Slahsdotters discuss an article at InternetNews looking at Apache 2.0 and suggesting it’ll kill off use of Microsoft’s IIS.

KDE.org has a profile of Lunak, from the Czech Republic. “I spend most of the time improving, optimizing or fixing various things, mostly in kdelibs. I actually
often do something, and next week I don’t remember all I did the previous week. It even happened
to me once, that I was looking at some code, wondering who the idiot who wrote it was, eventually
realizing from the cvs log it was me.”

– By Bruce Tober –

There’s a cliche sales line, used to overcome customer objections, that goes, “I know how you feel. I felt the same way, but what I found was that …” The IT people at BSL Ltd. in the UK could well use that line when talking with people thinking about migrating to Linux.

“Our early thinking was that we were moving from supported systems to apparently unsupported systems, which is why we initially moved very cautiously into the migration,” says Gary Madeley, BSL‘s technical infrastructure manager. The initial, cautious move was made in the mid-’90s with the migration of the company’s backup system to Linux. The industrial engineering products company has since moved almost all of its other systems to Linux.

“Our experience over time has been exactly the opposite,” Madeley says about his concept of support. “There’s been a number of occasions where we found faults
in the (former) operating systems we were using.” The suppliers either refused to acknowledge the problem was to port of their Unix OS or program “or they
insisted on us supplying them with more and more information about the problem. And then they spectacularly failed to resolve the issues. We still have a number of outstanding issues today.”

In other words, far from being the fault-tolerant system the supplier advertised, “which it may well be as far as the hardware is concerned, unfortunately the operating system crashes. It’s no longer a non-stop system. So we’ve got a number of
issues where they failed to be fixed and yet we pay them a lot of money to provide full support.”

The BSL’s experience with “unsupported” Linux has been rather different. “Although we’ve had no formal support, in Andy (Logan, BSL’s technical analyst programmer and ‘the guy who pushed us into using Linux’) we’ve got our own internal support, we’ve got somebody that’s studied it and embraces it and understands it in great detail. And in terms of getting third-party support, he has been able to get vital support from
the many user newsgroups.

“We’ve found faults with Linux,” Madeley says. “When we’ve found them, we’ve reported them to newsgroups and — quite the opposite to our experience with formal support contracts where they refused to accept the problem, or if they do fix it, it’s not for two years — with Linux we’ve had 10 fixes come back within the hour.”

He also prefers the Open Source concept. “We’ve been able to find patches directly and resolve problems in the same day.”

Logan says he “pushed” BSL into using Linux in about 1995 when the company was “looking into the Apache Web server and the book we got on it had a copy of Slackware Linux on the enclosed CD. It was the 1.2.3 kernel.”

“I remember at about the same time,” Madeley adds, “a friend of mine downloaded a copy from the Net and put it on his PC. And I thought it would be a good platform to use for some of the applications we had on the mainframe Unix systems and put them on the PCs. We started by migrating a backup program.”

“We always like to be aware of what’s happening in IT,” saya George Haynes, business systems manager. “We went with Unix in the mid-’80s. We’d been using computers for our accounts since the ’70s.”

They’ve become increasingly confident with Linux, to the point that in the six years since those first tentative steps towards migrating, “we’ve used Linux for increasingly mission critical systems,” says Madeley.

“We started off very cautiously. We were aware it was a free OS and had no support, allegedly. So we were concerned originally not to use it for any mission critical applications. We began by migrating some of the applications like the Web server to start our intranet and the back-up program. Then we moved on to use it for a mail server. So one by one we picked applications. It’s been entirely Unix to Linux because
until very recently we haven’t had any Windows NT server applications. We do have a few now for various reasons where it’s beyond our control.”

Another expression of that cautious approach, Logan says, is continuing on a stable kernel path. “A big question we faced was whether to stay with the 2.036 or go to the 2.2, and we decided initially to stay with 2.036 until only very recently. The question was stability of the kernel. And that’s how we’ve progressed during these years, staying with kernels until we’re as certain as we can be that the newer one is as stable.”

He is a devotee of the kernel mailing lists. “If you keep up to date with those lists, you’re going to get a feel for how stable a new kernel is,” Logan says. “For example, with the new 2.4 kernel, it seems people are still having problems with that. So I’m happy to stick with 2.2 for the time being because at the end of the day it’s stability that’s important above all else.”

Eventually came the big step for the company, taking the management information system, which was developed in-house, over to Linux. “That was quite a landmark
decision because that was a very important program, approaching mission critical status. because if the system is unavailable, people start to complain,” Madeley says. “It’s not quite mission critical in that the business will survive without it, but staff would be operating blindfolded.”

There’s now only one application that hasn’t been ported over to Linux, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s one of the backup systems.

Haynes says the company feels comfortable with Linux at this point. “Increasingly we’re taking these steps because every time we’ve done it, it’s not caused us any troubles at all, I say (while) grabbing on to a piece of wood, touch wood.”

Anonymous Reader writes: “Subterrain Networks, Inc., an information security contractor with over twenty-five accumulated years in experience is pleased to announce the unveilling of its extensive, timely, and international security web-portal. The SNI staff hail from such industry-leading companies as Network Associates, Entercept Security Technologies, Register.com, Motorola, and JP Morgan. The portal offers over 2,000 downloads ranging from software to exploits and research papers, accessible through a powerful interface; and best of all, it’s FREE. Sign up for your very own user account today!”

See http://www.dotgnu.org for general information about DotGNU.

1. "DotGNU Application Server" project announced
2. "Business Plan for DotGNU Inc" project announced
3. News from the Portable.NET C# compiler
4. News from the "pnetlib" class library


"DotGNU Application Server" project announced
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Barry Fitzgerald has announced a new DotGNU development project to
create a C# Distributed AppServer with fail-over and clustering
support.  When combined with DotGNU-SEE, and Portable.Net and an
Auth / Virtual Identities solution, this AppServer framework will
provide the base for a complete .Net and Hailstorm alternative.   


"Business Plan for DotGNU Inc" project announced
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Norbert Bollow has announced a project to create a business
plan for "DotGNU Inc", a company to be created around the community
of
DotGNU developers, which will generate revenue and pay developers for
their work.  At this stage, the main purposes of the business plan
are

* to reality check the business ideas

* to convince participating developers that we indeed have a
  viable plan that does not in any way violate the principles
  of Free Software ethics

* to help us know in what direction we want to go in creating this
  "DotGNU Inc".

Everyone who wants to see DotGNU succeed is invited to
participate in the creation of this business plan.

http://subscribe.dotgnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bizplan


News from the Portable.NET C# compiler
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rhys Weatherley has released version 0.2.8 of Portable.NET :

Web Page: http://www.southern-storm.com.au/portable_net.html
Download: http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/pnet-0.2.8.tar.gz

He has also added the module "cscctest" to the Portable.NET CVS
repository, which contains the beginnings of a regression test suite
for the C# compiler in Portable.NET, and he has publicly made this
offer: "The first to report 50 bugs in the compiler, complete with
test cases, gets their name in lights, bragging rights, and a free
e-mail message from me thanking them. :-)"


News from the "pnetlib" class library
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Version 0.1.2 of the "pnetlib" class library has been released, and
it
can be downloaded from

  http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/pnetlib-0.1.2.tar.gz

Of particular interest is the newly-added file "HACKING" which
explains how you contribute.

Gopal.V has written a program for automatically creating the "pnetlib
status pages" which you find at http://www.dotgnu.org/pnetlib-status/
On these pages you can see what is classes, methods, etc are still in
need of someone who implements them.


                             *   *    *

Subscription information:  "This Week in DotGNU" is posted to the
DotGNU developers list, to subscribe please visit
http://subscribe.dotgnu.org/mailman/listinfo/developers

Spanish translations are made available on a regular basis, you
can subscribe at http://subscribe.dotgnu.org/mailman/listinfo/spanish

Translations of "This week in DotGNU" into other languages are
very welcome; please let me know about them.


"This week in DotGNU" is Copyright (C) 2001 by Norbert Bollow.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire issue is
permitted in any medium or format, provided this notice is
preserved.
==================================================================END.

Alan Cox: “+ indicates stuff that went to Marcelo, o stuff that has not.”

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/linux-2.4/2.4.18/
Linux 2.4.18pre3-ac2

o       Re-merge the IDE patches                        (Andre
Hedrick and co)
o       Fix check/request region in ali_ircc and lowcomx(Steven
Walter)
        com90xx, sealevel, sb1000
+       Remove unused message from 6pack driver         (Adrian Bunk)
+       Fix unused variable warning in i60scsi          (Adrian Bunk)
+       Fix off by one floppy oops                      (Keith Owens)
o       Fix i2o_config use of undefined C               (Andreas
Dilger)
+       Fix fdomain scsi oopses                         (Per Larsson)
+       Fix sf16fmi hang on boot                        (me)
o       Add bridge resources to the resource tree       (Ivan
Kokshaysky)
+       Fix iphase ATM oops on close in on case    (Till Immanuel
Patzschke)
+       Enable OOSTORE on winchip processors            (Dave Jones,
me)
        | Worth about 10-20% performance 
+       Code Page 1250 support                          (Petr Titera)
+       Fix sdla and hpfs doc typos                     (Sven
Vermeulen)
o       Document /proc/stat                             (Sven
Heinicke)
+       Update cs4281 drivers                           (Tom Woller)
        | Fixes xmms stutter, remove wrapper code
        | handle tosh boxes, allow record device change
        | trigger wakeups on ioctl triggered changes
o       Fix locking of file struct stuff found by ibm   (Dipankar
Sarma)
        audit
o       Use spin_lock_init in serial.c                  (Dave Miller)
o       Fix AF_UNIX shutdown bug                        (Dave Miller)

Alan Cox: “People keep bugging me about the -ac tree stuff so this is whats in
my
current internal diff with the ll patch and the ide changes excluded.”

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/linux-2.4/2.4.18/
Much of this is stuff just waiting to go to Marcelo but it has the
32bit uid quota that some folks consider pretty critical and the
rmap-11b VM which I consider pretty essential.

(Marcelo I'll be sending you stuff I've done from this anyway, if
there is other stuff you want extracting just ask)

Linux 2.4.18pre3-ac1

o       32bit uid quota
o       rmap-11b VM                                    (Rik van
Riel,
                                                         William
Irwin etc)
o       Make scsi printer visible                       (Stefan
Wieseckel)
o       Report Hercules Fortissimo card                 (Minya
Sorakinu)
o       Fix O_NDELAY close mishandling on the following (me)
        sound cards: cmpci, cs46xx, es1370, es1371,
        esssolo1, sonicvibes
o       tdfx pixclock handling fix                      (Jurriaan)
o       Fix mishandling of file system size limiting    (Andrea
Arcangeli)
o       generic_serial cleanups                         (Rasmus
Andersen)
o       serial.c locking fixes for SMP - move from cli  (Kees)
        too
o       Truncate fixes from old -ac tree                (Andrew
Morton)
o       Hopefully fix the i2o oops                      (me)
        | Not the right fix but it'll do till I rewrite this
o       Fix non blocking tty blocking bug               (Peter Benie)
o       IRQ routing workaround for problem HP laptops   (Cory Bell)
o       Fix the rcpci driver                            (Pete Popov)
o       Fix documentation of aedsp location             (Adrian Bunk)
o       Fix the worst of the APM ate my cpu problems    (Andreas
Steinmetz)
o       Correct icmp documentation                      (Pierre
Lombard)
o       Multiple mxser crash on boot fix        (Stephan von
Krawczynski)
o       ldm header fix                                  (Anton
Altaparmakov)
o       Fix unchecked kmalloc in i2o_proc       (Ragnar Hojland
Espinosa)
o       Fix unchecked kmalloc in airo_cs        (Ragnar Hojland
Espinosa)
o       Fix unchecked kmalloc in btaudio        (Ragnar Hojland
Espinosa)
o       Fix unchecked kmalloc in qnx4/inode.c   (Ragnar Hojland
Espinosa)
o       Disable DRM4.1 GMX2000 driver (4.0 required)    (me)
o       Fix sb16 lower speed limit bug                  (Jori
Liesenborgs)
o       Fix compilation of orinoco driver               (Ben
Herrenschmidt)
o       ISAPnP init fix                                 (Chris
Rankin)
o       Export release_console_sem                      (Andrew
Morton)
o       Output nat crash fix                            (Rusty
Russell)
o       Fix PLIP                                        (Tim Waugh)
o       Natsemi driver hang fix                         (Manfred
Spraul)
o       Add mono/stereo reporting to gemtek pci radio   (Jonathan
Hudson)

This is the GNOME Summary for 2002-01-05 – 2002-01-12.

==============================================================
Table of Contents
--------------------------------------------------------------

1. New cool Nautilus functionality from Andy Hertzfeld
2. Evolution 1.0.1 available
3. GStreamer 0.3.1 out
4. GUADEC 3 comes closer
5. 3 GNOME interviews from FOSDEM
6. Jody Goldberg interviewed about Gnumeric
7. First release of GNOME C++ bindings for GNOME 2.0 out
8. GNOME developement information site
9. GNOME 2.0 status report
10. Translated GNOME summaries
11. Hacker Activity
12. New and Updated Software

==============================================================
1. New cool Nautilus functionality from Andy Hertzfeld
--------------------------------------------------------------

Our favourite living legend Andy Hertzfeld announced that he has
added
support for viewing newsgroup binaries to gnome-vfs and Nautilus. In
his
announcement he also details some of the very cool additions he is
planing for this feature. Be sure to check out the announcement, and
visit the Nautilus nntp page for some nice screenshots and more info.

       
http://lists.eazel.com/pipermail/nautilus-list/2002-January/006817.htmlhttp://linus.differnet.com/nntp/

==============================================================
2. Evolution 1.0.1 available
--------------------------------------------------------------

The Ximian Evolution team released Evolution 1.0.1 this week. The
release contains a impressive list of fixes for tons of obscure bugs,
so
Evolution should now be ready for those people who somehow manage to
get
the bugs no-one else gets. The full release announcement and download
instructions at the link.

        http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/1010867680/index_html

==============================================================
3. GStreamer 0.3.1 out
--------------------------------------------------------------

The GStreamer team made another release this last week with GStreamer
0.3.1 being released. The major focus of the release was various
sorts
of cleanup and smaller fixes which lead to improved portability, less
memory leaks, improved glib2.0 including libxml2.0 support and some
nifty new features. Links below to the release notes and the
GStreamer
homepage.

        http://www.gstreamer.net/releases/0.3.1/notice.phphttp://www.gstreamer.net

==============================================================
4. GUADEC 3 comes closer
--------------------------------------------------------------

As you all know by now GUADEC 3 will be April 4- 6th in Seville,
Spain.
GUADEC is the annual GNOME users and developers conference and having
been to the previous one I can tell you that it is great fun, so
remember to make room in your schedule and private economy to go this
year. The GUADEC team has now bought the guadec.org domain and all
information in this and future GUADEC events can from here on be
found
there. First out on the new website is the Call for Papers. If you
want
to hold a presentation or do a tutorial you need to send in paper as
soon as possible to the organizers. Everything from tree 
widgets presentations to talks on how to code when drinking lots of
Guinness is welcome.

         http://www.guadec.org/callforpapers.php

==============================================================
5. 3 GNOME interviews from FOSDEM
--------------------------------------------------------------
Three things at once, is that possible? Well apparently it is, as the
FOSDEM organisers have posted three GNOME interviews this week. First
out was an interview with Miguel de Icaza focusing on Mono. The
second
one is with Damien Sandras talking about GNOME Meeting, the very nice
video conferencing tool, and also one with Michael Meeks about GNOME
2.0.

        http://www.fosdem.org/interviews/1565.htmlhttp://www.fosdem.org/interviews/1579.htmlhttp://www.fosdem.org/interviews/1591.html

==============================================================
6. Jody Goldberg interviewed about Gnumeric
--------------------------------------------------------------

DesktopLinux.com interviewed Jody Goldberg this week about Gnumeric.
So
if you want to learn more about everyones favourite Spreadsheet now
is
your chance.

        http://desktoplinux.com/articles/AT3642020036.html

==============================================================
7. First release of GNOME C++ bindings for GNOME 2.0 out
--------------------------------------------------------------

Murray Cumming announced the first release of the gnomemm GNOME2.0
C++
bindings this week. These are C++ bindings for the libgnome* family
of
libraries. The use GNOME C++ bindings seems to steadily pick up pace
with new applications announcements steadily streaming in. Just this
week we had three new or updated appliations in the software map
using
Gtkmm and gnomemm, namely GChemPaint, gbuilder and gabber. With the
GNOME 2.0 bindings out it might be a good opportunity to take a new
look
at gtkmm and gnomemm for C++ developers.

        
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2002-January/msg00013.htmlhttp://gtkmm.sourceforge.net

==============================================================
8. GNOME development information site
--------------------------------------------------------------

The Anjuta hackers have a very nice webpage with information for
developers available at lidn.sourceforge.net. The page contains for
instance lots of devhelp books for download. If you are doing any
GTK+
or GNOME development,be sure to check this site out.

        http://lidn.sourceforge.net/

==============================================================
9. GNOME 2.0 status report
--------------------------------------------------------------

Jeff Waugh sent in this little GNOME 2.0 status report for the GNOME
Summary: 
We're coming up to our first public testing release of user visible
goodies, the GNOME 2.0 Desktop Alpha. Almost all the components have
been ported for this release, so there'll be plenty of bug-fixing,
interface-beating, and platform-testing to do before the first Beta.
Some packages are already ready to go for the Alpha release. New
developer platform packages are available, whilst Kevin Vandersloot
and
Jacob Berkman have released the first desktop packages
(gnome-applets,
gnome-utils and bug-buddy). Binary packagers will benefit from this
head
start! Some of the new things you'll see as part of the official
desktop
release include Procman, a process viewer with a very usable
interface
by Kevin Vandersloot; Yelp, a very cool help browser by Mikael
Hallendal; and of course, anti-aliased font rendering.

Packages are due on Monday, and the release is slated for later in
the
week.



==============================================================
10. Translated GNOME summaries
--------------------------------------------------------------

As always we have translations of the GNOME summaries available. So
linked below are French translation, Spanish translation and
Hungarian
translation. If there are other translations available please let us
know.

        http://www.gynov.org/news/index.php4http://es.gnome.org/actualidad/http://cactus.rulez.org/projects/gnome/summary/

==============================================================
11. Hacker Activity
--------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks for Paul Warren for these lists.

Most active modules:
 122 gnucash
 81 galeon
 63 gnome-core
 62 gnumeric
 55 gtk+
 53 evolution
 50 gnome-applets
 33 gnomeicu
 32 gtkmm-root
 29 gnome-games
 28 web-devel-2
 27 gnome-python
 26 libgda
 26 gnome-libs
 26 gimp
 25 gnome-i18n
 25 nautilus
 23 libgnome
 22 gtkvts
 21 gconf-editor
[137 active modules omitted]

Most active hackers:
 74 rlb (gnucash)
 61 kmaraas
 55 menthos
 42 michael
 39 murrayc
 35 owen
 34 kevinv
 31 rodrigo
 31 stano
 29 chrisime
 27 jbaayen
 27 mmclouglin
 27 darin
 26 andersca
 24 dnloreto
 23 cstim (gnucash)
 23 billh
 23 jwise
 22 peticolas (gnucash)
 22 jpablo
[135 active hackers omitted]


==============================================================
12. New and Updated Software
--------------------------------------------------------------

Glimmer  - Very functional all-purpose editor.
Xmms  - Multimedia player, features GNOME panel applet.
pjbmanager  - Access and control of the HanGo JukeBox.
GStreamer  - Multimedia development framework
GChemPaint  - 2D chemical structures editor
GTablature  - Tablatures (guitar partitions) editor and player
gnome-python  - Bindings allowing you to write apps in python.
libglade  - Library that allows you to load GLADE interfaces at
runtime
gSmbScanner  - NetBIOS scanner program
Gabber  - Jabber client
gbuilder  - Light-weight IDE for C and C++.
Gnome News Applet  - GNOME News Applet
Pan  - World class Newsgroup newsreader
gLabels  - Lightweight program for creating labels and business cards
gael  - EDA -Electronic Design Automation tool.
ldif_to_vcard  - Netscape LDIF address book files to VCARD format

For more information on these packages visit the GNOME Software map: 
http://www.gnome.org/applist/listrecent.php3

Another high activity week for GNOME, with many new announcements and
of
course a lot of behind the scenes GNOME 2.0 work being done. As
always
don't hesitate to send us submissions for things you want mentioned
in
the summaries.
Christian
gnome-summary@gnome.org

Dave Jones: “Assorted merges, fixes, updates & work in progress.

Most of the remaining compilation errors are drivers in need
off bio work. There may be a handful of kdev_t fixes still
needed, but this seems mostly done.”

Me being away for a week has meant that the backlog grew quite large,
and as such this has a large number of merges, tread carefully.

Patch against 2.5.1 vanilla is available from:
ftp://ftp.xx.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/davej/patches/2.5/

 -- Davej.

2.5.1-dj14
o   Merge 2.5.2pre10 & pre11
    | Also include Ingosched H7, so my testboxes now boot.
    | Dropped Manfreds ldtgrow patch for now due to conflict.
o   Merge 2.4.18pre2 & pre3
    | DRM4.0 changes dropped.
    | various SCSI layer changes dropped.
o   Yet more kdev_t fixes.                              (Various)
o   Fix potential ide-cd oops.                          (Zwane
Mwaikambo)
o   Reiserfs kmalloc cleanup.                           (Oleg Drokin)
o   Reiserfs potential corruption fix.                  (Oleg Drokin)
o   Reiserfs endian fixes.                              (Oleg Drokin)
o   64 bit cleanness for reiserfs.                      (Oleg Drokin)
o   Fix 'sticky alt on chvt' problem.                   (James
Simmons)
o   Fix 3Dfx fbdev ROP ops namespace collision.         (James
Simmons)
o   Console blanking improvement.                       (James
Simmons)
o   Multiple sound devices for OSS API.                 (Chris
Rankin)
o   Remove unneeded pidhash clearing.                   (Randy
Dunlap)
o   Allow enslaved devices with same ethernet address.  (Lennert
Buytenhek)
o   Cleanup IDE casts.                                  (Pavel
Machek)
o   Work around FAT fs __divdi generation.              (Tom Rini)
o   Print correct MCE address in bluesmoke.             (Lowell
Miles)
o   Numerous 's/more then/more than/'                   (Me)

Slashdot is discussing an article on ZDNet about Extreme Ultraviolet LLC, which is a joint development effort which recently built its first extreme ultraviolet lithography chip building machine.