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Linux.org reports: Wednesday afternoon around 5pm EST someone was able to get into the registrar account for our domain and point DNS to another server -- as well as lock us out from changing it. They pointed the domain name to a pretty rude page for most of the evening until Cloudflare stepped in and blocked the domain for us.

After a lot of back and forth with our registrar, we were able to get things back under our control. I'd like to point out that our server environment was not touched so there are no worries about your data. We've gone over security protocols and are tightening things up that may have slipped through in the past. Thanks for your support!
Linux.org apparently pointed to a page exclaiming "G3T 0WNED L1NUX N3RDZ", which also included a NSFW picture, some abusive language, a shout-out to recently-deceased programmer Terry Davis, and a link to an article about Linus Torvalds' controversial apology for "his hostile behavior towards others in the community."

Long-time Slashdot reader Grady Martin says he also saw the page pointing to "presumably doxed info" about the creator of Linux's code of conduct, a fact confirmed by a report in the Register. "As for how it was hacked, [Linux.org owner Mike] McLagan blames the public Whois displaying his partner's email address -- presumably the hacker worked their way into the Yahoo email account listed as the admin of the site and from there requested a password change in her Network Solutions account to gain access to the domain."

This site's "Your Rights Online" section, sadly, has never suffered for material. The revelations we've seen over the last year-and-change, though, of widespread spying on U.S. citizens, government spying in the E.U. on international conferences, the UK's use of malware against citizens, and the use of modern technology to oppress government protesters in the middle east and elsewhere shows how persistent it is. It's been a banner year on that front, and the banner says "You are being spied on, online and off." A broad coalition of organizations is calling today "The Day We Fight Back" against the growing culture of heads-they-win, tails-you-lose surveillance, but all involved know this is not a one-day struggle. (Read more, below.) THREE REASONS TO HATE MASS SURVEILLANCE:

1) Because the Internet is nearly everywhere, it means the spying it makes possible has spread to match its footprint. 30 years ago, "on the internet" really was novel, because the public Internet simply wasn't. There were a few big military and academic sites around the world, and the concepts that make today's internet work were already embodied in running systems, but there was little reason for individuals to care about privacy invasion, or having their systems crippled by government malware, because their systems and their privacy weren't at issue. There wasn't a World Wide Web as a portal to nearly every resource online, no "Cloud," and no Blue Coat. Now, not only can individuals get on the internet, but the meaning of that phrase has moved, fast, over the last decade: now, getting on the internet is just a fact of modern life, a banal, automated background fact of the way we stay in touch with friends, deal with bills, find entertainment, get directions, and work. Online surveillance of all the signals we emit and receive (over home internet links, over cellular networks, on landline telephones, even on postcards) might be minimized and waved away as the collection of "mere" metadata, but in reality, if you're reading these words online, and even if you're doing your best to read them anonymously, it means you've almost certainly got a collection of data about you online already.

2) Because "online surveillance" is a slippery slope, and it will only get slipperier. Remember the Clipper chip's hardware-based encryption escrow scheme? Who and how often you email, chat with online, or call on the phone is the tip of the iceberg. Robert Bork didn't like having his video watching habits spied on, and that was before Netflix and competitors made the sorting and stacking of movie-watching habits not only possible but an never-ending exercise in deep data analysis. Maybe you don't care in particular about what the NSA, FBI, or anyone else thinks of your taste in entertainment, but you might prefer them to stay out not only of the information revealed by your current online activity, but also out of whatever things are revealed by future developments. Right now, a relatively small part of the online population uses crypto-currency like Bitcoin; a decade from now, it seems likely to be even more widespread than Netflix is today. Do you want your transactions to be public record, or even public-servant record? Beyond that, the era of ubiquitous, automated surveillance doesn't need you to mail an angry letter, or declare allegiance to an unpopular cause online: Just walking around means sooner rather than later you're likely to be captured on camera.

Access to your medical records almost certainly will be online, too, even more than it already is. Online and offline lives will only get blurrier: Your GPS (and increasingly, that means your phone, too) knows where you've been, and your should-be-private Google Maps page knows where you might have considered going. (Couple that with the cavalier attitude that dominates rules about data that you carry in your phone, laptop or USB data sticks, if you cross, or even come near, the U.S. border.) Think about the meta-data (or what the government might characterize that way) that your reading and viewing habits, your prescription medicine needs, your airline tickets, and your Amazon wishlist could reveal, and whether you'd want everyone's digital dossier to be up for ad-hoc scrutiny in 10 years any more than it already is. You don't want the equivalent of the TSA viewing rooms (for your own good, of course) attached to every stream of online communication.

3) Because you're paying for it. How much you're paying is hard to say, because of black budgets, overlapping programs, and the sheer number of systems that are or could be used to make widespread surveillance the new normal, but the mystery price tag starts out high. If you're an American, or an EU citizen, at least you can be grateful that you're likely only being spied on, rather than actively harmed in other ways; in other countries, the outcome can be far grimmer. How much do you want to pay to build an infrastructure for constantly surveilling yourself, your friends, and your family? Especially one that fails so miserably at even its stated aims?

THREE WAYS TO FIGHT IT:

The good news is, while you can't stop the entire octopus, you're not required to be a full-time victim of online surveillance or the offline surveillance that it seems to normalize. Instead, you can take some simple steps that at least fog the glass a bit. Readers will no doubt suggest better technologies and practices, but here's a short list to start with:

1) Encryption, more often and in more contexts. Encrypted hard drives are now easy to buy off the shelf, or to implement with software per-user. Use encryption when it makes sense, for documents, emails, file systems, or browsing; the more you do, the more normal this becomes — if it's perfectly normal to carry data encrypted, no matter how innocuous, it's hard for merely possessing encrypted data to be vilified. TrueCrypt might not be impregnable, but neither are the opaque envelopes you might put in a physical mailbox: making it harder to spy on you even in small ways beats indifference. Good news: not every layer of security takes much effort for you to take advantage of: Mozilla's move to HTTPS Everywhere is an example, as is the option that many OSes are embracing to offer the user full-disk or per-directory encryption.

2) Avoid standing in front of the biggest targets. If you don't yet, use an operating system like Linux or one of the modern BSDs, at least part of the time. The SCADA vulnerabilities exploited to cripple a key part of Iran's nuclear program exploited a well-known hole in a widespread operating system, and the same can be said of many attacks blandly characterized as "Advanced Persistent Threats." Even a cheap, adjunct laptop running an up-to-date Linux or OpenBSD could make you safer for some tasks online; cheaper yet, you can run an entire Linux system from a USB drive, and yank it when you're through. That doesn't stop a mid-stream listener (which is a very hard problem), but a compartmentalized system like that means you can do your online banking or anything else and be less vulnerable to common malware. (Besides, it's fun!)

3) Tell companies, politicians (for instance, by voting for or against), and the people around you, that you object to being spied on. You can't prevent malicious individuals, governments, (or Google, or Yelp, or your Facebook friends) from looking at some of the data that you emit; you might feel perfectly satisfied with lots of the transactions you take part in freely. But you can minimize the worst consequences by being mindful of what you do or don't mind putting out there, and spreading the word when you find abuses of trust that compromise your privacy.

Online spying didn't pop into existence with Edward Snowden's revelations about mass data gathering by the NSA on U.S. citizens. For Americans, having our communications tapped by government agents (even if by a government that has remained far more benign than have many others) extends as long as the history of the country; likewise for Europeans and others all over the world. It's much easier, now, though, for those agents to put an ear to your wall or an eye on your correspondence than it's ever been before. For those in many countries, taking practical steps to reduce your exposure is a sensible move for more than just aesthetic or philosophical reasons, though, and luckily the range of options for preserving privacy and private communications have advanced right along with the growth of the technologies that threaten them.

jfruh writes "The venerable Linux.org site quietly relaunched some weeks ago, offering much of the original useful content on Linux as well as some new articles. The site is still associated with Michael McLagen, a somewhat controversial figure due to the fights around the Linux Standards Association back in the late '90s. McLagen has not responded to requests for comments on the relaunched site."

An anonymous reader writes "I was asked to manage a number of Linux servers at work. I would like to use volume snapshots to improve my backup scripts and keep recent copies of data around for quick restore. I normally manage Windows servers and on those I would just use Microsoft's Volume Shadow Copy for this. I tried Linux LVM snapshots, but most of the servers I manage run regular partitions with ext3 file systems, so LVM snapshots will not work. I found some versioning file systems out there like ext3cow and Tux3. Those look interesting, but I need something I can use on my existing ext3 file systems. I also found the R1Soft Hot Copy command-line utility, but it does not yet support my older 2.4 Linux servers. What are you using to make snapshots on Linux?"

Almost Live writes "Oracle has released an out-of-cycle alert to offer mitigation for a zero-day exploit that's been posted on the Internet. The emergency workaround addresses an unpatched remote buffer overflow that's remotely exploitable without the need for a username and password, and can result in compromising the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the targeted system." Whoever published the vulnerability and matching exploit code did not contact Oracle first.

Quinton writes "Around midnight Pacific time on the 17th, Sony updated their Open Platform website needed to install PPC Linux on the PS3. The FTP Site contains the CELL Linux ADDON CD image, which has the bootloader (kboot/otheros.bld) and instructions needed to install Fedora Core 5, PPC. A full install from DVD takes about two hours. Most all hardware is supported except for graphics accelerator support (framebuffer only, up to 1920x1200)."

trifish writes "The author of VirtualDub wrote on his blog that 'someone has registered "VirtualDub" as a "word mark" in Germany as of June 6, 2006 and is now sending out notices to people in that country demanding money for so much as mentioning the program and linking to the SourceForge download from their website.' Well, I confess that only now I fully understand why Linux, Mozilla, TrueCrypt, and other open source projects register their names as trademarks."

musatov writes "SGT Coughanour, David A (HHC 1-110th Infantry US Army) speech on NOTACON 3: "Right now I am currently serving in Iraq where I run IT operations for a small chunk of the Sunni triangle. One of the major projects that we have accomplished here is setting up an ISP that supports 350 subscribers. It has also survived multiple mortar attacks, and is built entirely on Linux." Download video (80 MB QuickTime) Requires latest QuickTime installed. A mirror is available for people to download it."

Linux Hack writes "LinuxHardware.org has published their latest review and this one covers the top processors from both the big x86 manufacturers. If you want to see who's on top under Linux, you should check out this review. There's something here for both Intel and AMD fanboys!"

GerritHoll points out an article in Nature according to which "researchers at the University of Pennsylvania 'say that a "plasmonic cover" could render objects "nearly invisible to an observer.' Earlier attempts at invisibility worked by colouring a screen to match its background, like a chameleon. The described technique is new, because it works by the concept of reducing light scattering. It is not a 'magic cloak,' however, because it will not work for the full range of visible light and needs to be adjusted precisely for the shape of the object. However, the concept could find an application in stealth technology."

barryhawkins writes "When sharing with others that I was reviewing an O'Reilly book through their User Group & Professional Association Program, the first question was always the same: 'What book are you reviewing?' After saying the title was Understanding Open Source & Free Software Licensing, responses ranged from 'What's that?' to 'Well, you won't have any trouble sleeping!' One might think that this list of people included relatives and coworkers who were not attuned to the open source community and its issues. On the contrary, the responses came from those within my circle of acquaintances, which includes software developers, system administrators, and even an intellectual property lawyer. Licensing is not exactly the sort of topic where people slide forward in their seats and ask to be told more. Such is the appeal of software licensing; however, the importance of understanding licensing, particularly within the context of open source development, cannot be overstated." Read on for Hawkins' review. Understanding Open Source & Free Software Licensing author Andrew M. St. Laurent pages 208 publisher O'Reilly rating 8 reviewer Barry Hawkins ISBN 0596005814 summary A worthwhile introduction to open source licensing

Those familiar with the O'Reilly product offerings have no doubt seen or purchased one or more their Pocket Reference series. These are not comprehensive references, but rather convenient guides for a specific topic to provide the sort of information one is not likely to have committed to memory, particularly as the trend of having cross-disciplined technologists continues. This book could be considered the analog of such pocket guides for open source and free software licensing. Open source licenses and their legal interpretation, though, easily warrant a "pocket reference" that is a full-sized book of nearly 200 pages.

Frankly, reading through a software license and maintaining a reasonable level of comprehension is a rather tough job. The author manages to make the task far more bearable and fruitful at the same time; a difficult balance to strike. The pace of the annotation works well to break up the various licenses (twelve in total) into bite-sized chunks. Chapters 2 and 3, which address the Apache/BSD/MIT family of licenses and the GPL/LGPL/MPL family of licenses respectively, each end with a section titled "Application and Philosophy" that serves as a sort of reward for making it through the license and establishes a touchstone to summarize and provide meaningful context for what has been covered.

The annotations of the different licenses are a great introduction, but the book should not be considered a complete reference for open source licensing issues. The book seems to affirm this at points where the author indicates that particular topics fall outside the book's scope, even to the point of recommending experienced legal counsel for certain issues. It also has a wonderful collection of footnotes and reference to other resources to allow the reader to flesh out topics of interest beyond the focus of this work.

One subtlety of the book that should not be missed is how the history of the open source movement is woven throughout the book to provide the context in which these licenses came into being and were modified to accommodate the vibrant, emerging world of open development models. The book's last two chapters bring that context to the foreground, fully developing the consequence of the licenses in daily development activity. It is far too easy to view these licenses and as mere legal documents that exist in and of themselves; the author reminds us that these licenses are the manifestations of a spirit of selfless contribution and work toward social good made possible by the considerable sacrifice of quite gifted individuals. For those passionate about the open source and free software movements, the section of chapter 7 titled "Models of Open Source and Free Software Development" is a poignant and stirring encapsulation of the first years of the GNU and Linux projects and the work that brought them into being. The cliché rings true; we do indeed "stand on the shoulders of giants."

The number of editorial errors involving misspelled and/or missing words seemed relatively high; this is a trend that seems to have developed in technical books in recent years, to a point that the technical community has come to accept it as some sort of side effect of the rapid pace with which books must be produced in order to keep pace with the rate of change. Given that this is an issue present in other works as well as this one, it should not particularly count as a mark against the work, but rather serve to underscore an issue publishers should consider improving.

Understanding Open Source & Free Software Licensing strikes a balance between completeness of subject matter coverage and manageability of size. Given the amount of attention the average open source user or developer has given to licensing, reading this book would be a considerable improvement. This book is recommended for a couple of audiences. First, it serves as a great foundation for developers either active in or contemplating participation in open source development. Searching most any open source mailing list for the term "license" can usually turn up some of its hottest flame wars. If most developers had this introductory level of understanding about the main open source licenses, hundreds of message threads arguing about licensing could be avoided.

A second audience for this book is the project manager and/or CTO in most corporate IT shops. Most corporate projects are making use of numerous open source libraries and frameworks. This is particularly true with J2EE, but also with .Net as a number of .Net counterparts to popular J2EE resources arise, e.g. NAnt, NUnit, etc. This book can dispel unnecessary apprehension regarding the use of these libraries that often arises from fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) propagated in much of the mainstream technology media. It can also equip managers to make informed decisions about team members' potential contributions to open source projects and the potential legal implications.

You can purchase Understanding Open Source & Free Software Licensing from bn.com. (You might also be interested in Peter Wayner's review of Lawrence Rosen's book on the same topic, Open Source Licensing .) Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

CWitz writes "I'll be honest: I'm not terribly technical. In fact, I'll probably have to get someone to help me add in the tags necessary to convert this review to readable HTML. But what I lack in technical skills, I more than make up in apprehension about the darker aspects of the internet. When I get an unexpected e-mail, I'm sure it's from some identity theft villain full of virtual lock picks just dying to snatch all my private information. John Bigg's new book Black Hat: Misfits, Criminals, and Scammers in the Internet Age is an entertaining and educational book that provides me with more than enough information about how to protect my vulnerable computer." Read on for the rest of his review; it's not aimed at experts, but Scott makes it sound like a good read for the interested layman. Black Hat: Misfits, Criminals, and Scammers in the Internet Age author John Biggs pages 176 publisher APress rating 8 reviewer CWitz ISBN 1590593790 summary An introduction to the morass of malice that threatens any internet-connected personal computer; gives a broad overview of both social engineering and purely mechanical attacks, and advice on avoiding them.

Biggs is a technical journalist with more than seven years of real-world IT experience (programming and management), and he handles complex topics on the page in a fun, easy to understand manner. The book begins with the tale of a hapless spam victim in Germany, and moves on to introduce us to Alan Ralsky, the "spam king of Detroit."

Ralsky describes himself as an honorable marketing professional, but a Detroit Free Press article in November of 2002 pointed out that his computers vomit out more than 650,000 emails each hour. While his label of spammer or marketer may be debatable, there's no question about his efficiency. From the interview with Ralsky, Biggs moves into telling the story of his own struggle with spam. The discussion then turns to various relevant legal and social issues, and this shift is a hallmark of the book's positive qualities.

Black Hat effortlessly moves from straightforward factual reporting to first-person narratives to social and political commentary. The factual sections are just-the-facts-ma'am-reporting that would seem at home in any newspaper or technical journal. The first-person narrative sections are funny and reassuring. For leery technophobes like me, it's nice to know the experts struggle with many of the same computer bugaboos that plague me. The political and social commentary sections succinctly explain legal and cultural influences that shape the world of the internet today.

A good example of the political commentary is the chapter entitled "Upload or Perish: Pirates." As an aspiring author myself, I've always found myself believing that "sharing" intellectual property was inherently wrong. So I chose not to use Napster or Kazaa or the other options and totally agreed with efforts to prosecute active Napster users. But in this chapter, Biggs points out the misguided attempts of the industry by targeting the wrong people in their fight against sharing and piracy. In Eastern Europe and China, there are CD-pressing factories spewing out thousands of copies, complete with jewel case, printed insert, and full-color printing that are almost impossible to distinguish from the real product.

Biggs writes: "BMG Music representative Rob Anderson told me that many of the pirates have better CD and DVD reproducing equipment than even the large, official distributors." The discussion of industry actions targeting the wrong people continues with "Record companies can sue as many 12-year-olds as they want...but the equation will always be the same: piracy cannot be stopped." Detailed explanations of key landmark piracy lawsuits follow and the chapter ends with Biggs providing some suggestions for how the industry can help themselves in more effective ways, rather than attacking kids with home computers and a Jones for Metallica. Quite simply, he states the industry should use the technology to effectively deliver their product, at a reasonable cost, to the consumer. If listeners are going to share files, then the industry should harness the technology instead of stomping their feet and demanding that teenagers continue to trek down to the local mall and spend twenty dollars on a CD that may only have one or two good songs.

Personally, I'm still not sure that I believe in file sharing. Just because something isn't tangible (it's music or it's words or it's code) doesn't mean someone didn't work hard for it and invest in it. But Biggs' illuminating discussion certainly made me see how the industry has mismanaged their very lifeblood. I may not be file sharing anytime soon, but I won't be part of the angry mob hunting down file sharers any longer.

In Black Hat, Biggs manages to clearly explain certain technical aspects of spam, viruses, and other internet parasites. For instance, we've all seen that pile of gibberish at beginning of spam e-mails and Biggs explicates that mess in a way that anyone can understand. Like those rare moments in high-school English class when the teacher explains a poem that you always thought was unintelligible garbage, and the light goes on, and suddenly that long-haired Brit makes sense -- after reading Black Hat, I now understand much of what was to me only gibberish before.

In the chapter entitled "Shockwave: Worms and Viruses," Biggs dissects a simple, working worm. The worm was written by 16-year-old in Austria named Second Part to Hell with a taste for programming to White Zombie. Biggs interviews the worm writer and delves into the world of programmers he likens to sword makers, steeped in art and tradition. They do not include any dangerous payloads in their worms, but the possibility that someone could use the worm for malevolence isn't their concern, any more than the sword maker worries about how the weapon is being used. The dissection of Second Part to Hell's worm begins by actually showing the PHP web-programming code. Biggs then walks through each section, explaining how the worm selects which files to infect, creates a copy of itself, and processes its code to spread, and finally appends itself to the top of each file so it can seek out new victims.

The book goes on to discuss Nigerian 419 scammers, malicious virus writers, hacking legends like Lord Digital, spyware, and ultimately what a user can do to protect their computer and data. Entertaining and educational, Black Hat was a valuable read to a non-technical person like me. Best of all, John Biggs' suggestions for protecting my computer against the frightening aspects of the internet have made my cyber activities more comfortable and secure.

You can purchase Black Hat: Misfits, Criminals, and Scammers in the Internet Age from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews. To see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

mood6 writes "Linux Journal has a nice article on Automating Government with e-Governance. It discusses Linux usage by the Indian government to improve the lives of the rural poor (interesting look at how the IT boom in India is benefiting the poor). The article covers some of the difficulties in deploying Linux in non-English languages for government usage. Good read for those looking at Linux in e-Governance projects and a good follow up to a previous article by Tom Adelstein. In support of full disclosure: I wrote the article and the platform was developed by Delixus, my current company."

Simon P. Chappell writes "Linux programming is the C Programming Language. Elaborating a little, Linux programming is C, with the GLIBC library and the POSIX standard API. Even a language as powerful as C needs libraries and to get the Holy Grail of cross-platform portability, it's necessary to have them standardised. The POSIX API is that standardisation and Linux adheres to it very well (opinions from those litigious folks in Utah aside). For those of us who already know C, Linux Programming by Example sets out to teach you the rest in a step by step, helpful, relaxed and incremental manner." Linux Programming by Example author Arnold Robbins pages 687 (21 page index) publisher Prentice Hall rating 10 reviewer Simon P. Chappell ISBN 0131429647 summary An exellent tutorial for real-world Linux software development

What's To Like There are many things to like about this book (over and above the fact that page 118 has my all-time favourite UserFriendly cartoon on it :-). Linux Programming by Example (LinuxPbE hereafter) takes a steady, incremental path through the concepts required to write software that can effectively interact with the Linux environment.

It is a truism many of us have proven multiple times in our lives that one of the finest learning tools available to programmers is to read and grok good, working code, written in the language that we are learning. LinuxPbE takes this philosophy and walks you through actual example code from various Unixes and Linux. The first part of the book, specifically chapters one through six, covers all of the aspects of Linux programming necessary to understand the Unix V7 ls program in its full glory in chapter seven. I feel that this approach works very well.

Part two dives into processes, walking us through creating them, managing them, communicating with them by using pipes and sending them signals. A few other general topics are included for completeness. Part three then covers the art and tools of debugging in fairly substantial detail.

All the code in the book is very well laid out, with line numbers provided to the left, and comments (in a small sans-serif font) on the right-hand side of the code. This is a very readable combination that is enhanced further by the fact that at each logical division, an explanation is given of the design and implementation used by that section.

I can't resist admiring the addition of the essay "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years" by Peter Norvig. This is a classic exploration of the effort needed to attain mastery of any skill, concluding that the minimum length of time required is ten years. The inclusion of this article, to me, speaks well of the author and his understanding of the learning process. One can only hope that those learning from this book will come to the same understanding and realise that the book is the start of their journey to mastering Linux programming.

What's To Consider

Nothing notable.

Summary If you want to learn how to do this stuff for real, then this book will get you started. As "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years" explains, no book is going to cause you to become an expert in 24 hours, 24 days or even, perhaps, 24 months. That said, this book will be useful for many of those ten years, so run or surf to your favourite bookstore and purchase it now.

You can purchase Linux Programming by Example from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

leandrod asks: "I am in the process of helping a small software company define the infrastructure for their major client's new system. It is a big country, and it is a medium-sized client planning on going big. We are planning to standardize on Debian GNU/Linux. I am aware I can have IBM Tivoli Maestro for GNU/Linux for production scheduling, and BEA's Tuxedo TP monitor, but they are unsupported under Debian. I am also aware of one or two free TP monitors, but they are either incipient or stagnating. I couldn't find a production scheduler. I know I can do lots with the standard tools, but keep in mind I am targeting a transaction-processing bureau for a big operation with hundreds of thousands of terminals and millions of users, something like a poor man's Wal-Mart, or even Visa. Are there vendors out there willing to support Debian or just GNU/Linux in general? If not, are there free software projects that accomplish the same thing?"

GerritHoll writes "A test release of Fedora Core 2 is now available from Red Hat and at distinguished mirror sites near you, and is also available in the torrent. Fedora Core has expanded in this release to four binary ISO images and four source ISO images. This test release is specifically designed for testing the 2.6 kernel, GNOME 2.5, and KDE 3.2. Please file bugs via Bugzilla, Product Fedora Core, Version test1, Architecture i386 so that they are noticed and appropriately classified. Discuss this test release on fedora-test-list."

Via_Patrino writes "According to Microsoft on january 16, MS Windows 98 and 98se will end Extended Support Phase, that means they'll became obsolete and assisted support will no longer be available from Microsoft, affecting about 27% of the internet users. That means even if 98 is working well for your needs (and especially computer specifications) and you want to pay for support (because that might cost less than switching hardware) you can't, because who will be able to patch eventual new bugs (security related or not) besides Microsoft? So if you're not planning a switch it might be your last opportunity to update MS Windows 98, after that some software might disappear from MS website (just like MSIE 5.5 for 95 did)."

tickticker writes "EWeek is reporting on the Anti-Trust follow up, and of course it sounds like a victory for Justice: 'The judges 'were encouraging in the sense that they went to the heart of the case,' Robert Bork, who represented the Computer and Communications Industry Association and the Software and Information Industry Association, said following the court arguments. Bork formerly was a judge on the appeals court.' Microsoft comments included the 'abundance of choice' defence. Which to me means that Microsoft wants the last of the hold-outs to choose Microsoft."

lplatypus writes "ZDNet Australia reports that Sun Microsystems has "has cleared a place for its Java Enterprise System on the NSW government's software shelf, continuing its campaign to weaken Microsoft's monopoly over the desktop." The Age clarifies that Sun's offering includes open source components such as Linux, Gnome, Mozilla and Evolution. Another article is at Australian IT, or see Sun's press release."

numbski asks: "As a systems administrator, I find myself moving from machine to machine to machine on a daily basis. I happen to be a FreeBSD/MacOS X nut, so on a given day I move from my 17" iMac at home, to my 12" Powerbook at work, to any one of my 16 FreeBSD Servers. That's not to mention any of the Win2k Servers that have Cygwin loaded. All of that said, there is a longing in me to have a simple $HOME that all of my systems use and understand. I've considered the Knoppix way of dealing with this problem using a USB key device from this previous Slashdot article, however I don't know how many systems I could get away with consistently having my USB device picked up and used correctly without scripting changes to fstab, not to mention the issue of choosing a filesystem that just about every OS will recognize: FAT32. Windows is going to be unhappy no matter what I'm afraid, as it doesn't understand symlinking. c:\Documents and Settings\$USER can't just be moved off to another volume. The one glimmer of hope I have is this article on ftpfs and webdavfs. Using these one should be able to set up a single, persistent home that follows you from machine to machine over the internet. I guess I would like to know how others have gone about setting up a mobile $HOME. I look forward to having all of my preferences, dotfiles, and bookmarks follow me around."

heretic108 writes "From first boot to full desktop in 20 minutes! Knoppix has shot into the spotlight as a GNU/Linux distro suitable for demonstrating quality Open Source Software, standing out for its ability to self-configure itself into a vast range of hardware, and to run entirely off a CD boot without interfering with any existing system setup. That, plus its fat catalogue of pre-installed desktop software. But OSS enthusiast David McNab has poked a bit deeper, and found that Knoppix can install itself to disk, resulting in a completely configured GNU/Linux desktop system, ready to use, in 20 minutes, hassle free. CD no longer needed! Best of both worlds - use as a GNU/Linux demo disk, and if the user likes it, it's a snap to install permanently. I can't think of any distro that comes close to this, for ease and speed of setup. I found McNab's short Knoppix Installation Howto which gives a very brief and easy guide. With this rapid setup ability, Debian-based Knoppix makes a great contribution to the catalogue."

Akallabeth, the Arch-Lich writes: "New to town, I was trolling around for a LUG or two, and found this. Find your own DNUG here. Now, I can see the need for a support group for .NET users group, as no one really knows what it does. But, an UG founded by for-profit companies? That are Microsoft Certified Partners? With prize givaways listed on the meeting schedule? Something don't smell right. Oh, and they have banner ads too." However genuine or organized, local "support groups" seem like a good idea to me. Maybe we could all go toss a frisbee?

lintux writes: "You probably know Qt as the fine toolkit for the less-fine X. Today something cool reached a stable state: Qt for the console. A Qt library port which allows you to port Qt programs to the console! Just imagine a full-featured web browser like Konqueror, on a 386 text-machine! I tried some things, and I never want to use w3m or lynx again, I can tell you that!" Update by HeUnique:While I do approve of the job these guys have done on console QT, I believe they may need to properly relicense their project under the GPL.

Tetard asks: "Long live the pipe! Since the `|' was invented by Doug McIlroy in 1973, has there ever been a more effective way of reusing tools and connecting data ? The mouse is a device of the Beatles era; Rather than try and provoke nostalgia in the older ones among us, I'm asking myself, as are others: when we don't try to reinvent the wheel, or at least improve it, why must we try and copy it every time ? Xerox PARC exposed us to WIMPs and we haven't done better: some innovation, some plastic surgery -- but no "paradigm shift" -- where's the creative destruction that will take us further ? Graphical component programming is turning us into click-happy bonobos^H^H^Hchimpanzees, as we fail to find new ways to manage and connect richer data streams. My web designer friends are damaged for life because of mice, and yet we persist... Where do we go from here ? If we ever invent the graphical pipe, let if have keyboard shortcuts." Yes, you've probably seen a similar question to this run by Ask Slashdot before, but this time I'm wondering if maybe we need new input devices before the WIMP paradigm is replaced with something better. Might any of you have ideas on what form these input devices might take?

For those interested, here are the previous stories that have handled this type of question:

• GUI Research - Is it Still Being Done?
• Pipes In GUI's?
• Pipes in GUI's? (Redux)

So what it will take to break us out of the WIMP box (or prison, depending on your bias), maybe new input devices would do it, but quite frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if a 3D interface might be another route (it would possibly spark interest in designing a new input device that would work better with 3D interfaces, or maybe data-gloves could serve this purpose?). Going on a limb, maybe this guy might just be the ticket.

m0nkyman asks: "My company has just hired a Mexican and his whole family has moved up here to Canada to join him. As the in-house tech geek I'm planning to put together a computer as a gift to the family for school etc. Although they are learning English, I know they'll be happier in a Spanish environment. My question is which Linux distribution has the best Spanish language support, and are there any hints for how to install it for an English only geek? This isn't something I've run into before, but I'm sure others have... right? I've looked at here for help, but I'd like other recommendations."

morcego writes: "Well, finally someone came up with a solution to the DMCA problem. You can read it on the archive of the Humorix list." Well, combine this with my ULC Reverendship, and we're well underway *grin*.

rsd writes: "Conectiva Linux 7.0 is out. Here is the original announcement. And here is the babelfish translation. They are already shipping Portuguese box and will start the english soon. However the CDs (iso for what matter) are available in english already. Their main ftp server is overcrowded. Hoever, Rik VanRiel provided us with a really fast server. I will not describe every feature on it but the main change is the Synaptic tool, which in my opinion is the best APT frontend ever written."

Sleen writes: "DeMuDi stands for Debian Music Distribution. This is the first distribution of GNU/Linux whose sole purpose is to create a stable OS for Multimedia. The project is led by Guenter Gieger who is the developer of the Linux low latency driver for the RME Hammerfall 96xx series. Combined with realtime kernel patches, the Hammerfall card in Linux can achieve hardware level latencies. Though many are already using Linux to make music, Guenter has started this project to consolidate the decentralized resources needed for setting up a linux system for multimedia. Drivers, applications, a realtime kernel and many other things are missing from the typical linux distro. If anyone wonders what is available to work with, take a look at the packages page. They include multitrack hard disk recording software, physical modelling and virtual analog synthesizers, beatboxes, midi sequencers, processors, and Advanced Open Architecture Synthesis systems such as Csound. For more information such as project details, a mailing list and contact info visit DeMudi.org."

nilstar writes: "Rogers Cable wants to dump (slow) WebTV and move to linux based boxes to connect all the major appliances in your home: stereo, tv, computer, etc. via broadband using rogers@home in a service called "triple play". Will this really happen after MS invested C$600 in Rogers? Here is the press release. As the article here on the star says: 'Rogers Cable Inc. will begin testing a new service next month that turns all the communications, computing and entertainment devices in a home into a high-speed smorgasbord of interactive experiences."' Why do I bet these would only be useful with one company's cable service?

a2800276 asks: "The story that XFS has gone beta raised some questions in my mind. There are now four journaling filesystems available under various OSS licenses and being actively developed for Linux, there being (in estimated order of maturity): SuSE/Namesys's reiserfs, SGI's XFS, IBM's JFS and Tweedie/Redhat's ext3fs. Avoiding the obvious question of why can't the effort going into four different projects be channeled into one, I think a discussion of the particular merits of the different fs's would be interesting."

AnonymousCow writes "At LinuxTag, an unbiased comparison of performance of FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, and Solaris." I'll let Tim's comment on this story stand: "Unbiased is hard to claim - all tests can be seen as biased in their formulation - but this is thorough, with 45 slides and well-explained methodology -- BSD does very well ..."

Fawking DSL writes "``NetBSD can be intimidating from a Linux user's perspective. However, as the Linux user base grows, more people are finding their needs aren't being met by traditional Linux distributions. NetBSD is ready to step up to fill this niche. While Linux and NetBSD share many characteristics, there are some key differences.'' Check out this article at BSD Today."

Fawking DSL writes "``NetBSD can be intimidating from a Linux user's perspective. However, as the Linux user base grows, more people are finding their needs aren't being met by traditional Linux distributions. NetBSD is ready to step up to fill this niche. While Linux and NetBSD share many characteristics, there are some key differences.'' Check out this article at BSD Today."

snack writes "FINALLY! ATI has released info on their new graphics chip, built to take on both the 3dfx and nVIDIA. Reading through the press release it says that it has Windows, Linux and Mac suport. There are no benchmarks yet on the Web site, but reading through the tech specs it seems that this chip will blow everything else away. It also says that over the summer, this will implement the MAXX technology. Two of these chips working in parallel... Oh, my God!"

With the success of various IPOs lately, there are a lot of new millionaires in the Open Source community running around. It's heartwarming to those of us with long-standing roots in Open Source and a deep commitment to it to see this "validation," of sorts, towards the ideals that we hold dear. Unfortunately, as postings on Slashdot clearly indicate, it also fosters some resentment. Will Open Source's own success destroy the grass roots effort that forms its foundation?

This isn't some idle speculation. Linux, FreeBSD, Apache, PHP and others depend on the wide and varied developer community in order to grow and develop. People who helped got some 'Net notice, their names in the contributor lists and a warm fuzzy feeling that they were helping the effort. But now people are seeing companies and individuals making staggeringly large amounts of money, and are asking "When am I gonna get mine?" Not that they were/are "in it" for the money alone, but, after all, they think, "others are making major bucks." Some other developers are asking themselves why they should put forth so much of their own time and effort to simply benefit the corporate bottom line of a company that, they feel, has deserted the common Open Source contributor.

Of course, that's not totally true. Usually the company implements a "Directed Shares" program that allows significant Open Source contributors to purchase shares at the pre-IPO price. Still, things have not gone smoothly in these programs, with last minute changes in pricing and implementation causing even those "chosen" members to scramble about. And even if you did get in on the 2 big ones, RedHat and VA Linux, and had the money to buy the maximum amount of shares, and cashed in at the best possible time, you would have made about $150,000 (before taxes). Not exactly chump change, but for people who have put 4 or 5 years of significant effort into Open Source, the payoff may seem a little small.

So what will happen? Well, I'm certain we'll see a weeding out of some developers. Some will leave in search of obtaining some of that money out there. Others will leave because the playing field has changed, and recognition by your peers may no longer have the attraction that it once had, what with gobs of money floating around. Others will "follow the money" and start contributing to Open Source in hopes of "getting in" on the action, maybe even dropping any efforts on such projects where there are no perceived fiscal payoffs: "What, they aren't going public soon? Forget them! I'll work on Foobar."

And there will be some of us who stay because, well, even though the world may have changed, we haven't. All the things that made contributing to Open Source are still valid and vital. And so while we may look a little enviously at the stock market pages, and have to endure people asking "Why are you wasting your time" or "Why aren't you rich yet", we stay the course. Sometimes rewards are more than what you see on a bank statement; it's a warm and pure satisfaction that goes deeper than your wallet.

mackga wrote to us about the new LinuxToday Counter-FUD site. Good site to get information and destroy detractors -maybe we should link to it The Linux Myths and see who comes out next.Update: 12/04 11:52 by H :Also, thanks to Rik van Riel who pointed the The FUD Counter site.

I've been so busy on the code frenzy that I've been behind on the quickies! Tragic! First lets get the serious quickies out of the way: chris sent us the Atlanta Linux Showcase Tutorial and Conference program for the 3rd Annual ALS, comming up October 12-16, 1999, in Atlanta Georgia. Registration is open. Bl0w0ff noted that The dockapp warehouse has been upgraded and redesigned. k-rist sent us SimShatner. Here is a site selling a video history of Atari with interviews with the guys that did Pac-Man and all that early stuff. Someone sent us a link to another place you don't want to see a BSOD. Want some Blair Witch Parodies? irishmikev sent is a Southpark Parody and stairs sent The Blair Family Circus Project. How about a pair of strange places to put a server? Gareth Walwyn sent us one in a potted plant and GFD noted thatLinux Today has a story about a box that runs in a real Pizza Hut Box. If strange Linux boxes ain't your bag, someone submitted Apple Fritter which contains strange cases for Apples (Legos, Radios, and more) Jade wrote in with how to apply for the position of Sith Apprentice. and rjh pointed us to the iMaul (seems like a lot of stuff is coming in pairs today) Evan Vetere noticed that despair.com has new de-motivators. Matthew McCabe sent us tuxtiles which is taking votes on designs for "Linux Blankets". Since we're mentioning merchandise, I gotta plug Think Geek which is the first place I've seen with good stuff. They mailed us a box of freebies, but I actually woulda bought most of the stuff they sent me (mugs with #include <beer.h> and some sweet perl shirts and other cool stuff). Most of the "Geek" sites just sell crap but most of this was actually clever. We probably should also note that Copyleft finally has the new Slashdot shirts from our contest winners, they look great. ralphb was the first to say that Time Digital has an article on Slashdot.

Mads-Martin writes "Well, it seems as though Alan Cox ^[?] has been kind enough to answer even more questions then the interview. Look at the September 3 entry. "

The Ottawa Linux Symposium has come and gone. It was a superb, very technical, conference that was also a great social event. Dana has put up her pictures, and the lovely Alix has put up hers. Last but not least, Alan Cox has put up his large collection. Finally, I've included my report below.

Acknowledgements

My OLS trip would not have been possible without the support of the following people: Christopher Beard, Phil Schwan, Mike Shaver, and Andrew Hutton. I owe all of them a big thank you.

Thursday

My story begins on Thursday. I was scheduled to catch a 2:50PM flight out of Dulles Airport (IAD). That way, I would have been able to make it to Ottawa in time for The Puffin Night Out, a nice party which I managed to catch the tail end of anyway (after taking a flight later that evening). Customs was a tad on the scary side, but then again, I am 16 and was all alone.

Friday

I arrived at the hotel a little bit after 8, so that I would have time to register. Registration went very smooth, and in no time, I had my conference bag, complete with conference shirt, proceedings, etc. And yes, my badge really did say "Slashdot Wanker". Things like that happen when you know the conference organizers :)

I first headed off to Nat's talk. We chatted for a few minutes before he started, and I was introduced to his very beautiful girlfriend Rhett. Nat gave a very technical talk about the GNOME mailer. The GNOME mailer is going to attempt to be "not your mother's mail client". Instead of being folder based like traditional mail clients (filtered messages are placed in a folder which is tightly associated with a specific file on disk), it will be a query-based client. Messages can be sorted based on traditional criteria, but also things like keywords. This becomes a complicated thing after you realize that messages can do things like fit multiple criteria. The example given was a thread about gazelles: if I want to find all messages that are related to gazelles, I can do a search, but I might miss "me too" and other similar messages. Nat says that Bertrand Guiheneuf has done a lot of good work on the back-end ("Camel", which happens to be closely modeled after the JavaMail API), and that the front-end will come soon.

The other important point of Nat's talk was the fact that it will make heavy use of Bonobo for the front-end. The mailer will use Bonobo components (similar in concept to JavaBeans or COM objects) to do things like display text, vCards, HTML, in-line images, etc. It also will use a mail composition component, so that with proper hooks, even emacs could be used to author messages. The program will also be written in a scripting language, so that hackers and possibly even end-users can easily customize it - some may wish to not see certain buttons if they never use them, or may want to customize the behavior of a delete button when building an idiot-proof mail client.

After a short break, I headed back to the same room so that I could attend Phil Schwan's interesting InterMezzo talk. InterMezzo is a distributed filesystem that was initially intended to replace Coda. Coda is 500,000 lines of C and the internals are only well known to not even a handful of people on the planet. By contrast, InterMezzo is about 2500 lines of C and 5000 lines of Perl ("don't worry, no one liners here").

InterMezzo is a distributed filesystem, but it is not at all like NFS. With InterMezzo, there is very little difference between the client and the server. InterMezzo features the following: data resides in a native filesystem (ext2, most likely), the clients should exploit existing filesystems and should implement a cache at the kernel level, objects should have meta-data suitable for disconnected operation (so that unlike NFS, I can simply unplug my laptop, run off to wherever, and not need an internet connection to do my hackery), use TCP and other existing protocols for things like synchronization and security (rsync, ssh, SSL). Version .002 (which is actually quite functional!) was released about 2 weeks ago. They encourage people to test it.

After Phil's talk, it was time for lunch. A medium-sized mob of us went to the Hard Rock cafe, a 5 minute walk. This was my first time in a Hard Rock, and it seemed nice enough. I was finally introduced to Steve (from VA Linux Systems), and we chatted for awhile after drooling at his laptop (Sony VAIO 505TR - mine should arrive tomorrow :) Actually, I owe him a thank you...

We all headed back a few minutes late, but I still managed to catch most of Miguel's talk about Bonobo. Miguel says that Bonobo is essentially finished - Nat spent last week documenting it, and that a tarball will be released soon. Miguel used several pictures to show the role that CORBA/ORBit play in GNOME. He also showed off Glade, "even though it has nothing to do with Bonobo". Glade is very cool because it allows the UI of a program to be customized at run-time rather than compile time. It does this by using an XML file to store the location of widgets, etc. I'd encourage anyone who hasn't to look at it.

After Miguel was done rambling, I walked over to the IA-64 talk, given by Stephane Eranian of HP labs. Stephane told us that HP Labs has been working on porting Linux to Merced for well over a year. They have been using a simulator because there is no Merced hardware available yet. He explained neat things they did with the simulator, as well as some of the features of the chip.

Because IA-64 is based on EPIC, it requires the compiler to lots and lots of work, especially to take advantage of the chip's advanced features, such as predication and control speculation. Compiler authors also must be aware of "rotating registers", Not-A-Thing registers, and various other things that were enough to give me a headache just thinking about them.

The good news is that Linux already runs, and runs quite well on the simulator. HP Labs was behind the porting of the kernel, and CERN ported libc. By the time the chips come out, Linux will be running on them, and very likely with SMP support. Because the development environment is finished, they are now working on trying to get large apps like emacs and X to run.

This was the last talk of the day, which meant it was time for everyone to board the bus to go to the Phoenix Multiplayer Gaming Facility. PMGF was a large place with booths for people to play huge games of Half-Life, Quake 2, Need For Speed, etc. It was the first time I'd played Half-Life, and I did quite well - I managed to actually win a round. But it got boring after a little while, so I was very happy to see Ryan Tilder and Mike Shaver show up to rescue Alan, Jes, myself and others. We all headed off to a nice restaurant called The Arrow and the Loon. We chatted for a few hours, and everyone had interesting stories to tell (especially Mike, but I don't think he wants me to go into the whole Vaseline incident...) Oh, and the waitress had quite an attitude, too ("I'll have a fuzzy navel" "What sort of fruit are you?", "Here you go, princess"). I sort of have to feel sorry for Zach...

Saturday

I decided to go in a bit late on Saturday, so the first talk I went to was Zach's "Ninja Adventures in the Stratosphere" talk. Zach used some novel techniques and emphasized performance over portability to get some extremely fast servers. He explained what was right and what was wrong about his approaches. Basically, threading can be quite a pain in the ass. On a related note, I'm packaging hftpd for Debian, so there should be a package uploaded soon.

Next was lunch. We ate in the mall (it was connected to the hotel) at an interesting place. When you went in, you were given a ticket and then you could go to any of the little special booths and pick from whatever they had, and marked it on your card. I sat across from Arjan (khttpd guy) and David Huggins-Daines. We had an interesting chat about telco monopolies and high-speed internet links. Luckily, I only was a few feet from the table when I remembered my card. It's a good thing, too, since I didn't have $100...

After lunch was the much hyped FreeS/WAN talk (I believe there were a handful of CSA agents and maybe even an NSA person or two). It wasn't what I expected, but was still enjoyable nonetheless. The audience seemed to enjoy the "Analogy to Sex" chart. See, when you have no authentication and no encryption, that is like having sex with a stranger in public.

Finally, it was time for the last talk before the keynote. Mike Shaver and Mike Ang from Mozilla talked about the internals of the code, discussing everything from portability issues to the way Mozilla is capable of presenting and aggregating data. Topics covered included XPCOM, XPFE, XUL, DOM, etc. I found it interesting that in the future, through XUL, JavaScript will be able to manipulate the layout of the browser.

Then it was time for Alan's keynote. The presentation started with Gavriel State from Corel introducing Alan, but he took the opportunity to dispel myths about WINE. I probably turned bright red when the slide "Don't Believe Everything You Read On Slashdot" came up. I saw Ryan start looking for me as soon as he saw it. Everyone around me told me I should stand up and take a bow while everyone clapped, but I think I blew my chance (I'm only modest at all the wrong times ;)

Alan's talk was quite fascinating after everyone got over the laughter from the bluescreen he took a picture of on the departures screen at Heathrow. Alan discussed traditional proprietary software development models and free software development methodologies, and then compared them to each other. He discussed some of Brooks' lessons (and his law) from MMM (The Mythical Man Month). Brooks' law states that adding more programmers to a late project only makes it later. GNOME is a perfect counterexample. It started small and was going incredibly fast when it had over 200 people (as of Saturday, there were 319 CVS accounts). He also said that regardless of whether or not they officially have titles, there usually is a small set of core developers. He stressed that the way programmers communicate with each other is a key reason for free software working so well. In the proprietary software world, programmers must go through a management hierarchy instead of directly communicating with each other.

After the Alan finished and the prizes were given away and a short "presentation" by the president of rebel.com was finished, everyone headed to the Hard Rock for free food and beer (the beer was only free for 2 hours, due to the fact that they were figuring 5 drinks/person/hour). I left the Hard Rock early and headed down to meet Federico for a movie. Four of us (Federico, Ulf, Mark Steele, and myself) all went to go see "Lola Rennt", aka "Run Lola Run", a very cool German film. I'd explain more, but it's beyond the scope of this report and the IMDB has enough to get you started. Highly recommended.

After the movie, I headed over to the Vineyard and met Alex deVries, Zach, Mike, et al. We headed over to meet Jes and some others at a local pub(ish place). Had a nice chat with Matthew Wilcox, and finally met Mike Shaver's fiancee, Tyla. Went back and finally turned off the lights for sleep at about 2:30am

Sunday

I had to miss dim sum at 11 since my plane left for Toronto at 6:45am. I met Federico, Jonathan Blandford, and Miguel at the hotel a little after five (ugh!). We ate a small breakfast and then went to the airport. We left Miguel in Ottawa, but Federico, Jonathan, and I all went to Toronto on the same flight. Jonathan was kind enough to help me with some customs forms, and also told me about the root of "aware-of-vacuity", his machine's name at Red Hat.

We then went our separate ways and I flew back to BWI on a small, ~50 passenger Dash 8. All in all, it was a most wonderful and amazing conference. I eagerly await next year's.

SEGV has returned with a review of Kernighan and Pike's latest effort, The Practice of Programming This book has both practical and method aspects, including exercises. If you're serious about your programming, read below to get the skinny on the book. The Practice of Programming author Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike pages publisher Addison-Wesley rating 9 reviewer SEGV ISBN 0-201-61586-X summary Practical and enjoyable, this book captures its authors' considerable wisdom and experience on the practice of programming.

This book is written by some heavyweights in the industry: Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike. I have not read previous efforts such as The UNIX Programming Environment or The C Programming Language, but I understand that they are excellent works. I was hoping that this book would live up to that pedigree.

I was not disappointed. The Practice of Programming is a great resource. I found the book to be a good mix of Steve McConnell's Code Complete, Steve Macguire's Writing Solid Code, and Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls: all excellent works in my experience.

Structure

The book offers nine solid chapters devoted to the practice of programming: the tasks that we perform every day to develop software. They range from the beginning of the process (eg, interface design) to the end (eg, testing); from higher-level considerations (eg, portability) to lower-level (eg, naming).

The authors provide examples culled from their real-world experience. I particularly enjoyed their debugging anecdotes, especially their hubris in discussing their own bugs. The authors also provide illustrative exercises, annotated supplementary reading, and an appendix of collected rules. The quality of these is high.

Style

Kernighan and Pike write with facility, clarity, and authority. It is easy to tell that their advice comes from wisdom and experience. I found the text to be readable and enjoyable, and the examples to be relevant and understandable.

The authors' presentation really makes this book valuable. It is neither dry nor difficult to read. In fact, even when they cover difficult material, they are careful to present it in an accessible manner. A college-level programmer should be able to absorb chapter 9, even though the authors build a toy VM with JIT compiler -- not a trivial undertaking.

Examples

The examples in this book really stand out. There are many, almost one per page. The bad examples are appropriately marked with '?' characters, the good examples are nicely commented, and each is concise and typically adapted from real code.

The authors employ many programming languages to illustrate their points. Although they have a distinct bias towards C and Awk, they also present C++, Java, and Perl code, and are careful to use idioms particular to each language.

Often, they will present several versions of the same program. When they do so, they discuss code length, clarity, and related issues, and compare performance, scrupulously noting the environments used.

For example, in chapter 3 they design a single program and implement it in C, Java, C++, Awk, and Perl. In chapter 6, they apply their testing tips to those programs. I appreciate this kind of continuity in a book.

Nitpickings

I have a few nitpicky comments regarding this book. I really don't like the authors' predilection for short local names, which seem clear in a book's example but aren't so sensible when being maintained in real-world code. The world would have been a better place with a compare_strings function instead of strcmp.

Scott Meyers counsels us (More Effective C++ Item 6) to prefer preincrement to postincrement, yet the authors continue to use the latter in loop control statements. The authors also eschew Java's boolean/false/true in favour of int/0/1; for what reason, I am not sure.

Still, these are nitpickings. Those issues are relatively minor, somewhat religious, and do not detract from the value of the book.

Summary

I think this is a good book, and I definitely recommend this sort of reading for colleagues of mine. If you've read the books I listed in the overview, then you can get by without this one. However, I feel that it doesn't hurt to be exposed to slightly different presentations of the same material, if only to reinforce the lessons learned.

While I read this book, I was engaged in a coding standards effort in my previous employment. I did find this book, in conjunction with others, to be a useful resource. In particular, I believe it is the most directly applicable book of its sort to development shops that have a lot of C code. That includes the Linux community.

The Practice of Programming is most suited to an intermediate level programmer, although beginning and advanced programmers will also find knowledge in its pages appropriate to their level.

The book's official site contains source code and other resources.

To purchase this book, head over to Amazon and help Slashdot out.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface
Chapter 1: Style
Chapter 2: Algorithms and Data Structures
Chapter 3: Design and Implementation
Chapter 4: Interfaces
Chapter 5: Debugging
Chapter 6: Testing
Chapter 7: Performance
Chapter 8: Portability
Chapter 9: Notation
Epilogue
Appendix: Collected Rules
Index

A name that all the book reviewers know SEGV has sent in a review of Scott Meyers' CD work Effective C++ CD. This is a stray from our normal book reviews, but figured people would appreciate seeing Scott Meyers' newest effort. Effective C++ CD author Scott Meyers pages publisher Addison Wesley rating 10 reviewer SEGV ISBN 0-201-60615-1 summary More than the sum of its hardcopy contents, this electronic resource earns a place on the programmer's bookshelf.

What to Expect?

I wasn't sure exactly what to expect. Subtitled "85 Specific Ways to Improve Your Programs and Designs," I knew this CD was an electronic version of Scott Meyers' already-published books, which I had previously reviewed for Slashdot:

• Effective C++ Second Edition
• More Effective C++

So I knew a priori that the content was excellent, but how would it be packaged and presented? Would it be Windows-only, forcing me to use it only at work as I run Linux at home? Would it be awkward to read onscreen? Would it be easily searchable? Could I annotate and print portions of it?

A Pleasant Surprise

I was pleasantly surprised when the package contained only a CDROM with these instructions printed on it:

To start, open INDEX.HTM
System requirements: Netscape Navigator 4.0+ (on Unix, Mac, or Win32) or Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0+ (on Win32 only).

So far so good! I had no problems using the CD with Communicator 4.5 on NT 4.0, and Communicator 4.04 on Debian GNU/Linux 2.0. Pretty much any modern browser with Java and JavaScript support should work. If you experience browser problems, the publisher provides helpful advice.

Initial Impressions

The CD has a nice look and feel to it. A navigation area is always present, acting as a control and providing a colour indication of where you are in the CD.

The text is decent to read and is true HTML, not merely raw text. It seems Meyers is conscious of the fact that an electronic version must add value to complement a printed version, otherwise it is not useful for its target audience.

Overall, I'd say this offering is a well though out and put together product, and not just a cheap knock-off.

Content

The CD (which itself has a printing number) contains the latest printings of the two books. It also boasts five magazine articles chosen by Meyers to augment the material in the books:

• "Exception Handling: A False Sense of Security" by Tom Cargill, from C++ Report Nov-Dec 1994.
• "Coping With Exceptions" by Jack W. Reeves, from C++ Report Mar 1996.
• "Exception-Safe Generic Containers" by Herb Sutter, from C++ Report Sep 1997, Nov-Dec 1997.
• "Counting Objects in C++" by Scott Meyers, from C/C++ Users Journal Apr 1998.
• "A First Look at C++ Program Analyzers" by Scott Meyers and Martin Klaus, from Dr. Dobb's Journal Feb 1997.

The first three are highly recommended for anyone dealing with exceptions. And of course, since any function may throw an exception, that means anyone writing C++! The object counting article elaborates on an idea from Effective C++ Item 14, illustrating some subtle language issues along the way. The final article outlines the state of the art in commercial static C++ analysis tools in September 1996.

Hyperlinks

The CD has links everywhere. Let me repeat: everywhere. In addition to hyperlinking existing references, Meyers added many cross references to the books and articles to further solidify the material.

Links to the internet at large are redirected through Addison Wesley Longman's online site so that they may stay current. And every single paragraph on the CD is anchored and hyperlinked, to facilitate electronic referencing and bookmarking.

Search Facilities

The CD provides two alternatives to your browser's "find in page" search facility. The first is a comprehensive merged index of the two books. The second is a search applet, modified from the Design Patterns CD search applet. It displays the resulting hits, with their enclosing paragraph for context if you select it. I found it easy to scan through hits until I found an interesting paragraph, then to jump to that document.

Although the search applet is aware of the entire CD, it appears that it can search only for one keyword. I'd really prefer more sophisticated search string options, such as multiple keywords, boolean operations, and perhaps even full regular expressions.

Configuration Facilities

For a set of web pages, the CD is impressively configurable. You can choose between five navigation area sizes, and five image sizes. You can view the books by item, by chapter, or in their entirety. And of course you can change text size in your browser.

Performance and Licensing

To implement the configurability options, there are actually five copies of each image and three copies of each book on the CD. Still, the total data size is a mere 16MB, which easily fits on a hard drive for greater performance and frees a CDROM drive for other use. This is also important because, given technology, actually altering the HTML files is really the only viable way of annotating the CD.

The CD comes with a single user license. You must contact the publisher for additional network license options. The short story is: you can make the CD available on a non-internet-accessible server to as many users as you have licenses, and you can purchase additional network licenses more cheaply the more you buy.

Summary

I've been using the CD both at work and at home for a couple of weeks, and I continue to find it a valuable resource. It easily subs in for my absent printed books, although of course I can't use it without a computer. The articles are useful, and the index and search applet allow me to quickly find what I am looking for.

Really, I have only three complaints:

• the search applet is somewhat limited
• there could be more magazine articles
• Scott's author photo is starting to look less like Eddie Van Halen and more like Gene Simmons

However, I don't think any of those detracts from the CD enough to reduce its 10/10 rating. In the worst case, since the CD is composed of text HTML files, you could apply other search utilities (eg, grep) to it.

The CD's online site has a demo, which I recommend trying if you want to get a feel for the CD before you purchase it. In addition to the general look and feel, navigation area, and search applet, it includes all of the magazine articles and a few of the books' items.

I'm happy with the CD, and recommend it as a professional resource.

To pick this up and help Slashdot, head over to Computer Literacy.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
Effective C++ Second Edition
More Effective C++
Magazine Articles
Search the CD

Happy New Year! Ed Schlunder wrote in with 1999's first Ask Slashdot. He asks: "Our school district is playing with the idea of video conferencing and I'm wondering if this can be done on Linux. My home computer has a bttv card and a full duplex sound card. This should be the necessary hardware for doing video conferencing. On the software side, Linux supports IP Multicast and IGMP, so the kernel seems to be up to the task. But what about the actual video compression and distribution system? So far, everything I've looked at seems about 1-2 years old and no longer maintained (vic, nv, etc). Is there a cross platform video conferencing application out there for Linux that is actively maintained?" The school is currently looking into Microsoft NetMeeting, but Ed worries (and rightly so) that Microsoft might be positioning itself to dominate in this market, allowing them to determine the standards later on. What do you all say? Remember, that more of Ask Slashdot can be found here ! 1998 was a good first year, and I'm hoping that we can help more folks with their nagging questions in 1999!

Bryce writes "AT&T and IBM announced a series of strategic agreements under which AT&T will acquire IBM's Global Network business for $5 billion in cash. (That's a lot of stuffed suitcases going across the boards tables) IBM will outsource a significant portion of its global networking needs to AT&T. AT&T will outsource certain applications processing and data center management operations to IBM. The transactions could represent $2.5 billion in additional revenue to AT&T in the first full year of operation. The IBM Global Network business AT&T will acquire serves the networking needs of several hundred large global companies, tens of thousands of mid-sized businesses and more than one million individual Internet users in 59 countries. The acquisition boosts AT&T's strategy to rapidly increase the company's revenue, especially at its fast- growing networking services unit, AT&T Solutions. About 5,000 IBM employees will join AT&T as part of a You'll find the AT&T's press release and the IBM version "

Per Wigren was the first reader to write in to tell us that Linux.org has apparently solved their network problems, and the sites usual content is now back online.

Kevin Forge has written in with an interesting piece called Lawyers use WordPerfect. It talks about his view on free software vs. commercial software, and especially commercial software on free Operating Systems. Check it out. The following is a feature written by Slashdot reader Kevin Forge Lawyers use Word Perfect Each time even a rumor of a commercial app being ported to Linux is mentioned we get comments that run the gamut from ; "Let's all go buy this to show our support for the platform" to "We can achieve most everything that prog offers by using these open source tools so why should we trust our important work to this propriatery bloatware ?".

"who wants world domination"?

We constantly hear the argument that Linux will achieve world domination or that a significant percentage of all computers will be run on Linux in a few years. However to achieve either goal Linux must be a viable option for people with real business needs now.

This brings me to the lawyers we all love to hate. I am siting in a Lawyer's office waiting to be paid for fixing Windows 95 on 2 PCs ( again ) when a client walks out having just spelled out the details of her divorce ( loud enough for me to hear ). Before she is in the parking lot the laser starts spiting out the 1st page of a 30 page court document for her case.

How the hell could that be done so fast ?

Simple It was already done. The details that change are few and far between. Things like names, addresses and dates. Once these are entered into fields a macro is run that generates your own customized "I can't live with this bum anymore" court filling.

Don't discount inertia

Now you could say it's easy enough to do this kind of thing with a shell script on a Linux system without the added expense of Word Perfect. However it took these people years to tune operations and learn WP to the point where this became a practical time saving prosedure. To move this operation to existing open source software would mean learning all these tricks again.

How important is the cost of changing ? Well these same lawyers buy new PCs preburdend with MSOffice 97 and promptly upgrade to Corel Perfect Office 8 or even 7 in order that they can keep using the same techniques. Sure those features are available on MSOffice and the learning curve from one Windows app to another is tiny compared to moving to traditional Unix tools. However an even lower cost is simply shelling out a hundred bucks for a CD from Corel.

Where does Linux fit?

Well with WP on Linux the barriers to entry become significantly lower for Lawyers. Simply put, a Penguin preloaded and configured with XDM, KDE, WP8 and Laserjet support has the same learning curve as moving up to a Dell with NT4 or 98 and WP8. With the massive reliability gap taken into consideration they could see Linux as a cost effective solution and another group joins ISPs and tech companies as Linux users.

Where does this leave the open source word processors ?

I see no reason to not continue aggressive development of the better GPLed Word Processors. K/LyX is moving well and there is talk of a serious contender from the Gnome camp. Maxwell, which shines among Linux apps has been GPLed with a flat request to "port it to Gnome and KDE" ( It's Motif based ). One of these will eventually become a challenger to WP across the board. By then Word Perfect will be accustomed to maintaining a quality lead that enables them to survive against a free challenger. In other words those without money or who attend "The church of Emacs" will have good WPs and the rest of us will have slightly better WPs.

Telling people to "accept the open source concept" if they want to use Linux or to "GPL all code that you will release on Linux" is completely pointless. Even RMS knows this which is why he wrote the LGPL.

This applies to the SQL people too.

Right now all but 2 of the large database makers are officially supporting their products on Linux. IBM programmers say a port is running in the lab ( I have no reason to doubt this for even a second ) and Microsoft would prefer to pretend Linux doesn't exist (let's return the favor :). Some months ago I argued that Oracle wouldn't ever port to Linux until they saw it as a "port or die" desision at which point they would start selling the DB for Linux they already have running in the labs. The reality is a little more impressive than the speculation. It seems all these vendors will be giving away products in order to establish market share. Is it just me or do other people think they are trying to get a significant piece of the Linux DB pie before it gets big?

Should we all just run out and buy these programs to show our support?

No. That's just crazy. Let the free market have it's say. There are evaluation versions of the better stuff floating around. If you find it's good enough to keep beyond the evaluation period then fork over the dough. That doesn't mean you need to wait out the full period however, just until you know it's a keeper. We should buy them if they are of some use to us. We should buy them if they are good. It's your money spend it wisely, you now have choices.

Slashdot reader Ignasi G. writes "For the past months I have been very happy reading almost everyday how Linux has been gaining popularity in the computer world. Linux is today an OS with a well deserved recognition, but still lacks support for other tasks which are very popular nowadays, such as multimedia. And I think this is something we must keep in mind, because good multimedia capablilities is something many users want to have in their computers. I sent e-mail to Matrox asking them about Linux support for their multimedia products. You can find my letter and their respone here. " Anyone know of a different but good frame grabber card he may use? Alan?

Good press for Linux is always nice to read, and it was nice to read the CNN article about Linux users and the OS in general.

Michael McLagan wrote in to tell us that Linux.org is experiencing DNS craziness thanks to everyone's favorite service, InterNIC. Things apparently are fixed now, and things will be back to normal after the servers propogate tonight.

This is fairly sizable. Michael McLagan, better known to most readers as the brave soul responsible for Linux.org has written a response to the criticism he has recieved lately about the web site. I feel Linux.org is an important resource and Michael is working hard to do a good job. I think it's important that we work together to make sure that Linux.org is all it should be. I guess the first step is to hit the link below and read what he has to say, and talk about it. The following is written by Michael McLagan to help address the issues at linux.org

Recently there has been controversy over the new site layout and design, as well as the Ziff Davis article. To address some of these issues, I am making a public statement about linux.org and Linux Online in general. I hope to address the various points raised in the discussions from last week, and head off a few questions which will no doubt come.

Below is the first page of our advertising material sent out to companies who ask us about placing banner ads up on the web site. I believe it will answer a lot of the questions about how/why/where the domain is going. Please take some time, as repetative as it may seem, to read it thru.

Most of you probably don't even know who I am. I'll take that as a blessing, because being famous isn't my desire. I will say that there isn't a single one of you out there with the kernel tree installed that doesn't have my work on your hard drive. I've made several kernel contributions, one large, several small. I've also worked with several commercial operations in getting Linux drivers available for their equipment, most notably DigiBoard serial products.

Does that make me more important than any other kernel contributor? Absolutely not. It doesn't even put me into the same league as gentlemen like Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, Remi Card, Leonard Zubkoff, Theodore Tso and a whole list of others who I can't take the space to mention. Does it make me more important than the user of Linux? Again, i don't feel so. What it does, though, is give me some standing in establishing a corner of the Linux world and maintaining it.

The long and the short of it is the buck stops here. As much as some do not believe it, there is a person (other than myself) responsible for the day to day business of maintaining the site. As far as the design and graphics go, they are my work. It's my hardware, my configurations, my cgi software, my bandwidth and my money. Despite all of that, I dedicate my time and effort and that of the webmaster, to the promotion of an OS that I believe in.

I'm doing my level best, in my opinion, to achieve the goals outlined in the advertising materials we distribute. If you have contributions you want to make, comments that you feel are important, topics that you don't think we are covering then I encourage you to step forward and fill the webmaster@linux.org mailbox with those comments. We welcome them, and we act on them. I've had this discussion with our largest detractor, Vincent Jannelle over the last few days, and he seems intent to do his own thing. I told him, as I tell you, we will give his work all due consideration, and take from it what fits in with our own goals.

I apologize for the length of this, but I beleive that it goes a long way to clarifying my position as the maintainer and controller of the linux.org domain. I hope it has answered some of your questions, and addressed some of your concerns. I will respond, time permitting, to comments that are sent to me at Michael.McLagan@Linux.Org. I thank you for taking the time to read these comments.

Issues from recent discussions

• The Logo.

  The unfortunate problem I had was the inability to get the font used in the original work. With the new site up, and people noticing/commenting on the penguin, I put in 3 days to get the Dubiel font working so I could re-create the logo. As you will all notice now, there's a new image online now which is a faithful reproduction of Larry Ewing's penguin.

• The background.

  Within a day of it going online, I replaced the background image of the penguin with one that was much lighter in appearance. This made it less emposing on the background, and comments to the webmaster began to fall off about it.

• The colours.

  Some of you wonder if I'm colour blind, or just plain blind. Well, I would invite you to visit (for the next 2 days only) the test site where we posted up some different versions of the homepage you see now. These are all identical except for the colour choices. Over 2 dozen people were asked to visit the site and provide feedback, selecting the colour of graphic, headers, and background they prefered, and what would make the best combination. The result was the site you see online today.

  I have no intention of revealing who participated in the viewing of these choices, or what their comments were. One of them, Jeff Claggett, identified himself as a participant in his post about the site. The others may and will probably remain anonymous. I will go so far as to say that very prominant members of the Linux community were invited and responded in our survey.

• Pages are slow.

  Claims the pages were slow on the 4th are entirely true. That day, the server jumped from delivering it's average of 650k accesses, 72k page views to 800k accesses and 85k page views. Additionally, there were massive numbers of 404 errors for people accessing graphics on cached pages, causing our badurl document to be presented.

  The machine itself is nothing less than a Dual Pentium 90, 128M of RAM, 2.1G SCSI drive. On it's normal days, it sings along like a well oiled top and generally delivers pages in a timely fashion. The one day everyone was busy looking at it, it didn't handle the load. As our numbers of accesses grow, we are planning to create a dual server situation, which will alleviate the problem.

• The page looks crappy in ...

  Taken directly from the server's log files, we have the following:

       Access
    Hits  Percent  ID
  -----------------------------
  413266   62.99%  Mozilla
  221824   33.81%  MSIE
    5253    0.80%  Opera/3.0
    2183    0.33%  Teleport Pro
    1693    0.26%  Lynx
    1467    0.22%  Wget
    1224    0.19%  GETWWW-ROBOT
    1074    0.16%  Konqueror
     657    0.10%  SQA SiteCheck
  
   ...
  
  ------  ------
  656116  100.00%
  

  Seems to me that we should be addressing the needs of the majority of the clients that come to the site. I believe we do.

• Poor content

  This, I must admit, confounds me. I believe the content we have here is a good general reference to what's out there for information on Linux. It is undergoing a bit of a re-organization into some more manageable sections, and hopefully will be more useful/accessible to people in the future.

  We host what I believe to be the most up to date and complete list of Linux user groups worldwide. That, in and of itself, makes Linux Online a valuable resource to the new Linux user, to see where they can meet like minded people in their corner of the world. The list is kept up to date by a constant stream of user input and our own research on search engines and the like.

  Even if after all that has been said, we are here to support the community. If there's a piece of content that is missing, please send it in as a submission. It will usually show up at the next week's update unless something busy is going on and it takes an extra week. We incorporate every project, application, distribution and general link brought to our attention.

• Site doesn't change

  Oh that it were true that the site could be neglected for some short period of time. Unfortunately, if the email to webmaster is left even for a day, it reaches into the unmanagable range. A week would present enough email to drown an individual trying to deal with it. Linux Online maintains 2 web sites, www.linux.org and a development site. The latter is blocked from access to the pubic appropriate security checks. During the week, ongoing changes are made to the development site. Monday morning, at 4:45AM Eastern time, context diffs are created from last week's site, and the diff and images are copied onto www.linux.org as the week's update. After this process is done, URLWatch is run and the email notices are sent out.

• Banner ads? How dare he...

  Lets face it. We all have families to feed. The guy we buy our computers from, the backbone Internet providers, the electical companies, etc. As outlined above, in the very material that you can get by sending an email to sales@linux.org. I'd like to get costs covered as a bare minimum. I honestly can't see how any one of you out there can consider it inappropriate or unusual that having the site pay for it's hardware, T1, power, space and staff time is a problem.

  Over and above that, I believe that some non-distribution centric marketting would be a very good thing. That's where the next level of cash gained from the ads would go. FreeBSD has Walnut Creek CDROM buying banners for it on various search engines and the like. My intention is to gather the resources of the commercial companies in the Linux field, take some of their marketting money, and use it to market the IDEA OF LINUX, something that will help us ALL.

• Other sites

  I've never suggested that the world should look to any specific site to get their Linux information. In fact, centralization like that would be almost impossible. I am trying to do what I can to make that happen with an internet spider/search engine and thru our own efforts.

  Even with that, we will never be SlashDot or FreshMeat or any other live, minute to minute news/information site. It's not part of our current goals. Our direction is towards new users. I've recently put a "Getting Started" area on the home page with the top few questions that the webmaster gets in email daily. The subpage contains a growing list of other similar questions that are, we believe, one of the big reasons people will come to the site.

  If you want to link to another site, then by all means do so. I'm not holding a gun to people's head demanding they provide their main link to us, nor will I ever do so. As with the poll done here recently, we all have differing opinions, and it's our diversity that makes us what we are.

• PC Week Article

  Several pieces of information were quoted in the article by John Dodge in PC Week. The webmaster followed links off the web site and found the following information, which is the most likely source of his information.

  1. Linux Counter http://counter.li.org/

     Text from the top of the page:

     62481 users registered
     29458 machines registered
     My guess at the number of Linux users: Six million

  2. Linux Myth Dispeller http://www.KenAndTed.com/KensBookmark/linux/index.html

     This is the clumsily produced FAQ he refers to. The grammer is poor, but it DOES dispell a lot of myths IF someone actually reads it.

Advertising Introduction

In 1991, Linus Torvalds quietly started a revolution in the computer industry. With his first postings to usenet and release of source code on his ftp site, Linux was born. Over the course of time a myriad of different programmers, designers, and others have worked with Linus to build an industrial strength kernel, and surrounded it with all the tools necessary to turn it into a complete operating system.

Sometime in 1992, Michael McLagan became involved with Linux as a user. After downloading and installing one of the very early distributions (SLS for those who remember), it was clear that there was serious potential for Linux to grow. He began developing drivers and networking code for the Linux kernel. Over time, other companies developed distributions, and Linux began gaining acceptance around the world. However, Linux lacked a central organization to give it a presence on the internet, and to promote its use in corporate environments.

LINUX.ORG was registered with the InterNIC in May 1994. The web site went online with a single page via a 28.8k modem. Links pointed to a site maintained by Liem Bahneman at the University of Washington. This material was eventually moved to Specialized Systems Consultants. In August 1997 Linux Online designed an entirely new site with local content and a broader coverage of the activities in the Linux community.

The mission of Linux Online is to promote Linux to the world. Outlined below is the plan to accomplish this goal. Phase 1 is currently ongoing. Future phases will be funded in part by the banner ad programs outlined below.

1. Create and maintain a comprehensive website. An updated design to be released on June 1st. Updates to the site are done weekly. As staffing allows, more frequent updates are planned.
2. Purchasing general Linux advertisements in trade magazines, internet search engines, and other highly visible web sites on the
3. Purchasing general Linux advertisements in trade magazines, internet search engines, and other highly visible web sites on the Internet. These advertisements will promote Linux as a viable platform for corporate MIS environments, without making reference to any particular vendors.
4. Organize and present seminars in various U.S., Canadian, and International cities, aimed at information technology and management level decision makers within the business community. These one to two day seminars will present information showing Linux in use in large organizations, the benefits of using an Open Source product, various products from Linux vendors, and local information on consultants who can assist in a smooth transition to Linux.

Linux Online believes that widespread promotion will assist all organizations involved with Linux, from application developers, help desk and installation/setup consultants, kernel developers, hardware manufacturers, and other commercial endeavours. In much the same way that the kernel developers have worked together on source code, working together on promoting Linux will exceed the sum of individuals acting alone.

This is fairly sizable. Michael McLagan, better known to most readers as the brave soul responsible for Linux.org has written a response to the criticism he has recieved lately about the web site. I feel Linux.org is an important resource and Michael is working hard to do a good job. I think it's important that we work together to make sure that Linux.org is all it should be. I guess the first step is to hit the link below and read what he has to say, and talk about it. The following is written by Michael McLagan to help address the issues at linux.org

Recently there has been controversy over the new site layout and design, as well as the Ziff Davis article. To address some of these issues, I am making a public statement about linux.org and Linux Online in general. I hope to address the various points raised in the discussions from last week, and head off a few questions which will no doubt come.

Below is the first page of our advertising material sent out to companies who ask us about placing banner ads up on the web site. I believe it will answer a lot of the questions about how/why/where the domain is going. Please take some time, as repetative as it may seem, to read it thru.

Most of you probably don't even know who I am. I'll take that as a blessing, because being famous isn't my desire. I will say that there isn't a single one of you out there with the kernel tree installed that doesn't have my work on your hard drive. I've made several kernel contributions, one large, several small. I've also worked with several commercial operations in getting Linux drivers available for their equipment, most notably DigiBoard serial products.

Does that make me more important than any other kernel contributor? Absolutely not. It doesn't even put me into the same league as gentlemen like Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, Remi Card, Leonard Zubkoff, Theodore Tso and a whole list of others who I can't take the space to mention. Does it make me more important than the user of Linux? Again, i don't feel so. What it does, though, is give me some standing in establishing a corner of the Linux world and maintaining it.

The long and the short of it is the buck stops here. As much as some do not believe it, there is a person (other than myself) responsible for the day to day business of maintaining the site. As far as the design and graphics go, they are my work. It's my hardware, my configurations, my cgi software, my bandwidth and my money. Despite all of that, I dedicate my time and effort and that of the webmaster, to the promotion of an OS that I believe in.

I'm doing my level best, in my opinion, to achieve the goals outlined in the advertising materials we distribute. If you have contributions you want to make, comments that you feel are important, topics that you don't think we are covering then I encourage you to step forward and fill the webmaster@linux.org mailbox with those comments. We welcome them, and we act on them. I've had this discussion with our largest detractor, Vincent Jannelle over the last few days, and he seems intent to do his own thing. I told him, as I tell you, we will give his work all due consideration, and take from it what fits in with our own goals.

I apologize for the length of this, but I beleive that it goes a long way to clarifying my position as the maintainer and controller of the linux.org domain. I hope it has answered some of your questions, and addressed some of your concerns. I will respond, time permitting, to comments that are sent to me at Michael.McLagan@Linux.Org. I thank you for taking the time to read these comments.

Issues from recent discussions

• The Logo.

  The unfortunate problem I had was the inability to get the font used in the original work. With the new site up, and people noticing/commenting on the penguin, I put in 3 days to get the Dubiel font working so I could re-create the logo. As you will all notice now, there's a new image online now which is a faithful reproduction of Larry Ewing's penguin.

• The background.

  Within a day of it going online, I replaced the background image of the penguin with one that was much lighter in appearance. This made it less emposing on the background, and comments to the webmaster began to fall off about it.

• The colours.

  Some of you wonder if I'm colour blind, or just plain blind. Well, I would invite you to visit (for the next 2 days only) the test site where we posted up some different versions of the homepage you see now. These are all identical except for the colour choices. Over 2 dozen people were asked to visit the site and provide feedback, selecting the colour of graphic, headers, and background they prefered, and what would make the best combination. The result was the site you see online today.

  I have no intention of revealing who participated in the viewing of these choices, or what their comments were. One of them, Jeff Claggett, identified himself as a participant in his post about the site. The others may and will probably remain anonymous. I will go so far as to say that very prominant members of the Linux community were invited and responded in our survey.

• Pages are slow.

  Claims the pages were slow on the 4th are entirely true. That day, the server jumped from delivering it's average of 650k accesses, 72k page views to 800k accesses and 85k page views. Additionally, there were massive numbers of 404 errors for people accessing graphics on cached pages, causing our badurl document to be presented.

  The machine itself is nothing less than a Dual Pentium 90, 128M of RAM, 2.1G SCSI drive. On it's normal days, it sings along like a well oiled top and generally delivers pages in a timely fashion. The one day everyone was busy looking at it, it didn't handle the load. As our numbers of accesses grow, we are planning to create a dual server situation, which will alleviate the problem.

• The page looks crappy in ...

  Taken directly from the server's log files, we have the following:

       Access
    Hits  Percent  ID
  -----------------------------
  413266   62.99%  Mozilla
  221824   33.81%  MSIE
    5253    0.80%  Opera/3.0
    2183    0.33%  Teleport Pro
    1693    0.26%  Lynx
    1467    0.22%  Wget
    1224    0.19%  GETWWW-ROBOT
    1074    0.16%  Konqueror
     657    0.10%  SQA SiteCheck
  
   ...
  
  ------  ------
  656116  100.00%
  

  Seems to me that we should be addressing the needs of the majority of the clients that come to the site. I believe we do.

• Poor content

  This, I must admit, confounds me. I believe the content we have here is a good general reference to what's out there for information on Linux. It is undergoing a bit of a re-organization into some more manageable sections, and hopefully will be more useful/accessible to people in the future.

  We host what I believe to be the most up to date and complete list of Linux user groups worldwide. That, in and of itself, makes Linux Online a valuable resource to the new Linux user, to see where they can meet like minded people in their corner of the world. The list is kept up to date by a constant stream of user input and our own research on search engines and the like.

  Even if after all that has been said, we are here to support the community. If there's a piece of content that is missing, please send it in as a submission. It will usually show up at the next week's update unless something busy is going on and it takes an extra week. We incorporate every project, application, distribution and general link brought to our attention.

• Site doesn't change

  Oh that it were true that the site could be neglected for some short period of time. Unfortunately, if the email to webmaster is left even for a day, it reaches into the unmanagable range. A week would present enough email to drown an individual trying to deal with it. Linux Online maintains 2 web sites, www.linux.org and a development site. The latter is blocked from access to the pubic appropriate security checks. During the week, ongoing changes are made to the development site. Monday morning, at 4:45AM Eastern time, context diffs are created from last week's site, and the diff and images are copied onto www.linux.org as the week's update. After this process is done, URLWatch is run and the email notices are sent out.

• Banner ads? How dare he...

  Lets face it. We all have families to feed. The guy we buy our computers from, the backbone Internet providers, the electical companies, etc. As outlined above, in the very material that you can get by sending an email to sales@linux.org. I'd like to get costs covered as a bare minimum. I honestly can't see how any one of you out there can consider it inappropriate or unusual that having the site pay for it's hardware, T1, power, space and staff time is a problem.

  Over and above that, I believe that some non-distribution centric marketting would be a very good thing. That's where the next level of cash gained from the ads would go. FreeBSD has Walnut Creek CDROM buying banners for it on various search engines and the like. My intention is to gather the resources of the commercial companies in the Linux field, take some of their marketting money, and use it to market the IDEA OF LINUX, something that will help us ALL.

• Other sites

  I've never suggested that the world should look to any specific site to get their Linux information. In fact, centralization like that would be almost impossible. I am trying to do what I can to make that happen with an internet spider/search engine and thru our own efforts.

  Even with that, we will never be SlashDot or FreshMeat or any other live, minute to minute news/information site. It's not part of our current goals. Our direction is towards new users. I've recently put a "Getting Started" area on the home page with the top few questions that the webmaster gets in email daily. The subpage contains a growing list of other similar questions that are, we believe, one of the big reasons people will come to the site.

  If you want to link to another site, then by all means do so. I'm not holding a gun to people's head demanding they provide their main link to us, nor will I ever do so. As with the poll done here recently, we all have differing opinions, and it's our diversity that makes us what we are.

• PC Week Article

  Several pieces of information were quoted in the article by John Dodge in PC Week. The webmaster followed links off the web site and found the following information, which is the most likely source of his information.

  1. Linux Counter http://counter.li.org/

     Text from the top of the page:

     62481 users registered
     29458 machines registered
     My guess at the number of Linux users: Six million

  2. Linux Myth Dispeller http://www.KenAndTed.com/KensBookmark/linux/index.html

     This is the clumsily produced FAQ he refers to. The grammer is poor, but it DOES dispell a lot of myths IF someone actually reads it.

Advertising Introduction

In 1991, Linus Torvalds quietly started a revolution in the computer industry. With his first postings to usenet and release of source code on his ftp site, Linux was born. Over the course of time a myriad of different programmers, designers, and others have worked with Linus to build an industrial strength kernel, and surrounded it with all the tools necessary to turn it into a complete operating system.

Sometime in 1992, Michael McLagan became involved with Linux as a user. After downloading and installing one of the very early distributions (SLS for those who remember), it was clear that there was serious potential for Linux to grow. He began developing drivers and networking code for the Linux kernel. Over time, other companies developed distributions, and Linux began gaining acceptance around the world. However, Linux lacked a central organization to give it a presence on the internet, and to promote its use in corporate environments.

LINUX.ORG was registered with the InterNIC in May 1994. The web site went online with a single page via a 28.8k modem. Links pointed to a site maintained by Liem Bahneman at the University of Washington. This material was eventually moved to Specialized Systems Consultants. In August 1997 Linux Online designed an entirely new site with local content and a broader coverage of the activities in the Linux community.

The mission of Linux Online is to promote Linux to the world. Outlined below is the plan to accomplish this goal. Phase 1 is currently ongoing. Future phases will be funded in part by the banner ad programs outlined below.

1. Create and maintain a comprehensive website. An updated design to be released on June 1st. Updates to the site are done weekly. As staffing allows, more frequent updates are planned.
2. Purchasing general Linux advertisements in trade magazines, internet search engines, and other highly visible web sites on the
3. Purchasing general Linux advertisements in trade magazines, internet search engines, and other highly visible web sites on the Internet. These advertisements will promote Linux as a viable platform for corporate MIS environments, without making reference to any particular vendors.
4. Organize and present seminars in various U.S., Canadian, and International cities, aimed at information technology and management level decision makers within the business community. These one to two day seminars will present information showing Linux in use in large organizations, the benefits of using an Open Source product, various products from Linux vendors, and local information on consultants who can assist in a smooth transition to Linux.

Linux Online believes that widespread promotion will assist all organizations involved with Linux, from application developers, help desk and installation/setup consultants, kernel developers, hardware manufacturers, and other commercial endeavours. In much the same way that the kernel developers have worked together on source code, working together on promoting Linux will exceed the sum of individuals acting alone.