ZDNET reports: A group of teens and young adults allegedly planned an
international conspiracy in which they hoped to
“take down the Internet” on New Year’s Eve,
federal agents in Los Angeles said on Friday.

LinuxPower.org interviews Daneil Frye, director of the IBM Linux Technology Center. He says, “We’re expecting that GNOME will
accelerate Linux innovation and the use of Linux
as a desktop. GNOME is one of the major efforts
that, when successful, will legitimize Linux as a
viable desktop. “

Reader Emmanuel Gaillard lets us know about this: “The 2001 LSM Web site is now on-line. Here you could have a look at the dates (July 4 to 9) of the Libre Software Meeting, current topics, as well as the
days’ schedule, … and you can suscribe too (it is even required, since we
need to know the number of those present, either developper or spectator).
To remind you, the LSM is a chance for the developers and contributers
to meet once a year and during several days, in order to draw up a balance
sheet, to plan the future, to discover and even to have good time (Bordeaux
= wine).

This will happen in the ENSEIRB’s rooms, in Talence (near Bordeaux).

This event is open to the public with public sessions, happening in the
campus of Bordeaux I.
P.S The Web site is not finished yet, the essential of the themes are
missing (they will be gradually published).”
Links:
LSM;
ABUL;
ENSEIRB;
The university of Bordeaux I.

“Nuremberg, Germany – January 12, 2001 – Today, SuSE Linux, the international technology leader and solutions provider in Open Source operating system, presented the second generation of e-mail solutions for commerce, public administration, workgroups and all others needing professional e-mail communication.”
Read more on LinuxPR.

Ryan Henry writes “cintaks.com, a site offering news, articles, tutorials and more focused on programming and technology, has recently opened its doors! Check it out, get an account, sign up for the cintaks.com Alert!, and most importantly, submit your news, articles and tutorials!”

Jeff Sohler writes “One thing hampering the mainstream adoption of Linux on the desktop is lack of applications.

Borland has set out to change that with Kylix (Delphi / C++Builder for Linux), offering Cross-Platform development through use of their CLX component library.

Come see Kylix in action, this week in the Pacific Northwest, with more date and locations to follow. (See announcement)”

A standard has been released specifying how PDAs and other wireless devices can all interoperate for synchronization of data. Thanks to Slashdot for the link.

“
Basilix Webmail System vulnerability. Posted on 13.1.2001. Version Affected: Basilix Webmail System 0.9.7beta. Description: There is a simple mistake in the Basilix Webmail system. If .class file extension is not defined as a PHP script at the httpd.conf any attacker may see very valuable information by simply enterering a URL.
”
Full details at net-security.org.

– By Dylan Griffiths –

The Slackware team is gearing up for the next stable release, including important updates such as the 2.2.18 kernel (which includes USB support, DRI, and VM fixes), and glibc2.2. This release has not happened yet, despite what Slashdot reported and later retracted.

The -current tree is awaiting more testing and packages. The kernel of -current was upgraded to 2.2.18 on Thursday, the most recent of many changes and updates to the base 7.1 tree. Changes which haven’t quite settled into a stable release.

The largest potential pitfall to those updating from 7.1 or earlier is that with glibc2.2, the maintainers decided to remove the Berkeley DB support from the code. This means that most apps which require -ldb or -ldb3 for functionality (Postfix, Cyrus IMAPD, etc) break in interesting ways during compilation.

When the distribution is ready, Patrick V. will bless it, and move it to the Slackware-7.2 directory. That’s when the mirrors will have completetly up to date copies, and it’ll be ready for download and installation by the end users.

I received an official mail from Patrick Volkerding confirming that Slackware 7.2 has not been released. “I guess the most important reason that Slackware 7.2 is not released is that it’s not done yet. 🙂 There’s a lot of stuff that’s still on the TODO list. I’d like for 2.4.x to be an _option_ (I’ll still trust 2.2.xx more for quite some time), but 2.4.0 has issues with the USB subsystem not working as modules. […] So, we’re still looking at loose
ends. Seeing “7.2” pop up in a couple of places just indicates that we can all see the light at the end of the tunnel.“

NewsForge editors read and respond to comments posted on our discussion page.

“Digital Networks today announced availability of the new Athlon DDR platform. The new platform features DDR (Double Data Rate) memory technology that doubles peak data throughput to the processor by up to 100 percent compared to its predecessor, Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory (SDRAM), at comparable costs to SDRAM solutions… Pre-installed operating system options include Red Hat Linux or Microsoft Windows.” Full press release on LinuxPR