is just another simple gui which uses utilities which are not written, maintained, or contributed to by LinuxOne or its staff.

In short:

The LinuxMac product contains no proprietary technology. It relies on standard linux kernel modules for filesystems (confirmed through testing), and it relies on standard system utilities to access floppies (again, confirmed through testing).

In addition, the utilities are only useable by root. There is no way a user could use these utilities to format or mount a floppy without the root user making changes to the system.

Please let me know if you're interested in the details of the testing, or if you have any other questions.