Anonymous Reader writes: “Here is the latest toy for those who trade in both movie and audio files on the Net and who want to go portable with both. Pogo! Products, makers of the RipFlash portable MP3 player/recorder, released the Flipster, an MP4 video/MP3 audio portable.

http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2002/flipster.h tml“

Anonymous Reader writes: “LinuxDevices.com reports that Embedded Linux vendor LynuxWorks has raised $4 million in “bridge funding” and is in negotiations with venture companies for additional funding. The company has also successfully achieved quarter-over-quarter growth for the final two quarters of its fiscal year, which ended April 30, 2002, and is now cash positive. Story here“

Anonymous Reader writes : ” Latest from the Microsoft case. Judge disallows memo that tells how Intel was supporting computer makers using Linux and that Microsoft should work with other chip makers to damage Intel. Get the full story from:
Yahoo News.“

– By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols –

Even inside IBM it’s hard to find anyone who’s really that excited about bringing Linux to the pSeries, a.k.a. the RS/6000 line. You don’t need to be a computer scientist to know why: AIX, the native pSeries operating system, is a top-of-the-line Unix.
Dan Powers, IBM’s v.p. of Linux Solutions, claims “AIX is the fastest growing Unix operating system in the world,” as he compares it to HP-UX and Solaris. Of course, he continues, “but Linux is the fastest growing operating system in the world.”

That said, even he admits that there are “an entire class of applications that are best served by AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX because they scale up to 32 processors easily.”

Goodness knows, the pSeries customers aren’t unhappy. Powers explains: “We continue to do very well with AIX and pSeries apps.”

But, even so, Powers says that “we’ve decided to give AIX a Linux affinity.” He notes that “as a technology preview on our Regatta (pSeries 690) systems you can run AIX or Linux in up to 16 Lpars (logical partitions).” That’s nice, but you can run many more instances of Linux on an iSeries or zSeries.

While Red Hat, SuSE, and Turbolinux have pSeries Linux in their offerings, even these IBM Linux partners show little enthusiasm for Linux on the pSeries. Mike Hampton, Red Hat’s v.p. of business development, comes right out and says that he hasn’t seen much interest in pSeries. “A high-end xSeries (Intel-based) box running Red Hat Linux is pretty close to a low-end pSeries box,” he notes. Frankly, it’s “tough rationalizing buying Red Hat for pSeries.”

The analysts agree. The best reason Stacey Quandt, Giga Information Group’s Open Source analyst, can come up with for someone wanting to run Linux on the pSeries is that some vertical businesses might find that it scales well up to the mid-sized pSeries boxes. That’s not a big market.

Bill Claybrook, the Aberdeen Group’s research director for Linux and Unix, is even less excited. “I don’t know that IBM has sold any Linux on the pSeries. With the cost of Power-based hardware being higher than IA-32, I just don’t see the market.” Looking at the broader picture of processors, he says that while there was demand for Linux on the Alpha RISC style chip, there is none for the Power architecture. So he thinks that Linux on the pSeries is a “very small, tiny market,” and it will be “hard to get it rolling so long as IA-32 keeps getting blazing fast.”

Claybrook also believes that another problem with this port of Linux is that ISVs have shown little interest in porting their applications to Linux on the pSeries. Indeed, Big Blue Smoke, a Sun-sponsored anti-IBM site, jokes that you can look for as long as you like on IBM’s AIX site, but you won’t find any list of Linux applications that run on the pSeries. Joke or not, Sun’s right. You can find, however, an AIX toolkit for porting Linux applications to AIX.

One suspects that pSeries users find this toolkit more interesting than Linux itself. And the resellers and integrators? As one anonymous D.C.-area integrator says, “I like Linux. I’ll use on Intel boxes around my RS/6000, but put it on the RS/6000? There’s just no reason.”

The other IBM partners we spoke to agreed, which sums it up nicely. Linux works well across the rest of IBM’s product line, but on the pSeries, with AIX in place, few people inside or outside of IBM can find a reason to run it.

LinuxJournal.com has a column about dealing with fonts in Linux. “The real problem with fonts under Linux (under X actually) is the many different ways of handling fonts, not to mention different font types. We have both bitmap and outline fonts; which further break down into Speedo fonts, portable compiled fonts, Type1, TrueType, ghostscript fonts and others. This is one place where ‘more than one way to do it’ hasn’t paid off.”

The Sydney Morning Herald has a story about the Win32,Linux}/Simile.D virus that’s supposed to affect Linux as well as Windows. ” Win32,Linux}/Simile.D is a very complex virus that uses entry-point obscuring, metamorphism, and polymorphic decryption. The virus contains no destructive payload, but infected files may display messages on certain dates.”

–By Grant Gross –

It was hard to swing a dead cat this week without hitting news about the UnitedLinux consortium, four Linux companies joining together to market an enterprise-focused Linux OS. Caldera, Turbolinux, Conectiva and SuSE tried to keep the announcement secret until a press conference Thursday but there were all kinds of leaks by Wednesday morning.
UnitedLinux’s game plan is for the four companies to work together on the enterprise Linux product, and several companies have already committed to supporting the new distribution, including IBM, HP, Intel and AMD. The announcement got attention from all over the tech media, and from mainstream press such as USAToday.

Almost as soon as lengthy press conference ended, the analysis started. DesktopLinux.com weighed in with a mostly positive report. ZDNet UK interviewed Caldera’s CEO, who said the competition isn’t U.S. market leader Red Hat. LinuxandMain.com decried the group’s lack of attention to the desktop and even tried a little humor with “The Tuxfather.”

NewsForge contributor Russell Pavlicek took issue with UnitedLinux’s plans not to release free binaries. Free Software Foundation leader Richard Stallman took issue a rumored per-seat licensing fee for the UnitedLinux distro.

Defending patents

Red Hat caused a stir a few days ago when it was reported that the company had applied for patents on a couple of pieces of Linux-related software. This week, the company explained that the patents were “defensive,” designed to keep other companies from patenting the software. Red Hat says it’ll allow projects using some Open Source licenses to use the patented software without fees or legal threats.

Who paid for that study?

Conservative think tank Alexis de Tocqueville Institution released a study claiming Open Source software can create a security risk. The study’s authors, who seem to confuse open code with open holes, says terrorists can exploit Open Source software on government computers, supposedly easier than closed source software. And closed code is such a sterling example of great security — Microsoft can’t even get its patches right sometimes. Maybe the study’s authors didn’t read the recent Gartner Group report suggesting perpetually compromised Microsoft products could benefit from Open Source review of their code. Maybe the study’s authors don’t realize that the U.S. National Security Agency has chosen Linux to create a super secure operating system.

Odds ‘n’ ends

We knew it was coming, but there were reports of Sun dropping its free downloads of StarOffice.

A Mozilla 1.0 release party locator has been published. Check out a site near you — as of this writing, there were more than 110 parties planned around the world.

Success story of the week

ComputerWorld.nz notes a couple of big Linux adoptions in New Zealand, including MasterTrade, now running 300 desktops on Linux.

Newly released

The GNU Mach Kernel 1.3 was released this week.

Phat Linux 4.0 hit the download sites this week.

Newly reviewed

TomsHardware.com reviews Linux gaming in WineX and finds some problems, but a mostly workable solution.

ServerWatch.internet.com looks at Caldera OpenLinux 3.1.1 and the only bad thing it can find is that it might not be as supported as much as it has been after UnitedLinux debuts.

Russell reviews VMware 3.1.1 and finds some problems, but a generally useable product.

Not really a review, but a Linux desktop poll at LinuxDesktop.com gave Mandrake the highest number of users. ELX was close behind.

New at NewsForge/Linux.com

Among the other stories we reported first this week:

Robin “Roblimo” Miller causes quite the debate when he describes his problems with installing Linux on the same machine as Windows XP.

Jack Bryar suggests the Linux vs. Windows debate is improving as companies pitch better information on the total cost of ownership.

Stock news

The Nasdaq fell from 1,661.49 to 1,615.73 this past week, continuing a general downward trend since March. On March 8, the Nasdaq had a short-lived peak at 1,929.67. Except for five days in mid-May, the tech-heavy market has been in the 1,600s or lower since April 26.

Of our 11 Open Source related stocks, six lost ground for the week. Caldera, one of the four companies joining in the UnitedLinux consortium, was up from .67 to .84 this week. But Red Hat, seen by many as the main competitor of UnitedLinux, also rose, from 4.59 to 4.81.

Here’s how Open Source and related stocks ended this past week:

Company Name	Symbol	5/24 Close	5/31 Close
Apple	AAPL	24.15	23.30
Borland Software Int’l	BORL	9.80	9.57
Caldera International	CALD	0.67	0.84
Hewlett-Packard	HPQ	18.69	19.09
IBM	IBM	83.10	80.45
MandrakeSoft	4477.PA	e2.25	e2.20
Red Hat	RHAT	4.59	4.81
Sun Microsystems	SUNW	6.86	6.89
TiVo	TIVO	3.95	4.37
VA Software	LNUX	.97	.87
Wind River Systems	WIND	6.88	6.72

Wolfgang Denk writes:
DENX Software Engineering announces the first release of a new
Embedded Linux Development Kit (ELDK).

Our ELDK provides a complete and powerful software development
environment for Embedded and Real-Time Systems:

This version of ELDK runs on x86/Linux, x86/FreeBSD and on
SPARC/Solaris host operating systems and supports a wide range of
PowerPC target processors (8xx, 82xx, 7xx, 74xx, 4xx). It consists
of:

o Cross Development Tools (Compiler, Assembler, Linker etc.) to
develop software for the target system.

o Native tools (Shell, commands and libraries) that will run on the
target system.

o PPCBoot Firmware that can easily be ported to new boards and
processors.

o Linux kernel including all device drivers, board-support functions
etc.

o RTAI (Real Time Application Interface) Extension for systems
requiring hard real-time responses.

o SELF (Simple Embedded Linux Framework) as fundament to build your
embedded systems on.

All components are available with complete source code, most of it
under GPL. Also, detailed instructions to rebuild all the tools and
packages from scratch are included.

The ELDK can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.leo.org/pub/eldk/
or ordered on CD-ROM for a nominal charge ($ 99).

Detailed information about the ELDK is available at our web page at
http://www.denx.de/ELDK

A version of the ELDK for ARM target processors will be available in
a couple of days.

About DENX:

DENX Software Engineering, founded exactly 3 years ago, provides
software engineering services for Embedded and Real-Time Systems. We
have a high level of expertise in that area with a strong focus on
Open Source Software, especially Linux, but also FreeBSD, NetBSD,
etc.

We port firmware and operating systems to your hardware and write
device drivers and other low-level or hardware-related software
components. We develop, tailor and install the base software for your
embedded systems and provide the solutions you need. This allows you
to put all your resources into the development of your applications.
We also provide on-the-job training for engineers who need to ramp up
quickly on how to develop software for Embedded Linux systems.

Our partner DENX Computer Systems provides a single source for
ready-to-run hardware and software solutions that guarantee a
trouble-free start of your projects. For instance we offer PowerPC
evaluation boards, development systems and standard modules with Open
Source firmware and Linux pre-installed, of course with complete free
source code. Our BDM/JTAG debuggers interface perfectly to Linux
tools (like GDB / DDD debuggers) and provide full MMU support for
Linux kernel and device driver debugging.

Additional information about our services and products is available
on our web pages at http://www.denx.de/

NZheretic writes, “Jeremy Zawodny, has an intriguing question on
ask slashdot: If you had to explain to Microsoft why they should change their attitude toward Open Source, what would you say?
Can you provide a reason where

so many other reasonable arguments have failed, or rephrase the
argument so that the folks at Microsoft can comprehend?“

Teck Talk writes, “The new, enormous IDE drives are great — but they can be a pain to get fully recognized under Linux. Daniel Feenberg gives step-by-step directions for getting the big Maxtors fully functioning on a Red Hat system in a Tech Tip article on Linux and Main. Very useful if you have or are considering a huge IDE drive and run Red Hat. It may well work with other distros, too.”