ndeepak writes: “I have written a command-line primer for new users of Linux, so that they can stop shying away from the prompt.

Intended for:

• Users new to Linux, who have never seen a shell-prompt before.
• Users of Windows(R), who are familiar with DOS but not Linux.

Features:

• Introduction to the bash shell, and miscellaneous things to know before you can start appreciating the shell and its commands.
• The most important and basic commands, with examples. Arranged in a task-oriented order. I have left out all commands which an ordinary user does not need to know. Only the most important options are included.
• Some advanced (but helpful) material. Covers find, grep and chmod commands, plus redirections and pipes.
• Getting started with vi (Appendix). Editors and consoles are intimately related, so I have put in this small file.

Link: http://www.symonds.net/~deep/stuff/linux/
(There are some more Linux things there as well!)”

PDAJames writes: “This article has an interesting take on Microsoft’s claims on OpenGL technology. An IP lawyer says that Microsoft could make things difficult for OpenGL if they feel like it, basically. And this could be an ongoing issue, since Microsoft has been acquiring graphics patents left, right and center…”

Rhett Aultman writes: “Jabbercentral is running a piece on a recent article in XML Journal advocating Jabber as an essential open-standard in the enterprise platform. The article points out Jabber’s power for addressing the critical issues of messaging and compares its flexibility and openness to that of SOAP, concluding with a call to developers to rally behind Jabber as they have rallied behind SOAP.”

Gordon Hubbard writes: “SYDNEY, Australia — 11 July, 2002 — AUUG, the Australian UNIX and
Open Systems User Group, today announced its annual national conference
for UNIX, Linux, BSD and Open Source end users, corporations, developers
and vendors. The conference will focus on Security, Network Monitoring,
Open Source and Business, Large Scale System Management and Wireless Networking.”

The conference, now in its third decade, is a key resource and meeting
place for end users, corporations, developers and vendors wanting to make
the most of their investments in Open Systems.

The 3 day conference programme is preceded by a 3 day tutorial programme.
The tutorial programme allows attendees to work closely with an impressive
range of technical experts to develop specific skills in data security,
system performance, databases, web services and other Internet technologies.

Although focused on providing strong technical content, the conference
also addresses business topics and provides excellent opportunities for
attendees to meet and build friendships via the conference reception and
dinner.

Keynote and invited speakers include:
 

• Terry Lane, President Free Speech Victoria and broadcaster (ABC Radio National)
• John Zornig, Apple Computer
• Kimberley Heitman, Chairperson Electronic Frontiers Australia
• Neil Gunther, Founder Performance Dynamics Company, USA
• Rob Pike, Director of the Computing Concepts Research Department of the
  Computing Science Research Center at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, in
  Murray Hill, New Jersey
• Chris Disspain, Chief Executive Officer for  .au Domain Administration Limited
• John Terpstra, Technology Evangelist, Caldera International Inc.
• Mark White, Apviva Technology Partners

Key Partners in the event include: Apple Computer, Check
Point Technologies Ltd, Sun Microsystems, IBM, AARnet, Caldera Inc., Silicon
Breeze, Australian Computer Society (ACS) and Pearson Education Australia.

“AUUG 2002 – Measure, Monitor, Control” will be held at the Duxton Hotel,
328 Flinders Street, Melbourne, 4 – 6 September 2002. Conference program
and speaker topics are available at http://www.auug.org.au/conf/auug2002/

Tutorials will be conducted prior to the conference, at the same venue,
from 1 – 3 September 2002.

Both AUUG members and non-members can attend with discounts for AUUG
members, members of affiliated organizations and students. Registration
for the conference is $650 for AUUG members and $800 for non-members. 
Tutorials are $500 per full day for AUUG members and $650 for non-members.

###

About AUUG Incorporated
AUUG Inc. is the Australian UNIX and Open Systems User Group, a professional
association for end users, corporations, developers and vendors that promotes
UNIX® and related systems, including Linux and BSD.  Dating from
1975, AUUG is a national body with chapters that organize local activities
in most capital cities.

Visit http://www.auug.org.au/
or contact AUUG at: AUUG Inc., PO Box 366, Kensington, NSW 2033, Australia.
Free Call 1800 625 655, Fax 02 8824 9522, International: Tel +61 2 8824
9511, Fax +61 2 8824 9522, E-mail: auug@auug.org.au.
ACN A00 166 36N, ABN 15 645 981 718.

 

Press Contact
Gordon Hubbard

Treasurer and Press Secretary, AUUG Inc.

<Gordon.Hubbard@auug.org.au>

Tel: 02 9659 9590

###

All products, brands or company names herein may be trademarks or registered
trademarks of their respective owners.”

– By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols –

Somehow, some way, people who are new to Linux have gotten the idea
that Linux has limited IM choices. Because the Unix family was the
first to have popular IM clients, with “talk” leading the way, that’s
more than a little silly. It is true that if you want the
latest AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) features or MSN Messenger you’re
out of luck, but there are many other clients to choose from and some
will let you talk to your buddies whether they’re on AIM, MSN or even
Yahoo.
That last part is very important. People sometimes think that most IM
clients are chosen for their technical excellence or features. No,
they’re not. Forthcoming research from Ferris Research shows conclusively
that we choose our IM clients based on what services our friends and
co-workers are already using.

If it’s for business, many other factors come into play — such as
security, message archiving, logging and interoperability — but even so,
we suspect that the services that the CIOs and CEOs use at home
probably get as serious a look as the corporate IM packages.

Linux IM clients do tend to have fewer features than their
Windows counterparts. On the other hand, some IM users aren’t crazy
about IM clients that include video-conferencing, file transfer,
games, N’Sync wallpaper, and the kitchen sink. If all you
really want is good, solid IM service that will let you talk to the
people you want to talk to, then there’s sure to be a Linux IM client
for you.

How we tested

While this isn’t a comprehensive survey of Linux IM clients — by my
count there are at least a dozen ICQ clients alone — it is an overview
of some of the best and most notable IM clients available today.

Each client was tested on a HP Pavilion 7855 PC with a 1-Ghz Pentium
III and 256 MBs of RAM running SuSE 8.0 and KDE 3.0. This system was
connected to the Internet via a Fast Ethernet switch to a SDSL router
running at 1.4Mbps.

I connected, when supported, with users on AIM, Jabber,
MSN, and Yahoo servers for chatting and any other basic functionality
that the client claimed. To all the developers’ credits, I rarely
found a feature claim that their clients didn’t back up, to at
least a usable level.

That said, most of these programs are still in beta, and you will run
into glitches. None of these blemishes ever got in the way of using
the clients for their main purpose, but if you push their limits,
don’t be surprised if you run into some oddities. None of them,
however, were so bad that simply closing and reopening the client
didn’t repair the problem of the moment.

Another thing to keep in mind is that if you expect these text-messaging clients to also work as video-phones, as their Windows
cousins do, you’re in for a disappointment. Yes, you can do
text messaging; yes, you can do file transfers with most of the
clients; but if you want to see and hear grandma in Nebraska, none of
these clients are as able to do that job as well as the Windows clients.
For my tastes, that’s not a problem. If I want to do video-conferencing, I want a real video-conferencing program, not an
overloaded IM client. Your viewage may vary.

The programs

AIM
1.5.234 — If you want it, you can have AIM running on your Linux
workstation today. You might not want to, though. The latest Linux edition
dates from August 2001 and is several iterations behind its
Windows big brother. Last spring and summer, AOL was taking AIM on
Linux seriously. Today is a different story. While no one at AOL
would come right out and say the project is dead, it’s pushing up
posies.

Still, once installed, with a modified GTK library, it does give you
all the AIM basics, and if that’s all you need, it’s all you need.
It should run on most Linux desktops of July 2001 or later vintage.

GAIM 0.59 – – You may not
want bother with AIM for Linux, though, because GAIM out-performs it. This
Open Source IM client works with AIM, ICQ, Jabber, MSN, Yahoo
Messenger, and more IM systems than any of the others. If you
want one client to talk to everyone, GAIM is it.

The newest version, despite its beta number, is much more stable than
previous versions and is now as steady as any IM client I’ve
encountered. While GAIM is meant for Gnome, you can run it flawlessly
with KDE with the appropriate tweaks.

It’s not as feature-packed or as pretty as Trillian on Windows or Epicware‘s Open Source Fire.app on
Mac OS X, but another point in GAIM’s favor is that you can add to its
utility with plug-ins like a spelling checker or RC5 encryption. You
can only encrypt sessions between GAIM clients, but more and more
business users want to that kind of protection, and relatively few
clients deliver it today.

Everybuddy 0.4.2
— Everybuddy is another Open Source project that tries to talk to all
major IM systems and it does a pretty fair job of delivering just
that. While not as full-featured as GAIM and slightly rougher on the
edges, it’s a fine program in its own right.

Transferring files over it can be daunting, with some upload and
downloads unsupported. For example, the site says you can download files from your
MSN friends, but, in the current RPM, you can’t. That feature is
still being tested.

On the other hand, Everybuddy does have a few interesting features
that, to the best of my knowledge, are all its own. For example, you
can use a filter with it so that you can try to talk to someone in
another language using AltaVista’s Babelfish as your translator.
Thanks to Babelfish, this is more amusing than useful, but it does
show that the developers have an eye to the future of IM.

Gabber 0.8.7 — Gabber is
a Gnome-based IM client for the Jabber family of Open Source, XML-based protocol IM programs. Jabber is the most
popular IM service after the corporate threesome of AOL, Microsoft
and Yahoo. You can use gateway programs to talk to AIM, MSN, and
Yahoo users with the usual proviso that these may not always work.

Gabber, unlike GAIM, is much more picky about running in Gnome than
KDE. While I was finally successful in getting it to run in KDE, more
casual users should be running Gnome if they want to use Gabber.
That said, once up, Gabber ran fine, although I did run into some odd
crashes. Still, Gabber is a young program and shows promise —
especially with its very attractive user interface.

Kinkatta 1.01 —
Kinkatta is a pure AOL IM client without the other IM service
trimmings. Now in version 1.01 for KDE 2.2 and above and 0.89c for Qt
2.2x and higher, this is a solid, reliable client.

A labor of love by chief developer Benjamin Meyer, Kinkatta has a few
features that other clients don’t have. These include the ability to
print directly from the chat window and some advanced message logging
features.

LICQ 1.04 — The ICQ for Linux
site declares that LICQ is the best ICQ client around. Who am I to argue? I’ve tried the others, too, and if I had to have one client, and it had to be just for ICQ,
LICQ is the one I’d pick.

Why? Well, not to put to fine a point on it, but the program just shows
more elbow grease has been applied to its look, functionality and
speed than most of the other ICQ clients. Specifically, I like the
skin support, the file transfer mechanism, the user search capacity
and on and on. If you want an ICQ feature, and it’s not in LICQ, it
may not be worth the having.

Yahoo
Instant Messenger 0.99.19 — One of the major IM companies, Yahoo
is taking Linux IM seriously. Its neat client, while not as fancy
as its Windows clients, includes such bells and whistles as access
to user profiles, stock reports, and email access.

Of course, using the Web and HTTP for this instead of packing it all
into an IM protocol helps a lot. The program is, however, optimized
for Netscape. If you use Konqueror or another browser, you may have
to do some tweaking to get Yahoo Instant Messenger and the browser to work well together.

Yahoo, unlike AOL, is updating its Linux client on a regular basis. The
latest build is from this summer, and I’m told more will be newer
versions will be out shortly. Alas, it’s not Open Source.

Despite that, YIM actually has the widest OS support of all these
programs. In addition to its Linux builds, YIM also comes in versions
for SunOS 5.7 and FreeBSD 4.5.

YIM is also limited in that it only works with Yahoo. The good news
about this, though, is that YIM will still be
working come the day that the more universal IM clients are having fits
with the major IM services.

The one for you?

Again, it really depends on what services your friends are on. For
ICQ fans, LICQ is the one to beat. For personal use, though, and as
someone with friends and co-workers on all the IM networks, GAIM is
my favorite.

If you wanted a business IM client that would work with the outside
world, YIM deserves your careful attention, because, unlike AIM- and MSN-dependent clients, it’s the most likely to work today and tomorrow.

You should also think about Gabber because Jabber seems posed to become
a major, open IM server force in its own right. Its other advantage
is that if you want an internal business IM system, you can simply
install a Jabber server, and with the right firewall settings, you can
have your own internal Open Source IM system for a minimal
investment.

Mission interoperability improbable

GAIM’s one big problem, along with all the universal clients, is that
the major IM server companies; AOL (owning AIM and ICQ), Microsoft and Yahoo
have no reason to want unauthorized clients to use their systems.
Worse still, they have several good reasons to block IM programs like GAIM,
Everybuddy and Kinkatta from their servers: advertising
revenue from their proprietary clients, traffic on the last mile to their
servers, perceived security holes, and cross-licensing deals with
other software vendors, such as AOL enabling Lotus to use AIM servers
with Lotus’ Sametime client.

Because of this, AOL and Microsoft have both blocked access to their
servers from non-authorized clients at times. While users want
interoperability, IM companies aren’t interested in supporting
clients that don’t contribute to their bottom line.

Currently, message protocol changes are used to block unwanted
clients. AOL, for example, uses two protocols for AIM. OSCAR is the
proprietary protocol, and there is no published specification for it.
IM clients that use OSCAR, like GAIM, can find themselves blocked
from the service if AOL fiddles with the protocol. So far, the free IM client programmers have been successful in reverse engineering these changes so that new versions of their clients will work with AIM again. TOC, on the other hand, is a simpler, well-documented Java protocol that AOL uses in its Java-based “Quickbuddy”
AIM client. So many free AIM clients, like Everybuddy, use
TOC.

The bad news for TOC developers is that AOL hasn’t worked on TOC for
some time and it’s not nearly as functional as OSCAR. So, for
example, a TOC-based client can’t support buddy icons or voice. On
the other hand, AOL hasn’t shown any signs of blocking access to its AIM servers with
TOC, while OSCAR is changed fairly often to block them.

While open protocols like Jabber and Simple, which is likely to be adopted by AOL and
Microsoft, offer a way out of this programming problem, it’s not
likely to stop IM service providers from eventually blocking non-authorized IM
clients using server-based authorization schemes, like Microsoft Password and
Project Liberty, which is supported by AOL.

LinuxPlanet: “Of the four current members of the UnitedLinux consortium, we’ve heard from all but one: Turbolinux. Jacqueline Emigh reports on what Turbolinux hopes to gain from this union, how they feel about the Linux Standards Base, and how this member of the group makes no secret of who UnitedLinux is going after.”

IDG.net: “Two security holes in a graphical user interface common on Unix and Linux systems from vendors such as IBM, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard could allow an attacker to launch a denial of service attack or overwrite files on affected systems, according to a new security bulletin released Wednesday by CERT/CC (the Computer Emergency Response Team/Coordination Center).”

News.com is reporting that “Sharp’s Linux-based handheld suffers from security holes that could let hackers grab private data off a corporate network, according to researchers at a leading university.”

Salon writes “Critics say Redmond’s new security initiative will imprison users. But why would Bill Gates want to do that?… Bruce Perens, a programmer, an author and a pioneer of the open-source software movement, has this axiom to describe the tech industry: ‘Nobody takes a new technology seriously until Microsoft does it.'”

Electronic Design: “It’s raining penguins. Or rather, that’s what many people would like you to think. Linux vendors are laying off scores of workers. Linux publications are folding. So is it doom and gloom time for Linux lovers? Now might be a good time to take a step back and review the facts. Economically the industry, and the world as a whole, hasn’t been doing too great lately. We’re not shocked if GM, HP, or IBM lays off thousands of workers, so it should come as no surprise that Linux companies are tightening their belts too…” *Note: The article linked is in PDF format. You’ll need a program like xpdf in order to read it.