Anonymous Reader writes: “It looks like Download.com has removed KaZaa from its site because of concerns over Brilliant Digital sneaking their distributed computing program onto the latest KaZaa downloads.

http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2002/kazaaremov ed.html“

MozillaQuest Magazine (MozillaQuest.com) reports: “SuSE Linux plans to release its SuSE Linux 8.0 operating system (OS) distribution on 22 April 2002. . . . SuSE Linux 8.0 is expected to ship with the new Linux 2.4.18 kernel . . . GNOME 1.4.1 RC1 and KDE (K Desktop Environment) 3.0.”

Check this MozillaQuest.com story for details

– by Tina Gasperson –
Monta Vista, an embedded Linux company out of Sunnyvale, California, is announcing the upcoming release of Carrier Grade Edition (CGE) Linux. According to Glenn Seiler, Monta Vista marketing director, CGE, a version of Linux for the telecommunications industry, will ship in late May.
In January, the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) announced a change in its focus. Instead of simply providing hardware for Open Source development and testing, it shifted to providing guidance to Linux kernel development in order to produce a hardened kernel suitable for the rigid requirements of the telecommunications industry. These new, stricter standards are called “carrier grade.” The OSDL formed the “Carrier Grade Linux Platform Working Group,” which “is not intended to redefine existing architectures, but rather will identify requirements and encourage development of common infrastructure requirements.”

“There’s a lot of activity aligning around the carrier grade definition,” says Seiler. “We’ve been delivering a high availability product to some key customers for the last year or so, and we’re already tracking and planning a third generation release of the product that will track directly with the Open Source Development Lab’s specification when it is completed in the fall.”

Seiler says that network equipment providers are feeling pressure from customers and competitors to put together product packages quicker and cheaper. In the past, telecom companies would have to create custom-developed solutions. “Over the years, hardware components begain to standardize, but the OSes varied. Now more and more [network equipment providers] are starting to standardize on Linux,” he says. “Some vendors are further ahead than others — some of the U.S. vendors are the farthest behind.” However, there is more of a push today for complete off-the-shelf hardware and software packages, and apparently, Linux is a good operating system choice for vendors.

“The benefits are to a large extent, typical, such as lower cost of development. Unlike a solution built on Solaris, with Linux you have source code and you have a community of developers that are constantly enhancing and fixing bugs in the products. That translates into lower costs and faster time to market. Linux is considered to be mature and robust. It is believed that Linux is robust enough to meet end user requirements for carrier class service. Even with all the built-in benefits of Linux, with the carrier grade, you get an even higher price-peformance ratio.” Because of these benefits, Monta Vista hopes to find a niche with CGE Linux, on hardware from big companies like IBM, an investor in Monta Vista.

“The industry is aligning around this carrier grade Linux definition,” says Seiler. “Companies are going out and talking about their carrier grade initiatives and what they’re putting into it. Monta Vista will be the first Linux distribution to have a carrier grade Linux solution.” Seiler says Monta Vista is not worried about copy cat products. “Although this is Open Source and anybody can play the ‘me too’ game, it takes a lot of time and expertise to put together the infrastructure.”

Seiler stresses that Monta Vista does not want to reinvent Linux. “Neither the OSDL or Monta Vista has any interest in creating a new kernel or forking or deviating from Open Source practice as it exists today. We’re taking a standard Monta Vista kernel and adding to that certain capabilities and features we believe are appropriate and needed for the carrier class products, like reliability, availabity and serviceability. We’re doing a lot of things to improve diagnostics.

“We’re doing kernel and driver hardening. We’re not 100% hardened in the first release, but we do have some efforts in that area. A big part is adding fault management and monitoring, which ties strongly into the middleware and the high availability management. We’re providing event logs and resource monitoring APIs.”

In case you were looking forward to downloading the source code for this Linux distribution, forget it. “We will not have a free download of this product, at least not initially,” says Seiler. “One of the misconceptions about Linux is that you have to give away the source code for free, which is not entirely true. You have to freely provide source code to those customers you provide binaries to. We do intend to charge for this product.”

From Sulzberger, corresponding secretary LXNY: Please write against the proposed SSSCA and the already passed DMCA. The deadline for comments to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts,
the Internet, and Intellectual Property is 5:00 pm Monday 8 April 2002:
http://www.eff.org/Alerts/20020329_eff_drm_alert.html.
Also the United States Senate Judiciary Committee seeks guidance on the
question of whether the Englobulators be granted direct ownership of every
computer in the world:

http://judiciary.senate.gov/special/feature.cfm.

The deadline for comments on a proposed law that would make VCRs illegal is
Wednesday 17 April 2002:

http://www.eff.org/alerts/20020405_eff_bpdg_alert.html.

Anonymous Reader writes tells us about this article” http://www.linuxfreak.org/post.php/2002/04/07-22_1 1_15/332.html. “he UNIX and UNIX-like communities are not going to sit around and let these people be fooled by the fancy million dollar Microsoft/Unisys advertisements.

What we need: Letters/Articles written by corporations which run a variant of UNIX/Unix like discussing their advantages …”

– By Grant Gross –

It was a challenging week for a couple of Linux-related companies, Lindows and Lineo. Lindows, the company that’s promising to make Microsoft programs run on its Linux distribution, lost its business relationship with Codeweavers, a company actually making products that run Windows applications on Linux.
In a more expected Lindows-related move, Microsoft is appealing a judge’s refusal to grant an injunction against Lindows using its own name. Microsoft claims Lindows violates the Windows trademark. Meanwhile, Lindows is promising to release its SP2 OS in a couple of weeks.

Over at Camp Lineo, there are reports that the leading embedded Linux company has run out of money and has laid off 50 employees.

Sun knocks Linux on mainframes … again

When Shahin Khan, chief competitive officer at Sun Microsystems, knocked Linux on mainframes a couple of weeks ago, he raised a fuss. Well, he’s at it again, calling Linux on a mainframe “wolves in sheep’s clothing.”

Microsoft and Unisys anti-Unix site, the final chapter>

Our own Robin “Roblimo” Miller wraps up the story of WeHaveTheWayOut.com, part of a marketing effort by Microsoft and Unisys to get customers to switch to their products from Unix and Linux.

As you may know, the two companies first ran the site on FreeBSD, an Open Source Unix, and the Apache Web server. Then, when they switched to Microsoft’s IIS, script kiddies promptly found all kinds of security holes and crashed the site for a couple of days. Microsoft’s claim: Unix locks you into using high-priced sysadmins. Well, when pre-teens can obtain Microsoft certifications, and Microsoft can’t make its own Web server secure, maybe you want a competent sysadmin to run your important Web sites, don’t you think? Think of this whole episode as a real-life parable explaining the problems of using IIS.

Newly released

A beta-test version of Linux Mandrake 8.2 for the PowerPC platform has been released.

SashXB for Linux, a Web-based programming platform, was released by IBM this week.

Sharp has announced the availability of its Linux-powered Zaurus PDA.

theKompany.com has released the Aethera Beta 8 version of its messaging and groupware client for Linux.

Newly reviewed

Robin reviews the new Mandrake 8.2 release and says its a great operating system, but MandrakeSoft has some funny ways of distributing it that may be bad for business. That prompted a note of disagreement from MandrakeSoft’s CEO.

One early review of KDE 3.0 says it “polishes the Linux desktop.”

David Cafaro reviews that Zaurus PDA and finds all kinds of potential, but a few problems mixed in.

New at NewsForge/Linux.com

Among the other stories we reported first this week:

Tina Gasperson reviews three sites that offer online Linux training.

Stock news

The Nasdaq ended the week at 1,770.03, down from 1,858.25 on March 31. The loss was blamed mostly on earnings reports from tech companies not Open Source-related, but that didn’t help our list of 11 stocks. Ten of them were down for the week, with only Apple posting a gain.

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

Company Name	Symbol	3/29 Close	4/5 Close
Apple	AAPL	23.67	24.74
Borland Software Int’l	BORL	13.01	11.78
Caldera International	CALD	1.591	1.32
Hewlett-Packard	HWP	17.94	16.99
IBM	IBM	104.00	97.25
MandrakeSoft	4477.PA	e2.60	e2.25
Red Hat	RHAT	5.709	5.01
Sun Microsystems	SUNW	8.82	8.71
TiVo	TIVO	5.30	5.00
VA Software	LNUX	1.70	1.43
Wind River Systems	WIND	13.59	12.88

– By Marco Alvarado –

Awhile back, I replied to a ZD Anchor Desk discussion about Mac OSX and Linux desktops. My impression is the issue of an alternative desktop to Windows is working toward a war, and like all wars in this world, without a clear winner.
What we need is not a war to obtain “the winner,” “the best desktop” or whatever name we like to use to qualify a user environment. How many devices do we have today in our offices or our homes? The computer is present in almost any device in our living environment. Really, we don’t need one computer to contain all we do, but to control all the devices.

Bluetooth and company are the right path. It’s not the only path, but Bluetooth has the right intentions. Each device must interact in some way with the other one, and we could mix them with X10, Bluetooth, infrared and any wired or wireless technology to develop a “friendly operating environment.”

Then we could have the desktop, or the “control center” for all them. From it, we could run a visual interface to write a letter contained within a “storage device” and served by a “running environment” through a Web service, all them being low priced devices.

Thinking in this way, Windows and OSX aren’t alternatives, but old -rule expensive application environments. Linux, being a 100% open platform, is an ideal base to build little embedded applications and specialized visual environments. Our problem is the conception of the environment.

We don’t need a full Unix clone 100% of the time. We can create something for beginners with a small number of all the Unix (in this sense the GNU) set of programs, and we can build independent sets of locally specialized devices with different subsets of the GNU. If you don’t believe me, how many times a secretary could use the cc compiler or the basilisk emulator? We need very little distributions with only a few parts of the broad spectrum of applications, oriented toward specific tasks. These would be distributions we can install almost without knowledge of the tricks of X Windows or without a lot of disk space, memory and so on.

Then, in your company, the Secretarial Distribution on the secretary’s machine interacts with the Manager Distribution on the manager’s machine and the Support Distribution on the support desk’s machine. All them would be crafted to work in the best way for the specific type of work.

“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.

Turbolinux writes: When Birkenstock USA launched its ecommerce site in March 2000, the site was an immediate success. Even without any advertising, traffic — and sales — climbed rapidly. But success brings its own challenges. It quickly became clear that the company was soon going to outgrow its single 350 MHz Pentium III server, and that it needed to plan for tremendous growth on its ecommerce site.
Birkenstock, based in Novato, Calif., is the U.S. Distributor of Germany’s Birkenstock Footwear. The Web site, www.birkenstock.com, allows customers to buy the popular Birkenstock shoes directly from the company. It also serves as an ecommerce engine for many of the company’s independently-owned retail outlets across the U.S.

“Since we launched it, the Web site has seen exponential growth,” says Howard Lee, Birkenstock’s Web Marketing Manager. “And we’re now starting to do email campaigns and magazine advertising, so we’re expecting more and more traffic.”

Birkenstock, along with the company that built and runs its Web site, Deluxe Digital Media (DDM), of Berkeley, Calif., also had the upcoming holiday shopping season in sight. “If the online holiday season is anything like what’s been projected,” says Kevin Johnson, President of DDM, “we could see another 60% increase in traffic volume. That could cause real problems.”

But Johnson is not worried. That’s because at DDM’s recommendation, Birkenstock has moved the Web site to a Turbolinux Cluster Server 6 from Turbolinux.

“Turbolinux Cluster Server 6 lets us balance the load across multiple machines,” says Johnson. “That’s going to be key to handling the load we expect.”

DDM looked at other options, says Johnson, but Turbolinux Cluster Server 6 “just seemed to make the most sense in terms of a solid, stable solution, especially since we’ve chosen Linux as the operating system of choice.”

Initially, the cluster consists of five machines: two cluster managers, two Web servers, and a database server. One of the Web servers also doubles as a fallback database server.

The Turbolinux Cluster Server 6 architecture, says Johnson, will let Birkenstock grow the system as needed. That’s important not only because of the upcoming holiday, but also because more of the independent Birkenstock retail outlets are turning to the Web site to handle their ecommerce needs. “More than 30 Birkenstock stores are using the site already,” Johnson says, “and that number is growing steadily.”

Turbolinux Cluster Server 6’s ability to expand as needed, and its load balancing features are important, says Johnson. But as far as Lee Middaugh, the DDM system administrator responsible for the Birkenstock site, is concerned, it’s Turbolinux Cluster Server 6’s fault tolerance that counts.

“Computers do go down,” says Middaugh. “It’s almost inevitable. But with Turbolinux Cluster Server 6, if there is a problem with one computer, the system automatically rolls its functions over to another machine. That means if a machine goes down in the middle of the night, I don’t have go in and fix it right away, I can sleep. It’s going to take a lot of stuff to go wrong for us to have any downtime.”

To learn more about Turbolinux Cluster Server 6 go to www.turbolinux.com.”

vmlinuz writes that nVidia has released its latest Linux drivers: “Version: 1.0-2880
Release Date: 4/3/2002

Release Highlights:

* GeForce4 and Quadro4 Support (see products supported list)
* OpenGL® 1.3 with NVIDIA extensions
* Compatibility fixes (see the NVIDIA_Changelog installed with the release)

download“

Perlguy writes, “The news that the Microsoft/Unisys anti-unix web site at http://www.wehavethewayout.com was originally running on FreeBSD was just too funny.
They totally open themselves up to parodies like:
http://www.wehadthewayout.com“