Slashdot Mirror

We need a good, polite, robust, idiot-proof "mirror" script so that the folks who are interested in this stuff will be the backup of last resort more reliably.

Still, this is another example of shoddy, biased reporting in the Linux media. After all, why use the whole truth when half of it will do just as well! Now that's efficiency!

Actually, Linux Today is one of internet.com's rags (INT Media Group, Inc). They are more mainstream media than most of the well-known on-line Linux news services.

I suggest that if you want decent Linux reporting you go to linux.com or LWN.net, or just read /. for cogent evaluations of bad reports, like the above. Also, news.com tends to "not get it" as much as the specifically Linux-oriented sites, but they have some excellent general technology reporting (in spite of being CNet).

With Jacques Le Marois (CEO & Co-Founder of Mandrakesoft) on: http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/05/22/1 754212&mode=thread

With Gaël Duval (Creator of Linux-Mandrake & Co-Founder of Mandrakesoft) on: http://lwn.net/2001/features/MandrakeSoft.php3

Worth a read.

cough* EXT3*cough*TUX2*cough

I am a Linux enthusiast. When I learned that IBM was investing such a substantial sum of capitol in Linux, I was pleased.

Though running Linux for the lesser duration of its existence (1997), in that time I have seen it grow. Where once ignored and labeled as a hobby, now the largest software company is calling it their number 1 threat and petitioning United States lawmakers to take measures against its development model. This is a large difference from the times when we would petition hardware and software manufacturers for just documentation, let alone drivers and ports.

Another poster mentioned this but it is worth repeating: $18,000 is well worth the advertising this incident has caused. Many news sites have covered it and IBM is well known for having done it. lwn.net previously reported that Sun Microsystems had offered to 'help IBM remove' the paint. Granted, the publicity for such a reason is somewhat embarrasing but more people now know of this wonderful operating system, and the more than significant investment one company has made.
-catpyss, yes an unusual name but you will remeber it.

There's a vocal minority on each side that makes lots of hostile noise about the other license, but I think most in the free software community are more relaxed about it. In certain cases like Ogg/Vorbis, RMS even advocates BSD. I don't know a lot of people who would eschew BSD-licensed software just because they prefer GPL or vice versa.

Not for MS Windows, but for all x86 unixes: http://www.project-udi.org/.
(See also commentary from LWN).

Look, this is pretty cut and dried:

1) Magnequench does in fact hold four patents on the manufacture of the type of magnets in question.

2) Our current patent laws correctly grant them a limited period in which they can profit from the sweat of thier brow by preventing others from simply copying thier invention. (BTW: if you're opposed to this sort of protection, prepare to go back to a pre-industrial revolution timescale for innovation.)

3) Magnequench obviously feels that it's pretty easy to prove that the devices in question really do infringe on its patents.

The only questionable aspect of this is suing the OEM end users rather than those actually infringing, although I suspect that's a practical matter since the infringers are likely in a foreign country where IP is not well-protected.

If the patents were actually violated, I'm all for Magnequench on this one, and I hope they win big. Compaq and HP are not actually responsible for the violations in question, but they have the only economic power that will make the violators sit up and take notice.

(BTW: More detail on my position on patents can be gained from a letter I wrote to LWN a while back.)

Yesterday, I saw over LWN.net a little email from ESR predicting this.

It was pretty accurate, although naturally I dont think that the comments were quite as bad as he made them out to be. But hey, what do you expect?

On to the actual content of the speech, one thing I noticed was that this guy kept inextricably tying open-source to open source businesses. This kind of annoys me because one of the key aspects of the open-source community is that anyone with computer knowledge can help out, they dont have to be part a company or anything like that. Not that corporations dont do a lot for the open-source community, they just dont do everything. Another thing I noticed was that he seemed to think that open-source implied GLP. Certainly it does not. There are many, many other open-source licences out there, too many to name. Although I do personally prefer the GPL.

Also, Shared Source sucks for both individuals and for business. Like ERS said, its just a one way relationship. The companies that see the code cant use it, all they can do is modify it for the benefit of Microsoft. This basically funnels IP from everywhere else right into microsoft. Apparently its OK for them to steal IP, but once someone else does, oh man...

Im sure theres a million things that are wrong with this guys logic that I'm missing, but I cant get everything and I'm sure they'll be fully elaborated on in further comments.

God I hate Adelphia Powerlink. If it werent for their shitty servers I might have posted this comment like 20 minutes ago and it might have been near the top and so on...thats it, i'm suing them for irreprible damage to karma.

Subject: Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) now enabled on
ftp/filehub.kernel.org

From: "H. Peter Anvin"
To: "kernel.org FTP administrator" ,
mirrors@linux.kernel.org
Subject: Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) now enabled on
ftp/filehub.kernel.org
Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 21:55:49 -0700

I have enabled Explicit Congestion Notification on zeus.kernel.org, the
machine which contains ftp.kernel.org and filehub.kernel.org. This means
that some sites which are behind broken firewalls may have trouble
accessing it. If you are a mirror site, I would appreciate it if you
took the time and verified that you can still access filehub.kernel.org.

Jeff Garzik has a very good page listing ways to fix your firewall to
deal with these kinds of problems. If someone reports problems with ECN,
I suggest pointing them to it:

http://gtf.org/garzik/ecn/

In particular Cisco have production-level fixes out for all their
affected products.

-hpa

Subject: Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) now enabled on
ftp/filehub.kernel.org

From: "H. Peter Anvin"
To: "kernel.org FTP administrator" ,
mirrors@linux.kernel.org
Subject: Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) now enabled on
ftp/filehub.kernel.org
Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 21:55:49 -0700

I have enabled Explicit Congestion Notification on zeus.kernel.org, the
machine which contains ftp.kernel.org and filehub.kernel.org. This means
that some sites which are behind broken firewalls may have trouble
accessing it. If you are a mirror site, I would appreciate it if you
took the time and verified that you can still access filehub.kernel.org.

Jeff Garzik has a very good page listing ways to fix your firewall to
deal with these kinds of problems. If someone reports problems with ECN,
I suggest pointing them to it:

http://gtf.org/garzik/ecn/

In particular Cisco have production-level fixes out for all their
affected products.

-hpa

--
I noticed

Why don't distribuations like Ximian suggest this change?

According to this message on linux-kernel , David S. Miller plans upgrade vger.kernel.org, the linux-kernel mailing list server, Real Soon Now. This will prevent users behind routers that don't understand ECN from using the linux-kernel mailing list!

Is this irresposible or just a good incentive for the entire internet to upgrade their routers?

It remains to be seen how much further Oracle will go, and how quickly. However (and I've already prepared my will in case of God's heavenly thunderbolt), I predict that the Oracle database server itself will be open source within ten years. (If it isn't, it will no longer exist!)

As it stands, the postgresql project has been advancing very rapidly, and is getting extrememly close to beating Oracle in functionality. If Oracle doesn't react to this in the next few years, they're going to start taking serious hits in revenue.

Unfortunately, going open source is only *one* way they can react. Rather than going "open" they might go "free", that is, gratis. Using the db binary as a loss leader for other products (including support) wouldn't be the siliest thing they could do, and it would help to stay ahead of the *really* free competition for some time.

The Great Bridge benchmarks, Postgresql beat Oracle on speed slightly (Bruce Momjian confirms this in this interview: http://lwn.net/2001/features/Momjian/).

Version 7.1 has just been released, with the big news being the addition of outer-joins. I understand that replication is one of the next targets (and given the speed that these guys have been working at, I would expect it to be in the next rev).

From The postgresql site (http://www.postgresql.org):

Key New Features and Capabilities of Version 7.1 Include:

• Write-ahead Log (WAL) increases data integrity and processing speed. To maintain database consistency in case of an operating system crash, previous releases of PostgreSQL have forced all all data modifications to disk before each transaction commit. With WAL, only one log file must be flushed to disk, greatly improving performance. (Tech note: can eliminate use of -F in to disable disk flushes)
• TOAST (The Oversized-Attribute Storage Technique) Past releases had compiled-in row length limit typically between 8Kb & 32Kb. This restriction made storage of long text fields difficult, cumbersome and slow. TOAST enables rows of any length while maintaing the high performance PostgreSQL users have come to expect.
• SQL92 Outer Joins are now supported. (Tech note: eliminates the UNION/NOT IN workaround)
• 64-bit C Language Function Manager support The previous C function manager did not handle support 64-bit CPU's (e.g. Alpha, Sun, Itanium). (Tech note: This change should not impact existing custom functions developed for past versions, but performance will be improved through rewriting to use the new call interface.)
• Complex Queries that are better, stronger and faster Many complex queries were unsupported in previous releases. With v7.1 combinations of views, aggregates, UNION, LIMIT, cursors, subqueries, and inherited tables are enabled. Inherited tables are now accessed by default, and subqueries in FROM are now supported.

There is at least one application out there that had a problem with the September 9 rollover of the UNIX time stamp.

O'Reilly does have a book on ruby. Too bad it's only in Japanese right now. O'Reilly even sponsored a Perl/Ruby conference recently in Japan. There is even a Larry Wall Interview from the event, on what he thinks about Ruby and what not.

Your OS is only as secure as the tools you use. You could make Linux Really Really secure by running no servers on it. You could make BSD really really insecure by running insecure servers on it. How many BSD servers out there are running vulnerable NTP servers, for instance?

I'm not slamming the BSD practise of auditing their code, mind you. I did source code auditing as part of Data General's DG/UX B2 certification and we caught a lot of problems that way, but security doesn't end there. Claiming any one thing is the Be-All and End-All is just plain wrong. I wouldn't hire a system administrator whose sole security plan was "Install BSD." Nor would I trust auditors to catch every single hole, and it only takes one to compromise a network.

Someone tell Mr Cox that his a hat is not fashionable. (I'm speaking about his shirt of course)

And yes, it's definitely a male bunch...

---

Damn dude, where are the chicks?

Cheers...
--
$HOME is where the .*shrc is

Cheers...
--
$HOME is where the .*shrc is

It's more than a couple of days old -- well over a month has past since this was made public. It was buried at the bottom of the press release from TurboLinux, dated 21 Feb 2001 and picked up by LWN in their Commerce section from the next day.

It's more than a couple of days old -- well over a month has past since this was made public. It was buried at the bottom of the press release from TurboLinux, dated 21 Feb 2001 and picked up by LWN in their Commerce section from the next day.

i love the second letter
oh this week edition. quotes:
I think we should be frank. There is no point in fighting a war of propaganda. There is no denying the accusation that one of the main aims of the free software movement is a socialistic one. I don't really care that in the U.S.A., calling something "socialist" means that it is soon called "communist" and then "Stalinist" and then (worst of all!) "un-American". Sticks and stones. One of the advantages of the free software movement being so international as it is, is that it ought to be easier for us to think outside the box of American political discourse.
br> The GPL is socialistic in that it is designed to promote a social goal, which is the establishment of a archive of free software and a community of developers dedicated to enlarging and enhancing it. Ultimately it may occur that this body of software becomes so extensive and attractive that it becomes indispensible---that it becomes a public-domain homologue for what Microsoft software is now. The goal is to revolutionize the means of production of software and to establish a new mode of software distribution: To each according to his need; from each according to his ability. If the movement is successful---if GPLed software becomes "the standard"---then it will be more difficult for software companies to make money selling proprietary software. So the free software movement is not only socialistic in its goals, but dangerous to a certain form of capitalism too. In the case of Microsoft Corporation, the movement is openly hostile.
To those who complain that these goals aren't the American Way, let us simply say: Well, if that's true, then so much the worse for the American Way.

Count 'em up. I think I got about 196 listed at LWN's distro page a month or two back. But, as you point out, there's a handful of major ones (Debian, Red Hat, Caldera, SuSE, Mandrake, Turbo), a few HW-specific ones (Yellow Dog, ARM), and a whole slew of special-purpose ones, as well as smaller dists.

I tend to think of these as tailored applications of Linux rather than fragmentation of the core distro.

What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?

This is a very small step. What he seems to propose are more "exemptions" under current Copyright Law. While I would welcome these changes rather than live under the current situation, they are not enough.

Copyright Law needs to be completely overhauled; the law's concepts were formed at a time when the Printing Press was a huge capital investment. Today's "Printing Presses" (e.g. the Web) are common place. Current Copyright Law cannot deal with this notion of creating (copying) value for virtually nothing.

Consider the article at LWN - here.

In as much (or little) as his proposed changes do, they endorse the current Copyright Code - staked out by IP Lawyers for IP Lawyers.

I repeat: we do not need new exceptions to current Copyright Law, we need new Copyright Law.

Cheers,
Slak

http://www.lwn.net/2001/0222/kernel.php3

ReiserFS and NFS. The various problems that have bit (a small number of) ReiserFS users in 2.4 are being cleared up. But one larger problem remains: ReiserFS, as shipped in 2.4, does not support NFS. That limitation gets in the way of quite a few people who would like to use ReiserFS, but who also need to be able to export their filesystems.

For the short term, those who are not afraid of kernel patches can have a look at this message from Neil Brown describing where to get the patches he has made available. They are still under development, but they provide "reasonable NFS service" in their current state.

The picture for the longer term is a bit less clear. Neil has a plan for proper support of NFS with ReiserFS, and for improving NFS service in general. It is, however, a large change, requiring tweaks to every filesystem which needs to support NFS. Filesystem changes tend to make kernel hackers nervous, especially in the middle of a stable kernel series. And, in fact, Alan Cox responded that he was not interested in such an extensive patch.

Those who are curious about the troubles with NFS should look at Neil's justification for the changes. It is a lengthy, detailed, and well-argued discussion of how the current NFS implementation fails to mesh well with the various Linux filesystems, and exactly what needs to be fixed to make things work better. It was persuasive enough that Alan agreed that the approach made sense - for the 2.5 kernel series.

Thus, the 2.4 kernel may never support exporting of ReiserFS filesystems over NFS. Those who need this capability will have to apply the patch themselves. That is, if the distributors do not apply the patch themselves before shipping the 2.4 kernel. SuSE, at least, applied such a patch when it shipped ReiserFS with 2.2, so it would not be surprising to see that happen again.

hmmm ESR is a "leader" and here in the US, we cannot do without "leadership". Or maybe he is an inventor? That's because he had to invent his own cryptic language for kernel configuration. But oh boy, did he have to also invent Noosphere ?

CL: You sometimes describe yourself as an anthropologist.

ESR: Yes. An anthropologist is a person who studies the behavior of human beings and societies, who studies how human beings form culture, how those cultures behave, how do they change overtime, how they adapted to different conditions. Most of the important things I've done have come out of considering the culture of computer hackers anthropologically. Focusing less on their technological artifacts and their programs, and more of the social machinery, less on the technological machinery that they used, and more on the social machinery that they created in order to support their behavior, and support their craft.

CL: When I first read your "Homesteading the Noosphere", I was impressed by your tone of analysis, because you yourself were a hacker and your analysis was very objective.

okay sorry about all this

Alan Cox is doing that voodoo he do do: LWN report on 2.4.2ac1. Also, the ftp link.

More on 2.4.2 from the LWN is here.

Alan Cox is doing that voodoo he do do: LWN report on 2.4.2ac1. Also, the ftp link.

More on 2.4.2 from the LWN is here.

MICROSOFT (FAMOUS FOR IP THEFT AND SUPPRESSION) CASUALLY LINKS OPEN SOURCE MOVEMENT (FAMOUS FOR KEEPING IP AVAILABLE) WITH CLOSED-SOURCE NAPSTER (FAMOUS FOR IP THEFT)

Linux is developed in a so-called open-source environment in which the software code generally isn't owned by any one company. That, as well as programs such as music-sharing software from Napster Inc., means the world's largest software maker has to do a better job of talking to policymakers, [Microsoft's Jim Allchin] said.

Having failed at competing in the open market (yes, failed, look at W2k sales - and laugh at the thought of MS ever getting 15000 hits a second out of a single P-III-500 by any means), and failed to FUD enough of the public, and failed to fool DOJ, it appears that Microsoft is now embarked on pulling the wool over US Congress eyes... so...

U.S. CITIZENS! WRITE TO YOUR MEMBER OF CONGRESS AND POLITELY COMPLAIN!

This has been updated, and confirmed, however it looks like the extent of this restructuring is a bit more than just one layoff. Although only one employee has been laid off, "some employees are being moved to a different office" according to the SuSE's press contact.
Check out above article (for the update), or go straight to LWN for the other side of the story, where supposedly 'the number of affected people is said to be "around a couple dozen."'
Linux Weekly News's coverage is woefully short, but there is an e-mail from a SuSE employee on the SuSE mailing list posted as "confirmation"...

This has been updated, and confirmed, however it looks like the extent of this restructuring is a bit more than just one layoff. Although only one employee has been laid off, "some employees are being moved to a different office" according to the SuSE's press contact.
Check out above article (for the update), or go straight to LWN for the other side of the story, where supposedly 'the number of affected people is said to be "around a couple dozen."'
Linux Weekly News's coverage is woefully short, but there is an e-mail from a SuSE employee on the SuSE mailing list posted as "confirmation"...

http://lwn.net/daily/fisher.php3

The announcement from Redhat on LWN that gives details about what's new is here.

It's called Linux Weekly News. Every time an issue comes out the next half hour or so brings me up to date on what's happening all over Linux and Open Source... Despite "Linux" in the title, various issues from the BSDs and such are discussed as well. Wherever appropriate, there are summaries and links off to more specific news pages such as Kernel Traffic, Gnotices, Wine Weekly News, LyX Weekly News, Debian, etc. The edtors are up on EVERYTHING that is happening, and restrain themselves to no-nonsense reporting that is a pleasure to read, with links off to more information if you want it. If you're interested in providing more newsletters like WWN or Kernel Traffic, fine, but make it all fit into LWN. Check it out if you haven't already. (They also run daily newsbits in case weekly isn't frequent enough for you.)

There's a vulnerability in Linux with long directory names that's exposed by ReiserFS. As best as they can tell, the vulnerability is in the Linux VFS layer, and not ReiserFS itself. See this page and this page for more details.

As for whether this makes the FS marked experimental or stable, I don't know. I'd imagine that it'll be marked experimental simply because this is the first mainline release to include it.

There's a vulnerability in Linux with long directory names that's exposed by ReiserFS. As best as they can tell, the vulnerability is in the Linux VFS layer, and not ReiserFS itself. See this page and this page for more details.

As for whether this makes the FS marked experimental or stable, I don't know. I'd imagine that it'll be marked experimental simply because this is the first mainline release to include it.

• Linux is in a constant state of change.

There is a lot of excitement in the Linux community about getting the latest distribution of (Debian/RedHat/SuSE/Slackware/whatever). This excitement oftentimes results in neglect of older, oftentimes more stable releases of Linux systems.

To RedHat's credit, RedHat still supports releases as far back as RH5.2, in the sense they still releases security upgrades for RH5.2. About a year ago, RedHat silently stopped releasing security upgrades for RH4.2. Since I still run a RH5.2 server (too far away and too mission-critical for me to conveniently upgrade), I dread the day no more security patches are made available for RH5.2.

I know that the people at Linux Weekly News have been making somewhat of a stink over the fact that Debian announced that they would not make available security patches for 2.1 bugs immediately after releasing Debian 2.2.

Anyway, the point being: The "latest and greatest" is not always the best solution.

- Sam

There are a lot of hightly specialised Linux distros out there (check out the distros page on lwn.net) with all sorts of uses (routers, terminals, servers, workstations, ...). There is no real shortage of resources for Linux developement. When something new is needed, it's generally done by the group that needs it which is often a new group, not an old one abandoning their previous project.

Bill - aka taniwha
--

I have found more information regarding perveted practices and terms of the 'Open Sauce' community

see here!!!!
This document details a new disgusting prastice called grope which is short for GNU rope!!!!

You might want to look at the GNU Rope (a.k.a. grope) project. I'm not sure if it would help or not, but it sounds similar.

I don't know if anybody is working on it currently, but here's an article about it:
http://lwn.net/1998/1029/als/rope.html

The kernel section of the Linux Weekly News seems to be a good place to get a quick idea of what's planned for the Linux kernel. Digging quickly through the last few issues, I came up with a fair list of probables for 2.6, which I won't post here for fear of garbling the message horribly. (I know only slightly more about kernels than your average freshwater fish.)

The kernel section of the Linux Weekly News seems to be a good place to get a quick idea of what's planned for the Linux kernel. Digging quickly through the last few issues, I came up with a fair list of probables for 2.6, which I won't post here for fear of garbling the message horribly. (I know only slightly more about kernels than your average freshwater fish.)

Eric had options on 150K shares. The LWN.net stocks page shows VA at $26.31, currently, meaning those options, if he still has them, are worth just under $4million, minus the (low) exercise price. That assumes he didn't sell any at a higher price, which he could have done.

He's not quite so filthy rich as he appeared last December, but I expect most of us would think that things could be an awful lot worse.

Linux Weekly News has a pretty good analysis of their filing up. You can find it here.
Enjoy...
~luge

I was never quite sure what BeOpen actually planned on doing with Python. At least Digital Creations' entire livlihood depends on Python continuing to exist, and they're already a successful open source company. I thought those of us who love Python had it bad with all the moving around and the uncertainty behind licensing and the language's future (I imagine Guido et al have been having a rougher time at it than I have!), but I just saw on the front page of Linux Weekly News the current TCL plight. So I guess we could have it worse.