The Register reports on progress toward a Linux Standards base. “It’s a considerable achievement by the Free Standards Group not only to gather
an impressive buy-in from all the commercial distros and the big iron vendors, but
to provide standards that are both no-brainers to comply with and that have
obvious interoperability benefits. The Group published 1.1 of LSB – the Linux
Standards Base spec and the first version of the internationalization layer, Li18nux.” More from NWfusion.com, and here’s the press release.

Wired.com reports that the European Commission has approvedHP’s proposed takeover of Compaq Computer.

Rob Valliere writes: “Late last year, I decided to upgrade my Linux based notebook with the latest version of Red Hat and have a good look at the latest Microsoft office alternatives: Evolution 1.0, an Outlook clone and StarOffice6.0, an Office compatible suite. That was the plan 10 weeks ago. After many downloads, installations and evaluations, I now have an excellent replacement for my Microsoft Outlook alternative.”
For the full review visit 2002 – Windows Ready Linux Desktops.

NWfusion.comreports that SuSE and IBM are working together more. The two companies will work together on the SuSE Linux
Enterprise Server OS for IBM’s eServer series.

NewsFactor Network writes: “Thanks to some attention from Steve Jobs and exclusive deals with Nvidia, Apple has turned the corner with some key developers and has delivered systems with the horsepower necessary to drive speed-thirsty entertainment titles. Developers like MacPlay, which has worked to bring top game titles to Mac OS X, also are joining the fray. In order to remain competitive with PC manufacturers, which are attempting to build the world’s fastest gaming systems, Apple has made significant improvements at both the consumer and professional ends of its product spectrum.”

John Everitt writes: “CDF is the documentation for a free language project. Not computer language, but natural language. What relevance has this got to open source?. I believe it about time that something like the GPL applied to the most basic lingual tools. RMS has a lot to answer for.”In a nutshell the idea is to pool all information about a word, or paragraph into one place (including references from FAQs, dictionaries and thesaurus), add a Wiki plug-in and rope the whole bundle of love together with XML.

So say you want to look up ‘Free Software’, the idea would be that you could get the multiple definitions and distinctions with two or three clicks in an ordinary browser. That’s the ideal. The ability for anyone, regardless of cash, nationality and standard of reading may be able to understand anything written on the net.

Now that Linux is becoming an industry standard, the possibility exists to run this kind of software on quite basic hardware for the minimum of cost.

I’ve had a think and put together a document and project page at Savannah, after taking a whole lot of constructive criticism about the original document.

The document itself is licensed under the GNU free documentation license. It is compressed (along with its source) with GZIP and Tar. A PDF version is included in the archive for your convienience.

This is an appeal to the community as a whole, I beleive this is important, I hold no patent on the idea, the documentation is free to use and I beleive this is in the spirit of Lacklider. This doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing Slashdot is interested in – I tried, it appears this was not picked up. Instead (on Slashdot) you can read how to animate LILO.

Frankly, if Coup de foudre blocks a patent or two then I’m happy ;-).

NewsFactor Network writes: “Two industry groups have announced a plan that ostensibly would help consumers by separating legitimate e-mail from the junk variety. But some analysts speculated that the primary beneficiary of the plan would be one of the groups itself, thanks to the fees it would earn for certifying “legitimate commercial e-mail.” Nonprofit privacy group Truste is instituting a system that stamps commercial e-mail with a “digital postmark,” which assures the receiver that the sender complies with the group’s standards. And the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) said that it will introduce guidelines making it compulsory for its members to avoid sending e-mail to addresses on the DMA’s “do not contact list.” Until now, compliance has been voluntary. The DMA keeps a similar list for telemarketers.”

Anonymous Reader writes: “The Edge Report has posted a series of pictures from LinuxWorld Expo. The sets are at the following links: Set 1 – Walking in, CA, AMD, Red Hat; Set 2 – Ximian, IBM, Games, “The Tattoo Guy”, MandrakeSoft; Set 3 – .orgs, Compaq, fsf, Sun.”

– By Grant Gross –

Michael Spertus says his company’s port of its Great Circle software diagnostic tool to Linux could help Open Source developers debug their code and deliver good software to the community faster. Spertus is so sure of Great Circle’s usefulness that his company is running a demo for the program debugging the giant Mozilla browser codebase, and new results based on the latest Mozilla code will be released every week.

“Linux is a fantastic operating system — it’s fast, it’s stable, people run their Linux boxes for years,” Spertus said. “But the applications that run on Linux are not all as fast and stable as the operating system, or so rumor has it. What good is it if your computer runs for a year, if your application crashes twice a day?”

He added: “The really exciting thing is when you combine a good operating like Linux together with a good application like Apache, they become huge successes. Something like this will really help create a lot more really solid, enterprise-strength applications for Linux. We hope that can be a valuable step, when you have your Linux apps be as solid as your OS, and where that’s happened, Linux has had huge success.”

The Mozilla project — long derided by critics as buggy, bloated and behind schedule — might be an easy target for the debugging demo, but Spertus, CTO of Geodesic insists that the ongoing demo is a way for Geodesic to give back to the Open Source community as it releases its Great Circle tool for Linux.

Indeed, the Geodesic demo page quotes Nisheeth Ranjan, principal engineer for XML/DOM/Security at the Netscape Browser Division of AOL Time Warner as saying:
“Great Circle will prove to be a valuable addition to the development arsenal of the Mozilla community.”

Mitchell Baker, chief lizard wrangler for the Mozilla project, the Open Source community arm of the Netscape project, didn’t immediately respond to an email asking if she minded the project being a guinea pig in the Great Circle demo.

“We wanted to take a very large user-space program with source code available that was well known,” Spertus said of the reason the Geodesic picked Mozilla for the demo. “They’re working hard to get to being a 1.0 release product … so we thought it’d be a nice thing for us to do. You can get a [bug] report just by going online.

“We thought [using Mozilla] would really showcase you could use this on a multi-million line program and still get good results. This is meant to help them get to the full release stage, while at the same time, providing us with a good demo.”

The demo run on Mozilla shows a memory leak of 34.2 KB, with 856 leaked objects recovered by Great Circle. Users can click on various links to get detailed reports about the bugs listed. Users can choose from a number of reports, including heap statistics, collection statistics, and leaks and allocations.

Spertus said the online demo made sense as opposed to having developers download, install and run an evaluation copy, because during each step, Geodesic would lose potential converts along the way. “We wanted to make it a much easier decision for people do decide if this is the product they want,” he said. “You’ve got a a live eval without a net, as it were, that you could do with literally just a couple of mouse clicks, instead of doing all those steps to see if the product is for you.”

Great Circle is available for purchase or download at the Geodesic site, but as of Thursday at 9:45 p.m. EST I was unable to get the download to work with Netscape 4.77 in Linux Mandrake 8.0.

I earlier tried Konqueror 2.1.1 and, ironically, Mozilla 0.9.5, but in each case, the pop-screen that takes you through the download process would crash at some point. The pop-up screen for Netscape 4.76 for Windows appears to work fine. Editor’s note: Spertus reports that the download works in Mozilla as of Friday morning.

Spertus said late Wednesday he would check on the download problem. He personally tested the online demo against several Linux browsers, but Geodesic contracts out for its online store services, and that company may not have tested the download process against many Linux browsers, he said.

Geodesic, which has been selling diagnostic tools for Windows and Unix since 1996, also offers the enterprise-level Geodesic Runtime Solutions diagnostic tool in addition to Great Circle. But the company is first pitching Great Bridge to the Linux community, because the Runtime product can actually go into the code and fix errors, and there’s potential for license conflicts between the proprietary Runtime fixes and a Free Software license such as the GNU GPL.

“We think there’s a lot you could do with a lot of the [Open Source] licenses, maybe even all of them, in Runtime, but there’s certainly more of a question there,” Spertus said.

LWN.net has posted the January 2002 Netcraft Web Server Survey. According to the survey, Apache runs 63% of active sites, up slightly from the last survey.