Prentice Hall PTR today announced the
publication of Linux Administration Handbook, written by world-renowned UNIX
experts Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder and Trent R. Hein. The LINUX
Administration Handbook provides the breadth and depth of material necessary
to effectively use Linux in real-world business environments. Using the
practical approach of their best-selling UNIX System Administration Handbook
(Prentice Hall PTR, 1988, 1995, 2001), the authors address administration
challenges in the three most popular and representative distributions of the
Linux community: Red Hat 7.2, SuSE 7.3 and Debian 3.0.

“Linux systems are just as functional, secure, and reliable as their
proprietary counterparts,” wrote Linus Torvalds in the foreword. Torvalds,
the creator of Linux, continued, “Thanks to the ongoing efforts of its
thousands of developers, Linux is more ready than ever for deployment at the
frontlines of the real world. The authors of this book know that terrain
well, and I am happy to leave you in their most capable hands.”

Written for both the novice administrator and as a trustworthy reference for
the seasoned professional, Linux Administration Handbook features war
stories and hard-won insights, examining how Linux systems behave in
real-world environments. The authors cover difficult tasks in all their
complexity including DNS configuration, networking, sendmail configuration,
security management, kernel building, performance analysis and routing.

The authors divide the book into three large sections: Basic Administration,
Networking and Bunch o’ Stuff. Basic Administration provides a broad
overview of Linux from a system administrator’s perspective while the
Networking section describes the protocols used on Linux systems and the
techniques used to set up, extend and maintain networks. Finally, Bunch o’
Stuff includes a variety of supplemental information including advice on
topics ranging from hardware maintenance to the politics of running a Linux
installation. Each chapter is followed by a set of practice exercises
ranging from brief easy exercises to project-sized exercises.

About the authors…

Evi Nemeth

Since retiring from the computer science facility at the University of
Colorado, where she spent close to twenty years, Evi Nemeth continues to
spend time at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis
(CAIDA), at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. She remains actively
involved with the USENIX Association as a course instructor.

Nemeth has spent the better part of her professional career involved in a
number of professional activities, including the Internet Engineering Task
Force and teaching tutorials for the Usenix Association, Uniforum, SANS,
FedUnix, AUUG (Australia), NLUUG, (Netherlands), NUUG (Norway), Europen
(Europe), and other UNIX related organizations.

Widely recognized as an expert in the UNIX/Linux world, Nemeth has been
published in dozens of publications and has won a wide range of awards,
including the USENIX/LISA Lifetime Achievement Award and a “Top 25 Women on
the Web” award.

Currently, Nemeth is exploring the Caribbean on her 40-foot sailboat named
Wonderland.

Garth Snyder

Garth Snyder has worked at NeXT and Sun Microsystems and holds a degree in
electrical engineering from Swarthmore College. He is currently an MD/MBA
candidate at the University of Rochester.

Trent R. Hein

Trent R. Hein is Applied Trust Engineering’s co-founder, president and CEO.
Hein was named as a “Major Contributor” on the Lifetime Achievement Award
which was presented to UC Berkeley’s Computer Systems Research Group by the
USENIX Association. He was also one of three engineers hired at Berkeley
Software Design, Inc., developers of the much-acclaimed BSD/OS Internet
server operating system.

Hein is a frequent speaker at technical conferences and has authored
numerous white papers and articles for leading technology publications.
Hein holds a degree in Computer Science from the University of Colorado.

Linux Administration Handbook by Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder and Trent R. Hein.
(Prentice Hall PTR 2002. 890 pp. ISBN: 0-13-008466-2. $49.99 US.)

From Turbolinux: Rockefeller University in New York hosts a five-person research group doing large-scale comparative protein structure modeling as part of the Human Genome project and needed a cost-effective solution to add computing power to support its research. The group’s computing requirements had outgrown the capabilities of its 20-CPU UNIX-based supercomputer.

EnFuzion from Turbolinux allowed the group to cluster its existing SGI Origin 2000 supercomputer along with a handful of UNIX workstations and a 16-node Turbolinux cluster running on newly-purchased but affordable Intel architecture servers. The group’s own internal benchmarking showed the 16-node Turbolinux cluster under EnFuzion performed 20 percent faster than the supercomputer at a cost of under $30,000. The supercomputer had cost them more than $600,000.

“Hardware for parallel computing is finally becoming cheap enough and software is finally good enough to make sense for people other than the ‘parallel computing’ enthusiasts,” said Professor Andrej Sali, head of the research group at Rockefeller University.” With [EnFuzion] there is no need to modify your programs to use parallel computing. And you can use a heterogenous, multi-purpose system of machines, which may already exist in many cases. You can also grow it slowly, as resources permit, without throwing away what you already have.”

About Turbolinux EnFuzion
EnFuzion clusters all available computing resources on a corporate network to create a powerful “virtual supercomputer” and, as a result, allows companies to reduce time and costs associated with computationally demanding data processing jobs. Traditionally, these jobs – such as complex financial calculations – have been handled by expensive high-end servers. With the growing need to process increasing volumes of complex jobs in a shorter time period, the cost of traditional solutions becomes prohibitive. To learn more please visit www.turbolinux.com.

From C|Net’s News.com: “A Web site sponsored by Microsoft and Unisys as a way to steer big companies away from the Unix operating system is itself powered by Unix software.

The site, dubbed ‘We have the way out ,’ runs on Web servers powered by FreeBSD, an open-source version of Unix, along with the Unix-based Web server Apache, according to Netcraft, which tracks Web site information. Both pieces of software compete with Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The Microsoft/Unisys site solicits names and contact information in exchange for research reports on data center trends.”

Anonymous Reader writes, “MandrakeSoft, the French Linux distributor, has been in dire financial straits for some time now. Has its knight in shining armor arrived? Apparently, the answer is ‘yes’, and the knight is none other than Sun Microsystems!” The April fool’s story is at MonoLinux.com.

Joe Barr tells us about this story: http://www.linuxworld.com/site-stories/2002/0401.f cc.html.

“Linux? Step to the back of the bus, please. This section is reserved for Windows users only.”

Fellow hackers,

For some time I have felt unappreciated by some members of the Linux
community. Far too many of you like to whine and cry, saying “My patches
aren’t being accepted by Linus, but they are by Alan or Michael!”
It seems that some of you are too stupid to follow the simple
instructions that I have made clear on more than one occasion.

This, combined with the fact that today is my last day at Transmeta, 
has prompted me to consider rediscovering that balance I had in my life 
before you all took my hobby and made it into a mass movement. I have 
not decided who should take over maintenance of the kernel myself, for I 
believe that this decision should be made in a quasi-democratic 
fashion. While democracy has not worked well with this group of people 
before, I am willing to give it one last chance. 

However, I do have some opinions on who should succeed me as leader 
of kernel development. I will provide my opinions below as I am 
entitled to do so. Below is an alphabetical list of my nominations. 
I include a brief explanation of why I nominated them and any concerns 
I may have. You all should do the same for your nominations. 

Alan Cox: Alan has done a spectacular job of maintaining the 2.2 branch 
  ever since I embarked on the development branch. He would have been an 
  automatic choice for this job, except for his childish refusal to 
  travel to the US, where all the real kernel hackers hang out. 
  Marcello has proven to me, however, that you do not need to live 
  in a technology-rich country such as the US to be a leader of 
  kernel development. 

Matt Dillon: Whenever someone moans about the 2.4 VM fiasco, 
  I think to myself, "I wish Matt hadn't left the Linux kernel 
  development for FreeBSD!" I believe that if Matt were to be chosen 
  as leader, we would have had a sane and working VM on par with 
  FreeBSD's months ago. While he has little leadership experience, he 
  is a member of FreeBSD-core, a position which certainly demands 
  respect. 

Eric S. Raymond: Being leader of kernel development involves 
  fielding a significant amount of media attention. ESR has shown 
  on many occasions that he can talk shit and still sound just as 
  convincing as anyone on this list, all the time being completely 
  oblivious to any contrasting viewpoints. While his 
  kernel-configuration-adventure-game contribution to Linux just 
  screams out "worthless bloat", I must admit to having enjoyed 
  many a lonely night playing the game. If he could lay a similar 
  interface over gdb, I'm sure that more kernel hackers would 
  actually debug their work before submitting it. 

Richard M. Stallman: RMS has an exceptional track record in the 
  open-source field, being largely responsible for my favorite text 
  editor, compiler, and debugger. No other open-source hacker has 
  come as close as he has to replicating the integration available 
  with Microsoft Visual C++ 6 years ago. I fully endorse him as a 
  candidate, assuming he's willing to drop his puerile "GNU/Linux" 
  ego stroking. 

Theo de Raadt: Theo is an exceptional candidate. Not only is he a 
  more than adequate hacker; he attracts exactly the type of people 
  to OpenBSD that he wants, and will jettison those who are not up to 
  the task. While purging out all the less-than-adequate hackers 
  in the Linux project will inevitably attract negative publicity 
  from Slashdot and other "community" sites where these feeble hackers 
  hang out, it will no doubt strengthen Linux in the future. Just 
  look at what Theo's strong leadership has done for OpenBSD! He 
  turned around the worthless "research project" that was NetBSD and 
  made it an enterprise-class firewall system. I can only imagine 
  the effect his Midas touch could have on the Linux kernel. 

You have until the end of April 1, 23:59 Pacific Time to submit your 
nominations to the list. The most nominated person will become the leader 
of kernel development. I will examine the list of nominations and, 
assuming that the winner wants the job, I will hand full control over to 
them. I know that this is short notice, but knowing how obsessively most 
of you check your inboxes, I figure you should have more than adequate 
time to submit your recommendations. The decision will be final and no 
discussion will be considered after it has been made, so choose 
carefully. 

Thank you. 

                Linus 

The changelog is below.
2.2.21rc3
o Plan B driver updates (Michel Lanners)
o 3ware raid update (Adam Radford)
o Fix PowerMac compile (Krzysiek Taraszka)
o Fix nvram/rtc ioctl returns (Paul Gortmaker)
o OV511 compile/build fixes (Toru SAGAMI)
o Final ppp zlib bits (Paul Mackerras)

2.2.21rc2
o Fix Xeon crash on boot (Dave Jones)
o Update keyspan maintainer (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o Fix visor oops add palm m125 support (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o Update whiteheat driver to fix SMP locking (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o Fix head.S asm for cpu type (Mikael Pettersson)

2.2.21rc1
o Add farsync driver (Bob Dunlop)
o Fix x86 cpu type reporting in some cases (Barry Nathan)
o Fix module_license tag compatibility macro (Keith Owens)
o Update MAINTAINERS entry (Mark McClelland)
o Fix fb.h comment error (Krzysiek Taraszka)
o Zlib fix (Arjan van de Ven)
o Back out problem mce change

2.2.21pre4
o Fix FAT breakage in pre3 (Dmitry Levin)
o Add S/390 LCS driver (IBM opensourced it now) (DJ Barrow,
Frank Pavlic)
o Update COPYING file to match FSF update (Dan Quinlann)
| basically swap 19xx example for this century..
o Fix a file name comment (William Stearns)
o Add realtek phy support to 2.2 sis900 driver (Allan Jacobsen)
o Fix MCE address reporting order, fix oops with (Dave Jones)
newer gcc due to bad asm constraints
o Starfire update (Ion Badulescu)
o Always victimise the dcache a little when
short of memory (John Lash, me)

This week’s summary: 8.2 Release Follow-up; New Products at
MandrakeStore; Latest MandrakeClub Activities; Mandrake in the News;
Website Notices; Headlines from MandrakeForum.

Top Story
----------------------------------------
Last week's launch of Mandrake Linux 8.2 was extremely successful based 
on the amount of traffic reported by the download sites. If you had any 
problems locating a good download mirror, it should be much easier this 
week now that the initial frenzy is over.

For people wanting to burn their own CDs, three ISO9660 image files are 
located in the "iso" directory of the various download sites. ISO 
images are files that can be easily burned to CDs, and each ISO image 
is approximately 650 MBs in size. Only the first image (the Install 
disk) is needed, the other two images contain "extra" applications and 
utilities that you might want at a later date.

Check the download page for a list of up-to-date mirrors:
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/ftp.php3

If you don't have the time (or bandwith) to download Mandrake Linux 
8.2, place your order today at MandrakeStore:
http://www.mandrakestore.com


What's New at MandrakeStore?
----------------------------------------
Even the most die-hard Linux users sometimes admit that they miss 
certain Windows applications, viewers or plugins on their Linux 
desktop. Two great software products that solve this dilemma are now 
available at MandrakeStore:

Win4Lin lets Linux users run Windows applications *in* Linux at native 
speeds without any additional hardware or the need to dual boot, 
dramatically improving productivity and reducing hardware and OS 
license upgrade cost.

The CrossOver Plugin delivers a complete web browsing experience by 
making Windows plugins and document viewers compatible with Linux. It 
supports QuickTime 5, Shockwave Director, the Microsoft Office document 
viewers, and more.

Stop by MandrakeStore.com for more information about these products and 
for other attractive offers in our Third-party Software and Licenses 
section.

For more information please visit:
http://mandrakesecure.com/license/


MandrakeClub
----------------------------------------
33 applications from the Mandrake Linux 8.2 Commercial CDs are now 
available in the Download section of the MandrakeClub website. Some of 
the new additions include:

Black Adder -- Integrated Development Environment
Blender -- 3D modeling/rendering/animation package
Hancom Office -- a full-featured office suite
Netscape 6.2 -- the latest version of the Netscape browser suite
Codeweavers Wine -- allows certain MS-Windows programs to run in Linux

Not yet a Mandrake Club member? To learn more, please visit:
http://mandrakelinux.com/en/club/


Mandrake in the News
----------------------------------------
Slashdot.org -- Mandrake 8.2 Available.
Slashdot reports on the new release: "Linux Mandrake 8.2 is out! Check 
out the official announcement or head off to your closest mirror to 
grab the ISO images. The release is bound to be amazing, with the 
return of kernel-secure, a 65MB minimum install, hotplug device 
support, encrypted filesystems and more!" 

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/03/18/2111221

Website Notices
----------------------------------------
Thanks to Hendrik-Jan from the Netherlands and Alice from Russia, 
MandrakeLinux.com now supports two new languages: Dutch & Russian. If 
either of these languages are your native tongue, please stop by an 
visit:

Dutch -- http://www.linux-mandrake.com/nl/
Russian -- http://www.linux-mandrake.com/ru/

To help with website translations, please email us at 
weblocal@linux-mandrake.com with all the details. Thanks!


Extremely Off Topic
----------------------------------------
MandrakeSoft employee Jean-Michel Dault reports that last month the 
neighborhood surrounding the MandrakeSoft Montreal office was invaded 
(yet again) by Hollywood film crews. They were shooting scenes for 
"Confessions of a Dangerous Mind", an upcoming film produced by Miramax 
and directed by George Clooney.

The film crew built a section of the Berlin Wall on the adjacent street 
to recreate scenes of East Berlin in 1971. The movie will star Drew 
Barrymore, Julia Roberts, Rutger Hauer, Sam Rockwell, George Clooney, 
Matt Damon and Brad Pitt. Some other films that also used the 
neighborhood include The Score, The Whole Nine Yards, Varian's War, and 
scenes from a couple of Sherlock Holmes movies.


Headlines from MandrakeForum
----------------------------------------
Mandrake Linux 8.2: Your first impressions.
Tom asks everyone to share their first impressions of 8.2 and quickly 
receives over 200 replies!

http://www.mandrakeforum.com/article.php?lang=en&sid=2006
Mandrake Linux 8.2: Missing Your Boot Messages?
If your Mandrake Linux system uses the framebuffer on startup, you will 
notice a lack of boot-time messages. Tom describes several ways to 
restore them.

http://www.mandrakeforum.com/article.php?lang=en&sid=2011
Instructions on how to fix insecure default kdm configuration
An advisory has been released, MDKSA-2002:025, which details an 
insecure condition with the KDM display manager. Since the fix is so 
simple, Vincent describes how to quickly edit the configuration file.

http://www.mandrakeforum.com/article.php?lang=en&sid=2008
Have you noticed any problems with 8.2?
If so, this is your chance to tell us so we can add it to the 8.2 
errata. Before submitting a report, please make sure the error is 
reproducible by including all the details. We're mostly interested in 
severe errors such as applications crashing or hanging, major parts of 
the environment not working, etc.

http://mandrakeforum.com/search.php?query=8.2:%20Got
Read these and other stories at MandrakeForum
http://www.MandrakeForum.com/

“Decided the GNOME Foundation, Inc. ratify and adopt the set of
By-laws as reviewed at the board of directors meeting on March 26th,
2002, pending the reception of couple of votes from Board members
this should be effective by GUADEC time.”

Minutes of the GNOME Board meeting Mar 26 2002
          ==============================================


Presents:
=========

    Nat Friedman (chair)
    George Lebl
    Jody Goldberg 
    James Henstridge
    Daniel Veillard (minutes)
    Jonathan Blandford
    Havoc Pennington
    Jim Gettys
    Tim Ney 
    Telsa Gwynne
    Federico Mena

Missing:
========
    Miguel de Icaza

Decisions:
==========

    - Decided the GNOME Foundation, Inc. ratify and adopt the set of
      By-laws as reviewed at the board of directors meeting on March 26th,
      2002, pending the reception of couple of votes from Board members
      this should be effective by GUADEC time.

Actions done:
=============

  ACTION: Tim and Miguel check for logistic and policy of funding
          people travels and accomodations.
        => Except for a couple of people it is done.
        
  ACTION: Jody and Leslie to find possble presentators from KDE,
          StarOffice and CUPS.
        => Sander proposed someone for OO, looking for KDE people and
           no answer from CUPS people, it's late now.
           It seems dicfficult to do more at this point

Actions
=======

  ACTION: Tim, John and Havoc to get a draft statement on the relation
          with the Free Software Foundation and license policy.
        => Still pending. We expect to discuss that at GUADEC

  ACTION: Jim to restart the font discussions with various parties
        => Jim is pursusing the issue with Keith Packard and related parties.
           Ongoing, we expected discussion about this at GUADEC.

  ACTION: Nat and Jonathan talk to gnome-sysadmin about adding ssh
          tunneling for GNOME CVS access
        => This has been postponed until after GNOME 2.

  ACTION: Havoc, Jody, Nat volunteer for working on producing a first
       draft of ABI rules for GNOME-2 releases, get involvment from
       someone at Sun, and make sure the draft get some review.
       => underway, 

New Actions:
============


Discussion:
===========

 - approve last meeting minutes:
   http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2002-March/msg00001.html

 - GUADEC

   It seems there are 300+ person registered once duplicate are removed.
   Preparing the Advisory Board meeting, discussng the expected format
   of this day long meeting. We expect the Advisory Board members to
   provide us with some data and bring expectations w.r.t the future 
   directions.
   Havoc will chair the meeting, and prepare an overview presentation.

 - Foundation bylaws.

   They have been updated based on the feedback last meeting discussions:

   "Committees can be made up of people not on the board" has been
   reflected in the text.

   Bylaws amendments will have to be posted on the web site for 3 weeks, 
   member will have a way (electronic communication) to raise objection, 
   if less than 5% of the membership object, the amendment will be approved.

   After discussion with the lawyers, it appears that the Foundation
   can actually held Copyright for code.

   A spouse or family member would not be considered an affiliated person
   for purposes of restrictions on the number of directors from any one
   company who may serve on the board at any one time.

   We expect to have the bylaws approved by the board before GUADEC

   [Editor Note: the Board decided to go through a mail vote process and 
    apparently no objection was raised as of today Saturday 30 Mar 2002
    so it seems the new By-laws will effectively be approved by then ]

  We hope to see most of the GNOME community at GUADEC next week !
      http://www.guadec.org/

Daniel

Kristof Borrey an unknown artist to many, is the person behind
the exceptional classy looking KDE iconset, iKons. He’s this week’s
interview victim on The People Behind
KDE webpage. Besides having a
wonderful graphic talent Kristof also works on his interesting thesis
‘Is Linux ready for e-business? – opportunities in a GNU/Linux
environment’. Please join us for this week’s peek at the People Behind KDE .