Anonymous Reader writes: “If I were to make a recommendation on where to begin a career as a web developer, I would consider the cover price of The Book of Zope to be cheap tuition. I’ve just spent a few days with Beehive’s The Book of Zope published by No Starch Press. Having never built a web application before, I was definitely part of the author’s target audience. Beginning Zope users as well as experienced developers, however, have received equal attention in this guide on writing web applications. Read the review at Linuxlookup.com“

Jeremy White in a post to the wine-devel list: “Some recent events have occurred that have made me change my opinion
about a Wine license change.

During my involvement in the Wine project, I have always striven to
make sure that I, and my company, did what was best for the Wine
project. I believe Wine’s success will help to make the world a
better place. To that end, often through difficult personal
negotiations, I have always insured that all of my contracts require
that all code changes be returned to Wine. This, in effect, treats
Wine as an LGPL product.”

You can argue that the flexibility granted by the Wine license has
meant that I received some business I would not otherwise have had.
Gav, for example, has pointed out that Corel would never have worked
on Wine if not for its license.  There are two ironies there - first,
Corel has always been a great Wine citizen, IMO, never 'abusing' the
license.  Second, while we did work with Corel to help them with Wine,
we never signed a contract with them.  Their lawyers and I were never
able to agree on a contract that we thought would sufficiently protect
Wine.  Fortunately for me, we were able to work with Corel without a
contract, but this issue to this day creates unnecessary friction
between my company and Corel.

However, with some recent events I cannot disclose, it is clear to me
that the opportunity for Wine to be used in a proprietary product is
too tempting and has caused some harm to the Wine project.  Based on
experience, I feel strongly that the potential for harm is great
enough that CodeWeavers needs to take two actions. First, we would
like to release all new code we develop under an LGPL style license.
Second, I would like to open another call for a license change and
thereby strongly add my voice to Alexandre's.

Thus, I would like to call for a change in the Wine license.  I think
we all agreed that the LGPL formed the basis for a good 'alternate'
license strategy.  Eben Moglen, the counsel for the FSF, has kindly
offered to help review licensing strategies for Wine.  The goal is to
attempt to secure some form of Copyleft protection for Wine while
still permitting proprietary software to link and bind with Wine.  I
think it it is great that we have, in Eben, not only the leading legal
scholar on free software licensing, but a great hacker to boot.  I
think he will clarify exactly what is possible and what is not
possible with GPL style licenses and insure that the license we choose
will meet our goals.

When Alexandre last brought up this issue, he was very disappointed.
He felt that there was not enough support from the 'silent majority'
of Wine developers for a license change.  His overriding lament to me
was 'No one cares'.  He further felt that since a small number of
major Wine contributors objected, that it was not appropriate to
change the license.

I would like to ask for a more formal process.  I would like each and
every contributor to Wine to send Alexandre a private email with an
'Agree' or 'Disagree' opinion, so that he can more truly assess what
the contributors to Wine really want.  The specific question I wish to
pose is as follows:

    Should the Wine project switch to a license which has as
    its goal to attempt to secure some form of Copyleft
    protection for Wine while still permitting proprietary
    software to link and bind with Wine?

Please privately let Alexandre (julliard@winehq.com) know what you
think, and then publicly respond to this thread as you feel
appropriate.

Finally, in closing, I wanted to summarize our position.  We plan to
release our future work under an xGPL style license, and we would like
the rest of the Wine community to join us.  If the bulk of the
community wants to stick with the current license, then we will
probably end up making a separate CVS development tree.  Anyone would
be free to use our work from that tree, under the xGPL-style license
terms the FSF's lawyers recommend.

Thanks,

Jeremy

LinuxOnline.com has a commentary/marketing piece from Scott Handy of IBM talking about why Linux will continue to grow in business/enterprise settings. ” To make a change, the market needs a catalyst – and that’s Linux. The impact that Linux is having in the market is significant. According to analyst firm IDC, Linux is the fastest growing server operating system in the market, and second in volume only to Windows NT/2000 through 2005.”

LinuxPR: “Linux Canada Inc. proudly announces the release of
Quasar Version 1.1 and further announces that the new “Base Package” of
Quasar Accounting is being offered for use on a single computer free of charge
to the Linux and Windows communities.”

DebianPlanet: “I am running woody and i do a apt-get upgrade every day. Since the last few days i discovered a slowdown of all my kde applications. They take a long time to load and the gui’s are reacting with a delay of up to 10 seconds. This behaviour doesn’t appear when kde isn’t started directly by kdm but called from a xterm.”

Wired: “Some search-engine visitors are receiving ads instead of answers. Stealth advertising software Flash Track is intercepting queries, and irate users are looking for its source.”

NewsFactor Network writes: “If there is no significant loss in business efficiency when stretching hardware use for an extra year, have businesses been too quick to upgrade hardware in the past, and will the upgrade rate slow permanently? And if it does, what effect will that have on business hardware makers? At least in the short run, things do not look good for server vendors. Research company IDC has forecast that 2002 will be a “major transition year” for server vendors.”

Anonymous Reader writes: “You think that your computer or network is really secure? There really is only one way to find out if it really is secure or not, and that is to attack your own computer the way a cracker does. That all sounds pretty good, but what if you don’t have the tools or the knowledge to do the job? You could get a cracker to try to hack into your system for you, but is that really safe? If he actually gets in, will you be certain that he will get out and stay out?

Never fear, there are several services that can check your system for security holes and vulnerabilities for you. Most are free and there are also some subscription services that will perform a routine security audit on your system on a regular basis. Here are a few services that will tax your security, or lack of it, to the limits.

Story at Linux Box Security“

– By Grant Gross –

When my colleague Robin “Roblimo” Miller asked readers to name their favorite under-publicized Open Source projects, I was skeptical when one reader named XFce, yet another desktop environment for Unix-like operating systems.

After all, Linux already has two giant, competing desktop environment projects, Gnome and KDE, and a handful of smaller desktop-related projects. I like having options, but I’ve used KDE and Gnome (the Enlightenment window manager scares me a little but looks pretty darned cool) and found them perfectly useable. So why does the world need another desktop environment for Linux?

It turns out that when XFce chief programmer Oliver Fourdan started the project in 1996, there wasn’t a lot of competition around. The KDE project was still in alpha and Gnome was still a twinkle in Miguel de Icaza’s eye.

Fourdan, a French developer who works his day job at embedded Linux company Anfora, explains how XFce got started: “Back in late 1996, I’d started working on HP workstations that used CDE and I really liked that interface. I was very disappointed with Microsoft Windows 95 and its ‘Start Menu,’ so I found the concept of the toolbar in CDE very much more convenient. I had been using Linux since 1994, so it sounded natural to me to try to reproduce a concept I liked, on Linux. And at that time, there were no other projects like this–well at least, none really usable.”

He continues: “When finally KDE came out, I thought about dropping XFce, but KDE didn’t meet my expectations. It was using too much memory and the look was not
what I was looking for (remember, at that time, KDE wasn’t themeable, neither was XFce, but at least I knew the code of XFce so I could make it look like I wanted).

“Later, Miguel (de Icaza) sent me a mail about a project he was starting (that was
GNOME actually). He was looking for a toolbar like the one in XFce, but it needed a rewrite so it could be based GTK+ (at that time, I wasn’t using GTK+ which was not yet stabilized, I mean it was GTK

Fourdan says he’s not sure why XFce, which currently has about 14 regular contributors working on it, hasn’t gotten the publicity or developer interest that KDE or Gnome have.
“Probably because they are better in public relations than me,” he says. “And they probably have more time for this kind of stuff. The little time I have, I spend it on coding. When the KDE and GNOME projects started, their authors immediately communicated (to the community). I didn’t, not because I did not want to, but mainly because I did not know where to post.”

As Fourdan has already hinted, he keeps up with the project because he thinks it works better than the competition in some ways. I decided to take it for a test drive. After downloading XFce 3.8.14 (a simple rpm download and install; I rebooted Mandrake 8.0 and XFce appeared on the login menu), it’s difficult for me to understand why XFce doesn’t get as much publicity as Gnome or KDE. While Fourdan and his small crew aren’t spending their time developing office suites or browsers, they have produced a desktop environment that’s about as easy to use as KDE or Gnome, and maybe in some ways, more intuitive.

Fourdan claims several advantages over the big boys. He says XFce uses less computer resources than his competitors. Although he admits memory footprint is not easy to compare, his last benchmarks showed XFce using roughly half of the memory of GNOME 1.2, and about a third of KDE 2.0 running the same functions.

Here’s his email signature: “XFce is a lightweight desktop environment for various *NIX systems. Designed for productivity, it loads and executes applications fast,
while conserving system resources. XFce is all free software, released
under GNU General Public License.”

I didn’t notice a difference between XFce and KDE, but running StarOffice, Netscape, xchat and a couple of other programs on Mandrake 8.0 probably isn’t enough heavy lifting to tax my VA Linux Startx SP2 with 256MB of RAM and a 600Mhz processor. So far, I’ve had two copies of Netscape 6.2, StarOffice 5.2, xchat, Kpaint, The Gimp, and several terminals running at once with no noticeable problems.

Fourdan says he notices the difference in speed with a new laptop. “I recently purchased a laptop with a powerful CPU that comes with one of those recent Trident video cards, and since Trident doesn’t allow the XFree86 guys to write an Open Source accelerated driver for that chip (which is definitely a shame, but that’s another story), I’m
running X non-accelerated,” he says. “And here you can tell that Xfce is faster
that GNOME or KDE.”

He lists one more advantage: “Other than the speed and reduced memory footprint, one big advantage of XFce is that it doesn’t try to reproduce the Microsoft Windows look and feel, but one may not see it as an advantage. That’s a matter of taste.”

It took me all of five minutes to start using XFce after doing most of my desktop computing in KDE for the past two years. The default settings have a taskbar on the bottom, very similar to the Gnome or KDE taskbars. In the default, when you minimize an application window, it closes into a little icon on the right side of the screen, instead of in the bottom toolbar. For me, this felt more natural, instead of cluttering up the toolbar, but I come to Linux from years of Macintosh use, so it may be a Mac thing. Double-clicking on the application icons on the side toolbar certainly feels Mac-like to me.

One minor trouble I had was adding applications to the bottom toolbar, which had about two dozen programs included in the default. Included was Netscape 4.77 for a browser, the version that came with my boxed set of Mandrake 8.0, instead of Netscape 6.2 I had installed earlier this week. I also wanted to add StarOffice to the bottom toolbar; the toolbar word-processing choices were AbiWord and Nedit.

Because I was emailing Fourdan anyway, I asked him. But it’s quite easy once you find the “add icon” menu option above each toolbar icon.

Of course, when I want to run any program not in the toolbar, I just open up a new X-Terminal and type in the name of the application. Who said the command line was hard to understand?

The advantage of the more extensive toolbar menu in KDE is you can easily browse through your applications if you don’t know what exactly you’re looking for. With XFce’s stripped-down default toolbar, you have to at least know the name of an application to boot it with a terminal, or go digging through your hard drive. I spent a couple of minutes the other night trying to think of the KDE program I could use to resize an image. Of course, once I remembered, I opened a terminal in XFce, typed in “kpaint” and was resizing within seconds.

Readers tell me I can also access both the KDE and Gnome menus and run a program without a terminal by left-clicking on the desktop, which pretty much solves any criticism of XFce I originally had.

I’m considering switching full-time to XFce from KDE, which is a testament to Fourdan and his small band of developers when you compare them to the hundreds of contributors to KDE.

Next up for the XFce team is a new major release, including a totally rewritten window manager that’s more configureable, Fourdan says. “XfFe 3.x is pretty stable, so it’s time to start a new version, something totally unstable,” he jokes.

If he has any goals for the project, more publicity would be nice, he says, so he could attract more developers. He’s looking for programmers who know C and GTK+ because XFce doesn’t use any of the Gnome libs. “C is the standard accross Xfce components. Good knowledge of X low level API is always good, because if you know how things work at the lower level, your code will be naturally better.”

It’s tough to tell how many users XFce has — the desktop environment has been included in some versions of SuSE — but it averages 100 to 200 downloads a day. Fourdan says he’s happy to give *nix users another choice.

“Obviously, I’m glad that other people use and appreciate XFce, and find
it useful, but I’m not looking for ‘world domination,’ ” he says. “Let’s say
that GNOME and KDE are very good for all the people who like some kind
of full featured interface, and for the others, there are Enlightenment,
WindowMaker, XFce and a lot of others. That’s what I want, giving people
another choice. One good thing about Linux and X is that you can run
GNOME apps along with KDE apps on top of XFce or any other window manager.”

NewsFactor Network writes “In the world of user interface design, consistency is king. A consistent user interface not only can make a product more intuitive, but also can help users be significantly more productive. Unfortunately, in “user-friendliness” is allowing users to modify the interface of an operating system extensively by applying “skins” or “themes.” I have a different proposal for what to do with most themes: Get rid of them.”