Evilmutant.com has a review of TinFoil Hat Linux, including a list of its “paranoid” features. “TinFoil Hat Linux is a nifty tool that has not many features, but the ones it has are very interesting and useful. The whole idea behind this Linux distribution is pretty innovative, and I hope that further versions of TinFoil Hat Linux will incorporate additional security and privacy tools.”

Slashdot readers discuss the continuing saga of missing Linux kernel patches. In this case, the debate is prompted by an article at Gentoo.org suggesting that patches from individual coders sometimes get ignored.

Internet.com reports that NMS Communications has introduced a new Linux version of its development product to “help code writers produce conferencing, unified messaging and other telecom applications on the open source operating system.”

The move to offer Natural Access for Linux is in response to customer requests, the company says.

From Henri Bergius writes: Nemein has produced Nemein.Net for
Construction, an integrated project information system for the
construction industry based on the Sun Cobalt Qube3 server appliance.

The system provides construction projects with a web-based project
information centre where project participants can exchange information
efficiently. Unlike most project information systems on the market,
Nemein.Net for Construction works on the client’s own server appliance
removing the need for monthly service payments.

“The Nemein.Net for Construction on a Qube appliance is clearly more
cost-efficient than ASPed solutions for construction projects lasting
over one year,” says Henri Bergius, the director of Nemein’s product
development. “In addition, the client can keep the server appliance,
enabling easy access to project information even after the project has
ended. The other possibility is to transfer the solution into use at
another construction project.”

Nemein.Net for Construction consist of following modules:

• Document management
• Project planning and scheduling
• Electric copy orders
• Electric construction site logs
• Discussion forum
• Secure, SSL-encrypted connections
• User interface in finnish and english

The Nemein.Net solution comes pre-installed on a Sun Cobalt Qube3 Pro
server appliance. Qube3 is a browser-based, automatically maintained
server appliance. Qube3 can also manage email, web sites, name
services, application development and operate as a firewall. Support
and maintenance contracts for Cobalt Qube3 are provided by Sun
Microsystems.

The solution is delivered in cooperation with network infrastructure
expert NetFire, a member of the Future CAD group.

Nemein is the leading Nordic provider of Open Source-based solutions for Information Management and Professional Services Automation built on the freely-available Midgard application server.

More information

Petri Kuusela, Nemein
petri.kuusela@nemein.com
+358-20-198 6030

http://www.nemein.com

Paavo Helin, NetFire
paavo.helin@netfire.fi
+358-9-476 4100

http://www.netfire.fi

http://www.cobalt.com

http://www.midgard-project.org

Michael Holve write, “Bringing together the classic ‘Everything sites’ with just a little extra — into a one-stop portal for the Unix community … Not so much a news site, but more of a unique content repository and basically a bit of everything … Everything Unix.

The sites Everything Linux, Everything Solaris and Everything Mac all strive to bring you unique and in-depth articles and reviews. Backed up by community discussion and chat, the sharing of knowledge is encouraged. Everything Unix is meant to bridge the gaps and provide a central portal to bring it all together and provide the ultimate in places for Unix-minded folks to get together.”

– by Tina Gasperson –
MySQL AB, the originator of the MySQL GPL database, is taking Progress
Software Corporation, the corporate parent of NuSphere to court because it
continues to distribute a database product that links statically
to MySQL’s code. The product was originally released without the accompanying source code. The Free Software Foundation‘s chief
legal counsel, Eben Moglen, is set to provide expert testimony in a hearing
Wednesday at 2 p.m. in what is the first court test for Richard Stallman’s GNU
General Public License.

(The FSF has issued a press release and a copy of the affidavit.)

That’s a “garden variety” violation of the GPL, Moglen says.

Additionally, “We don’t expect to have any problem enforcing the GPL in
this situation,” says Bradley Kuhn, FSF’s vice president. Normally, he says, the
Free Software Foundation conducts private enforcement of GPL violations on
software that it holds the copyright on. In this case, MySQL retains the
copyright on its GPLed apps, and the FSF is simply providing expert testimony in what is expected to be an easily-gained temporary injunction against the further distribution of NuSphere’s version of MySQL.

NewsForge obtained a copy of the 12-page affidavit Moglen filed in advance
of his testimony, and in it he says that he thoroughly tested version 2.2 and
2.3.1 of NuSphere MySQL Advantage, the product that uses Gemini in apparent violation of
the GPL. He says that 2.2 violates provision No. 3 of the GPL by not providing
source code and only promising that it would be released at a later date. But in
his review of 2.3.1 he found “the source code was fully available.” He states
that he was also able to compile the source code into machine readable language,
and that the wording about releasing the source at a later date had been removed
from the manual.

However, says Kuhn, when NuSphere violated the GPL the first
time, it lost its right to redistribute the code in any form, according to
provision No. 4 of the GPL. Normally when the FSF privately enforces the GPL, it forgives a company’s violation when it corrects the error. However, under the GPL, such forgiveness is not required. MySQL AB has so many other issues with Progress and NuSphere that it is electing to press a case against its adversary.

On June 28, 2000, MySQL AB announced it was GPLing MySQL, an Open Source
database that is considered the standard by many. At that time, Progress
Software happily announced it was forming a company called NuSphere, which was
to be the Open Source arm of its formerly all-proprietary business. Progress
said that NuSphere would contribute code and up to $2.5 million to further the
“progress” of MySQL.

NuSphere ended up providing $312,501, according to MySQL AB, before a feud that
ripped their collaboration apart. According to MySQL, NuSphere simply forked the
MySQL project, created the Gemini software and linked it statically to MySQL
code, but didn’t release Gemini under the GPL. NuSphere also registered the
mysql.org domain, a move that some saw as a slap in the face to the originators of MySQL.

For its part, NuSphere says that MySQL has refused to cooperate in the spirit of
an agreement they made at the time of the GPLing of MySQL. NuSphere officials say that MySQL AB has refused to accept code changes from NuSphere. Of course, MySQL denies that NuSphere has submitted any code.

NuSphere CTO Britt
Johnston was unavailable for comment at press time, but in a NewsForge report in July 2001, Johnston said that
NuSphere was releasing a version of Gemini under the GPL. The report also
included details about another version of Gemini that the company was keep
proprietary.

“NuSphere will continue to offer Enhanced MySQL that
contains a commercially licensed version of the Gemini component that is a bundle of performance, support, and maintenance
improvements desirable for deployment of commercial
applications,” he said.

Bruce Perens, founder of the Open Source Initiative, has offered to become a moderator in the case if one is needed. “Moglen will get his injunction,” he says.

– By Russell C. Pavlicek –

Most people in the Open Source community are aware of VMware, a commercial
product which allows you to run a guest operating system on your Linux or
Windows system. Some people are aware of Plex86, an Open Source project
which is working to accomplish a similar goal. But not that many people
seem cognizant of an older project: Bochs.

Unlike VMware, Bochs (pronounced “box”) does Pentium machine hardware emulation. This makes performance under Bochs much slower than that
of VMware. But because Bochs emulates the hardware, it can be used on other
hardware architectures like Alpha and SPARC. So you can run Windows 95 on
your SPARC box, or FreeDOS on your Alpha. For example, one of the
accompanying screen shots is an x86 Linux booting on my SPARCstation 10.
My SPARC box is too slow to make things really usable, but a faster
CPU could make it possible to run x86 applications on a non-x86
architecture.

The Bochs distribution comes with a 10 MB disk image of DLX
Linux, which can be quickly booted and tested to
give you some idea how fast Bochs will run on your platform.

The bochs.sourceforge.net Web site lists several successful installations of Bochs, including Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Windows 95, and Windows NT. In addition, Bochs has been successfully compiled on host
platforms including Linux, multiple Unixes, Windows, and Mac OS.

Installation

The software installation is painless. There are binary versions
available for many common platforms, including an RPM package, which
installed easily on my Mandrake 7.2 box. For less common platforms, like
SuSE Linux 7.3 on SPARC, there are source tarballs and RPMs. I was able
to build Bochs on my SPARCstation from the source package without any
fuss. A simple configure; make; make install sequence produced a
working package and even automatically downloaded the DLX Linux disk
image.

Configuring the system is not overly difficult. As Bochs emulates an x86
processing environment, it allows you to emulate disk drives as well. You
can choose to have the floppy point to the physical device or a container
file. Likewise, the hard drives and CDROM can point to actual devices or
files that simulate the disk contents.

The Bochs environment is controlled by a single configuration file.
There is a large sample configuration file included that documents many
of the possible settings available under Bochs. There is also a short
sample configuration file which can be used to boot the DLX Linux image
file. After I modified the DLX configuration sample to point to the hard
drive image file, the Linux system booted right up.

Installing Windows 95

I decided to give Bochs a real once-over by installing an unforgiving and
cantankerous operating system: Windows 95. Using an old copy of Windows
95 I had on the shelf and my 1 GHz Athlon system running Mandrake Linux, I
went through the relatively straightforward configuration process. I
connected the Bochs virtual floppy and virtual CDROM to the real floppy
and CDROM on my system. I then generated a 483 MB virtual hard drive using
the Linux dd command following the instructions on the Bochs Web site.

I installed Windows 95 using the suggested configuration in the Bochs
online documentation. I told Windows that I would specify the hardware
and then selected generic components, like a standard VGA monitor, PS/2
mouse, and generic IDE interface. The first phase of the installation was
painless, but slow. I could have gone out to lunch during the software
load. A hot lunch. With dessert. And a dessert cordial. Yes, it was
really that slow.

Once the Windows installation needed to be rebooted inside Bochs, I found
I had a problem. The new system rebooted and then seemed to hang while
the log file slowly grew to massive proportions. A little research on the
Bochs Sourceforge.net site revealed that the version of Bochs I was
using had a bug in the serial driver (a fix is apparently in the current
CVS tree). So I rebooted Windows under Bochs in safe mode and disabled
the serial device. That allowed me to continue with the Windows
configuration.

Another problem I ran into was a bug that prevents you from providing
input to “scandisk” while it is running. If you accidentally cause
corruption on the disk such that scandisk would normally prompt you for
input, you are stuck. The process will hang at that point, necessitating
a crash of the system. Unfortunately, the crash will cause scandisk to
run again upon restart and the problem will repeat ad nauseam. The Bochs
Web site mentions this problem, but the only workaround I found is to
avoid the need to interact with scandisk. So, upon rebooting, I chose to
drop to the DOS prompt instead of restarting Windows. Using the command
scandisk /autofix /nosave /nosummary C:, I repaired the drive without
interaction. Then I rebooted the emulated machine and restarted Windows.

Once the system was running, many operations were usable, but on the slow
side. The speed was uneven due to the effects of the hardware
emulation. For example, on my machine, individual windows opened
and closed with acceptable speed. But intense disk access was painfully
slow. Even simple graphics, like watching a playing card move across the
screen in Freecell, were sluggish. But many other interactive actions
(like pull-down menus and user interfaces) moved at a usable
pace. It was clear that some applications would be usable,
even with the performance penalty.

But why not just use Wine?

Even though Bochs is much slower than programs run under the Wine project, it still has advantages. As previously
mentioned, because Bochs provides hardware emulation, non-x86 systems can
use it, unlike Wine. Bochs not only supports Windows as a client
operating system, but Linux, DOS, and other x86 operating systems as well.

Also, Wine has to chase the ever-mobile Windows APIs. Because Bochs
emulates the hardware environment, once an operating system boots, just
about any program that normally runs on that operating system is likely to
work. It does not need to emulate any proprietary APIs that the operating
system might provide.

So, while there are times when Wine is a good solution, there are also
times to use Bochs. Programs that do not yet run under Wine may well
run under Bochs using a Windows operating system. Another option may be
Plex86, an Open Source project similar to VMware headed up by Kevin Lawton, the original author of Bochs.

Wrapping it all up

Bochs is certainly not the end-all and be-all of x86 platform emulators,
but it does work well (if slowly). Because it is Open Source, it can be ported to any number of operating systems and hardware
platforms. If you need to run an x86-based operating system in a sandbox,
check out Bochs.

Anonymous Reader writes: “Guido van Rossum, known primarily for his work on Python, was recently awarded the FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software. In this interview with him, he tells of his first experience with computers, his vacation plans and other things.”

Anonymous Reader writes: “KernelTrap has posted an interview with Rik Van Riel. Rik is most recognized for his impressive rmap VM efforts. He’s also the founder of kernelnewbies. Living in Brazil, he works for Conectiva.”

YahooNews: “Microsoft has released patches for two security holes in its Internet software that could allow hackers to read files off a user’s computer or information in Web pages that they visit.”