Linux.com

A Bloomberg News story in the Seattle Times tells of the many things you might want to buy for a geek-friend if you can’t score a Playstation II before the holiday gift-giving orgy.

“The first ever preview of the GNOME meta-theming system has been released.
Sponsored by Helix Code, metatheme aims to provide users with easy access to
‘theme sets’ which encompass all themeable aspects of the GNOME desktop…” More at news.gnome.org.

“The firm this month began a three-month trial of private auctions to
resellers in a move that it said was intended to create cost efficiencies
and improve supply chain manag ement. At the end of August, Sun
sold about a dozen workstations to UK end-users through the QXL
and eBay auction sites. In the US, Sun sells about $1m of equipment a
week through auctions.” ZDNet.uk story.

“Ralph Krause reviews Konqueror — the web browser from the KDE Project: ‘In a nutshell, Konqueror works pretty well. I successfully used it as my primary browser with a few small problems, but nothing that was a showstopper.'” Read the whole thing at BSDtoday.

CNet reports that German authorities have fined Hewlett-Packard for selling CD-RW drives capable of burning illegal music archives.

The Register tells of discussions between the controllers of various country codes (e.g.: .de, .uk, etc.) on breaking away from ICANN’s dominance over decision making on the internet.

Info World reports that the Java Community Process has elected a new executive, and it looks like Sun is seeking more advice from other companies using Java.

Apache Week has a bug list, among other things. “These bugs have been found in 1.3.14 and will be fixed in the next release. The rotatelogs utility churns if the destination for the logs is out of space; if you make httpd.conf a directory rather than a file, then doing a subsequent ‘make install’ over the existing installation goes wrong, leaving a ‘.apaci.install.tmp’ file in the httpd.conf directory. This is because the check for an existing httpd.conf file doesn’t notice the directory; the recent performance tweak to Configure broke the DSO detection on Linux, causing compilation problems … “

Technocrat has this discussion. “Iam
writing to ask Technocrat readers & moderators for help, advice
& opinion on the status of pre-release code & open-source licensing … We have some very good
people on board & are close to the stage of releasing some alpha products. What concerns
us is the issue of licensing. On our group lists we have already published code examples &
specifications, how do we prevent some malicious persons from stealing this code &
claiming authorship. Do the GPL & other open source licenses make provision for
protection of code prior to official release or must the licensing terms be explicitly stated &
provided in conjunction with any code?”

It’s at Debian.org: “Debian 2.2r2 will probably be released by this weekend. Anthony Towns and Ben Collins argued about this, with Anthony wanting get r2 out
within the promised time frame to fix the problems in r1, while Ben prefers to wait a week or two for testing, even more pending security fixes, and to let
the porters catch up so we do not “make another point release, with known issues”. Anthony rejected this plan, stating that “it’ll be out around the
24th, US holiday or not”. This is a tough call — more security holes will surely be found soon after we release — but it’s the kind of tough call that
Anthony as release manager has to make, even if his decision is not popular.”