Anonymous Reader writes, “An intriguing puzzle over at Linux and Main. There is supposed to be a big press announcement held jointly by SuSE, Caldera, TurboLinux, and Conectiva Thursday morning that in the words of the press release will change enterprise Linux computing. All that’s known is here, but not much is known. Are there any informed guesses?”

“This document describes how to quickly setup a backup environment on a client GNU Linux box to a host GNU Linux box which has a tape backup device.”I wanted to setup a simple backup environment for my desktop RedHat 6.0 GNU Linux box so that the files were archived to a DAT tape device on an SGI
O2 Irix-6.5 box. After reading some documentation and writing some scripts I got the archiving working. Since I had been unable to find a backup FAQ
or HOWTO, I thought that I would share my experience and write my own.”

There’s a big announcement coming Thursday from Caldera, SuSE, Turbolinux, and Conectiva. No one knows the substance of this announcement, except apparently Linuxgram. They say their sources tell them that these guys are planning to form some kind of super-distro and team up against Red Hat.

Jan Schaumann writes, “Following Todd Vierlings announcement to the current-users Mailinglist, the
release process for NetBSD 1.6 has begun. This means not only that 1.6 has
been branched off the -current CVS tree, but also that daily snapshots will
soon be available. A list of changes from 1.5 to 1.6 is available here; a
short announcement including a best-case scenario timetable is available here (at NetBSD.org).”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
today announced an entertaining campaign to prevent passage
of a seriously abusive copyright law. By distributing an
Internet video parodying Disney’s attempts to control
the public’s use of CDs, DVDs, and other digital media,
EFF intends to spur widespread opposition to the Consumer
Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA)
proposed by Senator Hollings.
“We hope people will contact their legislators once they
understand how Hollywood is stifling innovation, fair use,
and the right to tinker,” said EFF Outreach Coordinator
Cory Doctorow. “CBDTPA is an anti-consumer, anti-technology
attempt to control how people can use the technology they
own.”

“The entertainment industry is manipulating copyright law
to impose government regulation on all new digital media
technologies,” added Fred von Lohmann, EFF Senior
Intellectual Property Attorney. “If they got their way in
1979, all VCRs would have been impounded as tools of
piracy.”

The EFF video parodies Disney’s attempts to control digital
media with the song “Tinsel Town Club,” a remake of the
theme song to the Mickey Mouse Club.

The parodied lyrics for Tinsel Town Club are the following:

“Sing Along Kids!

Chanting:
Tinsel Town Club
Tinsel Town Club…..

Verse 1:
Who believes the average Jane’s
a criminal on the make?
Disney and its showbiz friends
who have a lot at stake.

Verse 2:
Who with their locks
turn back the clocks
on rights we have today?
The entertainment moguls and
CBDTPA!

Bridge:
They sell us stuff. (It’s overpriced!)
Then lock it up (and that’s not nice)!
So they can keep their profits
in the sky. (High! High! High!)

Verse 3:
So, join the fight!
Defend your rights
before they’re whisked away.
Speak up fast!
Don’t let them pass
CBDTPA!

Numbers count. (They make Congress pay attention!)
Tell all your friends about
that old
CBDTPA!”>br?

For the Tinsel Town Club video:
http://action.eff.org/tinseltown/

For the CBDTPA action alert:
http://action.eff.org/

For this release:
http://www.eff.org/IP/SSSCA_CBDTPA/20020528_eff_cbdtpa_pr.html

For a previous alert on the CBDTPA legislation:
http://www.eff.org/IP/SSSCA_CBDTPA/20020322_eff_cbdtpa_alert.html

For more information about CBDTPA (and its older
“parent”, SSSCA):
http://www.eff.org/IP/SSSCA_CBDTPA/

About EFF:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading civil
liberties organization working to protect rights in the
digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF actively encourages and
challenges industry and government to support free
statement and privacy online. EFF is a member-supported
organization and maintains one of the most-linked-to
websites in the world at
http://www.eff.org/.

LinuxPlanet.com has the column: “The adoption of a new platform is not something that happens overnight, especially in the corporate arena, where conservativism often makes the decision to change a slow and complicated process. There are shades of grey wrapped up in every decision–quite a contrast to the often black-and-white world of an IT worker. In that world, if something is broken, fix it. If it breaks repeatedly, re-code it (if you can) or replace it.”

ZDNet has a column talking about the new Solaris 9 and how it stacks up to Linux. ” Sun’s bundled services will have a lot more credibility with customers than the mass of bundled free (as in beer and speech) utilities and services that accompany the typical Linux distribution. Many of these are top quality, but many are simply thrown in with the distribution because there’s no cost to do so. But Sun can compete in all these areas while still, like Windows and Linux, allowing customers to use third-party add-ons if they prefer.”

This history of Debian is from Linux Magazine’s March edition, now online: “Even Murdock himself started a company that sold a boxed version of Debian in April 2000, but he abandoned the effort in October 2001. It wasn’t until last May that Debian really made a mark in the business world. That’s when HP changed everything by announcing plans to standardize its internal Linux development on one distribution: Debian. Suddenly, the 600 or so Debian developers scattered around the world had a very large friend in Palo Alto.”

We heard it was coming. ZDNet UK reports that Sun will drop its free downloads of StarOffice 5.2 this week. The story also notes Sun’s deal with Ximian to bundle StarOffice 6.0 with fee-based Ximian products.

– by Tina Gasperson –
The public relations team for Germany’s LinuxTag convention is drumming up publicity for the show by touting Free entrance
tickets. Yes, that’s Free with a capital F. The passes, which are available
for download at the LinuxTag site, won’t cost you anything, but that’s not the
point, says Klaus Knopper, part of the LinuxTag team.Many computer and technology shows put free passes online, but the LinuxTag
tickets are different because the source code for creating these tickets is
freely available as well. LinuxTag has released the tickets under the GNU General Public License (GPL)
and is encouraging those who’d like to attend, to print out as many copies of
the ticket as they like and distribute them, as long as they also include (or
make available) a copy of the source with each ticket, according to the terms of
the GPL.

“The ticket itself can, of course, be downloaded free of charge,
but the main point is that it is open sourced, can be modified and used
for other things than LinuxTag 2002, and for this reason perfectly
reflects the free software philosophy, which is what LinuxTag is all
about,” says Knopper.

So, you could conceivably download the ticket, make copies, and sell it
yourself, right? “Following the rules of the GPL, you can of course do that,
provided
that you give the recipients access to the source code in one of the three ways
described in the GPL, the original authors are mentioned, and you
document your changes,” says Knopper.

He encourages ticket holders to be creative in their modifications, mentioning
that LinuxTag might hold a “best modified ticket” contest. “We may not be able
to accept tickets larger than [paper size} DIN A0 or with unreadable fonts, though, for
practical reasons,” he says. “We can’t put the [ticket’s] background picture
under the GPL, since it contains trademarked logos of the exhibiting companies.
But the pdflatex source is designed to compile without a background picture or
with a different background picture too, which the GPL explicitly permits.
So, you can alternatively use a different background picture instead of
the original.”

Knopper says response to the free ticket offer has been good, but as holds true
for Free Software, most people don’t understand the intended meaning of Free.
“There are a lot of downloads and preregistrations since the
announcement, unfortunately some people still confuse the term ‘Free Software’
with ‘free of charge,’ and don’t really understand what you can do with the
ticket and what’s ‘new’ with the way the ticket works.

“LinuxTag is primarily an information exchange platform where
developers, users and companies meet, not just another expo or conference,
and it is a Free Software project itself, directed and conducted entirely
by members of the Free Software community.” One highlight of the annual show is
the Business Congress, where IT managers and others involved in the management
of technology get briefed on Open Source software’s benefits for industry.

LinuxTag is sponsored by HP, Compaq, Fujitsu, SuSE, Intel, Sun, and others.

Knopper says that in addition to free entrance to LinuxTag, ticketholders are
allowed to visit a nearby park, and get a rebate for visiting the ZKM
(Center for Arts and Media) museum, also close to the exhibition hall. But because
LinuxTag is looking to make enough money to pay for its support of Free Software
projects, show organizers are also offering an “exhibition and conference
passport,” which in addition to an entrance ticket provides a conference CD with
all presentations and lots of Free Software, plus a LinuxTag pin, and Knoppix, a Debian-based distribution that
runs from a CD.

The LinuxTag 2002 show is being held in Karlsruhe, Germany, at the Fair Ground & Centre of Congress, from June 6 to June 9.