GdA writes, “Devil-Linux is a special Linux distribution which is used for Firewalls and Routers,
quite special because resides on a CD-ROM with the system configuration located in
a floppy disk. Portazero is publishing an interview with Heiko Zuerker, author of Devil-Linux.”

English version:
http://www.portazero.info/modules.php?name=Section s&sop=viewarticle&artid=25. Italian version:
http://www.portazero.info/modules.php?name=Section s&sop=viewarticle&artid=24.

DocTomoe writes, “About a week ago, someone asked us about how good the PPC port of Gentoo was. It was the first time we ever heard of a PPC port of Gentoo, so we were pretty surprised to hear about it. In a well kept effort, 2 PPC developers, Bryon Roche and Pieter Van den Abeele, have ported the grounds of the Gentoo Linux distribution to the PPC platform. iMacLinux.net took a closer look at the newcomer.”

RMS wrote an essay that begins, “In the Free Software Movement, we believe computer users should have the freedom to change and redistribute the software that they use. The `free’ in free software refers to freedom: it means users have the freedom to run, modify and redistribute the software. Free software contributes to human knowledge, while non-free software does not. Universities should therefore encourage free software for the sake of advancing human knowledge, just as they should encourage scientists and scholars to publish their work.”

Linus Torvalds is now famous as the author of Linux. His recent decision to use a proprietary tool (BitKeeper, aka BK) to manage the Linux source tree has created a lot of waves. Recently, Linus explained, “Quite frankly, I don’t _want_ people using Linux for ideological reasons. I think ideology sucks. This world would be a much better place if people had less ideology, and a whole lot more ‘I do this because it’s FUN and because others might find it useful, not because I got religion’.” KernelTrap tracks the lengthy thread in which Linus made this comment here.

“The increases are startling for the fiercely competitive PC industry. PC prices have dropped — though slight upticks occasionally occur — since 1995, says research firm IDC.” Story at Yahoo News.

From Linux PR: “Preliminary findings from an on-going Open-Source Software Institute (OSSI) study indicate wide and
accepted usage of open-source software within U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office’s (NAVOCEANO) enterprise-level systems.”

Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier writes, “Recently, Bill Gates gave a speech to the Government Leaders’ Conference, and naturally he couldn’t resist taking a few jabs at the GPL. While I don’t expect Gates to embrace the GPL, I take issue at the way that he represents Free Software and its role in business and society. The editorial is at Dissociated Press.”

Alan Cox: “+ indicates stuff that went to Marcelo, o stuff that has not,
* indicates stuff that is merged in mainstream now, X stuff that proved
bad and was dropped out.”

Linux 2.4.19pre7-ac2 
o        Limit default i2o_block to 64K writes                (me) 
        | Several controllers can't handle larger single requests 
o        Add power management control to i2o_block        (me) 
o        Use chained sg list for i2o_block                (me) 
        | Need to load first 8 entries into message for performance still 
o        Updated i2o documentation                        (me) 
o        Fix make xconfig 
o        Fix bios reboot sequence                        (Robert Hentosh) 
o        Kees Cook changed email address                        (Kees Cook) 
o        Fix a minor SuSv3 violation in SIGURG                (Christopher Yeoh) 
o        Make htmldocs fixups                                (Erik van Konijnenburg) 
o        Make all the slab caches use the "_" convention        (Ryan Mack) 
o        Fix flow control problems with TCP over NFS        (Neil Brown) 
o        Removepage hooks as per old -ac                        (Christoph Rohland) 
        | This lets shmfs/ramfs keep accounting straight 
        | ramfs needs someone to drop in the other old -ac bits stil 
o        Fix via-rhine PCI idents                        (Shing Chuang) 
o        Backport of 2.5 aha152x update by                (Juergen Fischer) 
o        Loop fixups                                        (Arjan van de Ven) 
o        Add HP tachyon idents to cpqfc driver                (Jes Sorensen) 
o        Clean up mpu401 failure handling paths                (Zwane Mwaikambo) 
o        Ad1848 pnp scanning fixes                        (Zwane Mwaikambo) 
o        Kill dead URL in maintainers                        (Joe Perches) 
o        Back out problem bridge update                        (Mike Fedyk) 
o        Fix sound on Compaq Presario 700                (Santiago Nullo) 
o        Fix restore_flags handling in cmd640 probe        (Justin Gibbs) 
o        Fix oops from mptable impaired bioses                (Arjan van de Ven) 
o        Fix 8139cp/8139too big endian multicast setup        (Naoki Hamada) 
o        Fix missing newline in i810 audio printk        (???) 
o        Put syscall table back for now                        (Steven Hirsch) 
o        Fix ips build for some combinations                (Steven Hirsch) 
o        NLS makefile tidy                                (Urban Widmark) 
o        Fix radeonfb build                                (Peter Horton) 
o        Update poll_out fixes on tty devices                (Sapan Bhatia) 
o        32bit uids in acct data                                (Chris Wing) 

Linux 2.4.19pre7-ac1 
o        Merge CPU speed control framework and support (Dave Jones, Russell King 
        for VIA processors and AMD K6                Arjan van de Ven, Janne Pänkälä) 
o        Merge with 2.4.19pre7 
        -        drop out keyb changes (breaks some setups) 
o        Lots more i2o debugging work                         (me) 
        | I2O now seems to be working again and works 
        | for the first time on the AMI Megaraid 

Linux 2.4.19pre5-ac3 
o        Software suspend initial patch                 (Pavel Machek, Gabor Kuti,..) 
        | Don't enable this idly. Its here to get exposure and so 
        | people can bring the rest of the code up to meet its needs as 
        | well as fix it. 
        | Read the docs first! 
o        Small fix for the radeonfb                        (Peter Horton) 
o        Fix highmem truncation on DMA mapping bug        (Dave Miller) 
o        Modules are not supposed to hack the syscall        (Arjan van de Ven) 
        table so remove the export 
+        Add ite sound configuration help                (Steven Cole) 

Linux 2.4.19pre5-ac2 
o        Fix compile error when using initrd                (Jeff Nguyen) 
+        Make the KL133 onboard video happy again        (Andre Pang) 
        | and a lot of people working to figure out the right bits 
o        Reparent jdb to init and drop lock on exit        (Ishan Jayawardena) 
o        Fix radeon corner case                                (Arjan van de Ven) 
o        Cache more group descriptors on ext2/ext3        (Arjan van de Ven) 
+        SAB8253 series wan drivers                        (Joachim Martillo) 
o        Add more idents for PIIX IDE controllers        (Arjan van de Ven) 
o        Lock signals in procfs                                (Andrea Arcangeli) 
o        Backport of 2.5 BUG_ON() functionality                (Robert Love) 
o        Drop -O1 on sched.c - turns out its a CPU 
        microcode bug on early Xeon not Linux 
o        Fix Radeon fb reset problems as X11 did                (Peter Horton) 
o        Radeon acceleration/mtrr updates                (Peter Horton) 
o        JFS flushpage updates                                (Christoph Hellwig) 
o        BeOS file system support                        (Will Dyson) 
        | original work by Makoto Kato 
+        Fix w83877 watchdog SMP compile failure                (Paul Komkoff, me) 
o        Fix pty/tty POLL_OUT reporting                        (Sapan Bhatia) 
o        Update berkshire watchdog driver        (Lindsay Harris, Rob Radez) 
o        Clean up duplicated path_init and __user_walk        (Hanna Linder) 
        code 
o        Enable MMX extensions on Geode GXm                (Zwane Mwaikambo) 
o        O(1) scsi free command block finder                (Mark Hemment) 
+        Updated IBM serveraid driver                        (Jack Hammer) 
o        S/390 makefile cross compile fixups                (Pete Zaitcev) 

Linux 2.4.19pre5-ac1 
o        Merge with 2.4.19pre5 

– By Henrik Nilsen Omma –

It seems clear there are many hurdles when persuading people to
switch to Free Software. Most people will not change their entire
operating system just for fun; it’s too unfamiliar, and they will
lose the use of all their favorite programs at the same time. (Yes,
there are free alternatives to most of these, and WINE should be working, well, any day now, but all this involves a steep learning curve for
the average user.) The key, as I see it, is to encourage people to
use the high-quality Free Software now becoming available in the
OS they are already using.
In my own experience, it is pointless to recommend Linux to my
friends with basic computer skills (although I’m hoping that Lycoris or
Xandros can change that), but it’s quite easy to get them to try a free
program like AbiWord in their native OS. I have been giving them CDs
with a few such programs and encouraging them to try it out. So far, this
has been on an individual basis. Then thought I would set
up a standard collection, so I could make one version of a CD with a
broad collection of free Windows software and give it to
everyone (less work). This idea soon evolved to setting up a standard
CD that we can all give to our friends.

Many Linux fans (of which I am one) take a rather Linux-centric view of
the desktop issue: “Hey, we have this great, free, stable OS, surely you
will want to switch from yours?” To which a normal user would reply,
“Well, I don’t care very much about the OS itself, I just want to run
application X,Y, and Z.” A much easier sell would be: “You should try
this free alternative to MS Office. It can be installed on your current
OS, and run at the same time as MS Office if you like. And if you don’t
like it, it’s easy to uninstall, and everything will be back to normal.”

At the moment, many are hoping that WINE and CrossOver Office will bring
users to Linux. But why should a business owner switch to an unknown OS
with the learning curve that implies, only to run the same
applications as before through a buggy and complicated-to-set-up
interface? She still needs to have licenses (and pay for them) for those
applications anyway. It makes much more sense to keep the OS that came
with the machine (because it’s “free” then, right? Or at least, “I’ve
paid for it already, anyway.”) and then install Free Software instead of
MS Office, etc. Perhaps WINE-like systems can play an important part
later, when individuals or businesses consider migrating to Linux
because they see that they can then use Linux versions of the Free
Software they are already using. Then they can WINE when “there is this one
Program X I need that only runs on Windows.” If that one program can be shown to work with WINE, then the user has no reason not to switch.

So, if you who agree that this is a key approach to promoting Free
Software (many will disagree; fair enough), the next question is how do
we help promote it in this way? I suggest that we set up a Web site or
at least a forum for this purpose. The participants would then nominate
and vote on Free Software alternatives for each relevant proprietary
OS. The programs at the top of the list would then be compiled and
ISOed, so that anyone easily can download and distribute them. A new
disc could be launched each month and simply be called the “OpenCD”
or “The Free Software Collection.” If such a compilation were to reach
critical mass, it would be possible to get hardware resellers to bundle
it with machines, etc.

It seems that the three projects soon to be released in version 1.0, namely
OpenOffice, Mozilla and AbiWord, are obvious candidates, but there is
still lots of room on a disc. I’m sure others will have lots of good
suggestions. However, I don’t think that we should strive to fill up
the 650MB of a CD just for the sake of it; I would strive for quality,
not quantity. There are plenty of CDs with “free software” bundled with
computer magazines etc., but these often contain mostly shareware or
demos of proprietary stuff. Besides, a 200MB ISO image is faster
to download and burn.

This should all be relatively easy, but I also think great improvements
can be made on this idea with a bit more work. First, a Web site should be set
up which contains a description of each of the programs on the disc, and
these Web files should also be included on the the CD so that the user
can read about a program before installing. This should auto load when
the CD is inserted to make it easy, and it should look professional. It
would also be useful to have a friendly install shell where the user can
launch each installer with a click. There should also be up-front
information about what impact it will have on the system, such as the
required disc space and file association changes, and information about
how to uninstall. The CD might also include some classic Open Source
literature for the curious, and a collection of useful links.

Some have suggested that GNU/Linux should be marketed more
professionally, with glossy ads in Newsweek and Time. While that would
probably help market the OS, it requires large recourses and a centralized effort.
The free-CD approach, on the other hand, can be done in the typical
decentralized Open Source way, and should be well within our abilities
and resources.

“Commentary” articles are contributed by Linux.com and NewsForge.com readers. The opinions they contain are strictly those held by their authors, and may not be the same as those held by OSDN management. We welcome “Commentary” contributions from anyone who deals with Linux and Open Source at any level, whether as a corporate officer; as a programmer or sysadmin; or as a home/office desktop user. If you would like to write one, please email editors@newsforge.com with “Commentary” in the subject line.

From Gnome.org: “Abiword v1.0 is here and now. It is all good!
(If the binaries are not up yet be patient, or go to sourceforge and compile from source).”