Have you heard about the packaging system included with Debian? Are you at a loss to figure out how to actually use these new tools? Debian Planet’s users explain it all.

ZDNet’s Todd Spangler mulls over the latest developments with the online music sharing service: “EMusic President and Chief Executive Gene Hoffman, for one, believes Napster is being disingenuous. “It seems Napster would rather shut down user accounts than to deal directly with the problem of illegally distributed files,” Hoffman said. EMusic said it tried to negotiate a more “consumer-friendly way” to resolve the dispute between the two companies, but Napster refused to cooperate.””

“The Debian GNU/Linux xmcd package has historically installed two setuid helpers for accessing cddb databases and SCSI cdrom drives. More recently, the package offered the administrator the chance to remove these setuid flags, but did so incorrectly.” Full details at LWN.net.

The advisory is at LWN.net: The version of the ncurses library shipped with Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 is vulnerable to several buffer overflows in the parsing of terminfo database files.

ZDNet’s LinuxDevices.com interviews Eric Lee, President and CEO of Esfia, Asia’s newest maker of embedded Linux products.

Linux Orbit’s editor-in-chief walks readers through the process of installing PCMCIA cards and drivers not supported by Linux on two different computer. The first machine is a Toshiba Satellite P5; the second is a Quantex 1500.

Oracle
developers are in for a treat this Thanksgiving holiday — free CDs. Due to
unprecedented success of the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) free CD sampler
program, Oracle will continue to offer OTN members free CDs of Oracle’s
industry-leading software including Oracle8i(TM), Oracle JDeveloper, Oracle
Portal, and much more. Launched nearly one year ago, more than 200,000 OTN
members have already taken advantage of the free CD sampler program.
Developers interested in ordering the free CD samplers can do so by joining
the Oracle Technology Network for free.

Interwoven today announced that it has made TclPro, its development tool for the Tcl language, an open source product. The program is now available for download at Interwoven’s Web site.

Emacspeak 13.0 is now available. The program provides a “complete audio desktop” that enables visually impaired users to interact with their computer using a hands-free environment.

Anand Lal Shimpi takes a look at AMD’s plans for 2001 and beyond. “If you had talked about AMD as being a performance leader back at the release of their K6-III processor last year you would’ve been ridiculed. However, with the most recent statistics showing that AMD has almost 40% of the performance desktop market, 24% of the market belonging to Athlon CPUs alone, it is obvious that things have turned around for AMD.”