Author: JT Smith
Author: JT Smith
Category:
Author: JT Smith
Newsletter; Mandrake in the News; Cooker ISO images released; Business
Case of the Week; Spotlight on Mandrake Online; This Week’s Online
Poll; Software Updates; Headlines from MandrakeForum.”Happy New Year! Please be safe during the holiday. We look
forward to another great year with you in 2002.
Top Story
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MandrakeClub was officially launched before Christmas and the
website already has several active discussions in progress. Denis
Havlik (the MandrakeClub moderator) reports that everything seems to be
working well, and the “Download” section already contains most of the
apps from 8.1 commercial CDs; a complete list of RPMs is available at:
http://www.mandrakesoft.com/products/81/applications
http://mandrake.com/en/club/
Financial Corner
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MandrakeSoft now offers a financial newsletter that should be of
particular interest to shareholders and investors. The first issue of
the “MandrakeSoft Shareholder Newsletter” has been released and
contains up-to-date information about important company news such as:
* The Linux Market
* MandrakeSoft and the stock exchange
* MandrakeSoft’s positioning
* Latest news
* Financial results
The read the latest issue of the MandrakeSoft Shareholder Newsletter,
please see:
http://www.mandrakesoft.com/company/investors/newsletter/
Mandrake in the News
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Tech-Junkie — RedHat 7.2 Vs Mandrake 8.1 On The Desktop.
A 6-page article on the TechJunkie.com website offers a thorough
comparison of the two leading Linux distributions and concludes:
“Well there you have it, Mandrake has a definite edge when it comes to
desktop usability as RedHat sticks to its roots as a popular
corporate-oriented product.”
The article covers:
Graphical installation; Desktop usability; RedHat 7.2 vs Mandrake 8.1
vs Windows XP in Quake 3 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein; Interview
with RedHat’s Product Manager and Frederic Bastok, MandrakeSoft
Co-Founder.
http://www.tech-junkie.com/sections.php?op=viewarticle&artid=36
—
The Register — Mandrake 8.1 easier than Win-XP.
The popular British online magazine “The Register” writes about their
“outstanding Linux eXPerience” with Mandrake 8.1:
“Windows addicts curious to see how the other half lives but wary of
the installation challenges Linux is supposed to present will find
Mandrake 8.1 considerably easier to install and configure than Win-XP.
It’s quite nearly Harry Homeowner-proof…
If you’d like to eXPerience that sensation, Mandrake 8.1 is, hands
down, the easiest way to get started.®”
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23436.html
What’s Cooking at MandrakeSoft?
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To give everyone an easy opportunity to try the latest from the
Mandrake Cooker, ISO images were released last week. But be careful!
This is a development version for testing only and is provided “as is”.
However, the installation works OK so most users should be able to
install and test the last packages and features.
http://www.mandrakeforum.com/article.php?sid=1515&lang=en
The two-ISO set can be found on most mirrors that contain
development versions of MandrakeLinux:
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/ftp.php3
Business Case of the Week
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FutureGrafix uses Mandrake Linux as a development platform, and also to
create images and animations:
“I have found that Mandrake’s superior networking and hardware
recognition capabilities (to name a few of the wonderful things about
it) make Linux a prime choice for companies starting out as the
installation is easy and the interface has grown considerably” says
Daniel Parker, a senior computer graphics designer.
http://www.mandrakebizcases.com/article.php?sid=236
Every “bizcase” counts; please share your story by submitting it to
MandrakeBizcases.com
http://www.mandrakebizcases.com/submit.php
Spotlight on Mandrake Online
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Mandrake Online is an online service first introduced in Mandrake Linux
8.1 that records the system’s configuration settings (hardware devices
and installed software packages) so that you can automatically be kept
informed of security updates and important upgrades.
To try Mandrake Online for free, you’ll need to first create a new
account if it wasn’t already done after the 8.1 installation
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/demos/Demo/Mandrake8.1/Desktop/.
The Mandrake Online setup wizard can be started from the KDE menu:
Configuration > Other > Mandrake Online. Check the appropriate box to
create a new account and follow the instructions — you’ll need to
provide a valid email address where security update notifications will
be sent. After the registration is finished, complete the final steps
to activate the new account. From then on, you will receive security
alerts and upgrade notifications via email.
For more info, please see:
http://www.mandrakesoft.com/products/mandrakeonline/
This Week’s Online Poll
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What do you think about the new MandrakeClub?
* Like the idea, already joined
* Like the idea, have not joined (yet)
* Not sure, give me more info.
* Sorry, not interested.
Cast your vote in the Voting Booth and check the results:
http://www.mandrakeforum.com/pollBooth.php?op=results&pollID=23
Software Updates
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Security-related software updates have been released for:
samba — provides WinXP support
libgtop — fixes buffer overflow and format string vulnerabilities
glibc –fix buffer overflow vulnerability
krb5 — fix buffer overflow in telnet
flex — fixes improper declaration of isatty()
View the entire list at:
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/security/
Top Stories from MandrakeForum
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KDE 3.0 BETA 1 For 8.0, 8.1.
For advanced users only — If you still don’t know what to do during
the slow days this holiday season, kde.org has RPMs for 8.1 (mirrors)
of their first BETA version of KDE 3.0 (read my lips: B-E-T-A, and, as
usual, unsupported).
http://www.mandrakeforum.com/article.php?sid=1504&lang=en
—
Smoke Signals: Using External FireWire Storage Devices.
Tom posts a very informative two-part article that explains how to use
Firewire devices in Mandrake Linux 8.1:
“Looking for an external storage always has been a bit of a twisted
situation: you’d either go for the simple (parallel, USB) or for the
fast (SCSI). FireWire (aka IEEE1394) tries to deliver both and does
quite a good job at it.”
http://www.mandrakeforum.com/article.php?sid=1495&lang=en
http://www.mandrakeforum.com/article.php?sid=1501&lang=en
—
Linux-tips digest (1)
Deno delivers a batch of helpful tips from Linux-tips.net. “I’ve cut
down each of the “tips” to just a few lines, but you can follow the
links to original articles to get the whole story. Have fun!”
http://www.mandrakeforum.com/article.php?sid=1496&lang=en
Read these and other stories at:
http://www.MandrakeForum.com/
Penguins in Peril
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“Massive icebergs and an unprecedented amount of sea ice have nearly
isolated one of Antarctica’s largest populations of Adelie penguins,
jeopardizing attempts by the birds to breed, scientists report. Each
year at this time, the penguins flock from their feeding grounds at sea
to Ross Island, where they breed and lay their eggs in shallow nests
lined with pebbles. But satellite images released Thursday by NASA show
the coast around Cape Crozier is choked with ice and icebergs.”
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Category:
Author: JT Smith
This gets things mostly usable for quite a few boxes I’ve
tried on, there’s still a lot of breakage, and some of the
kdev_t fixes applied here may not be final.”
Patch against 2.5.1 vanilla is available from: ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/davej/patches/2.5/ Enjoy, -- Davej. 2.5.1-dj11 o Merge up to 2.5.2pre6 | Plus various compile fixes. (Me, Jeff Garzik, Frank Davis, Martin Dalecki) o Don't enable APIC on newer Dell laptops. (Mikael Pettersson) o Add more missing MODULE_LICENSE tags. (Me) o Report out-of-spec SMP Athlons. (Me) | Flames to /dev/null o More fbdev/console clean up. (James Simmons) o Sync up with latest bootproto. (H. Peter Anvin) o Reiserfs Sparc alignment fix. (Alexander Zarochentcev) o Remove some bogus headers left around. (Christoph Hellwig) o Fix wanrouter build. (Me) o Various bio surgery on SCSI drivers. (Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo) o Reiserfs getblk cleanups. (Christoph Hellwig) o make DASD use generic BLKGETSIZE{64} again (Christoph Hellwig) o Fix devfs & tty breakage. (James Simmons)
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Author: JT Smith
Category:
Author: JT Smith
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Author: JT Smith
Category:
Author: JT Smith
SIXNET, a hardware company that for 25 years has been making industrial automation controllers designed to function in harsh environments ranging from dusty assembly lines to outdoor pumps, is changing most of its product line from running on proprietary software to embedded Linux.
SIXNET, based in Clifton Park, N.Y., will release its first Linux-powered product, the VersaTRAK IPm remote terminal unit (RTU), this spring. Steve Schoenburg, director of marketing for SIXNET, describes an RTU as a “box you put someplace else to get information and bring it back to a central place.”
The RTU is rated to use in temperatures ranging from -30 to 70 degrees Celsius (-22 to 158 degrees F, and Schoenburg says it can be used in temperatures even colder than that), and the unit can be used to monitor water treatment, air quality, pipelines, and also in business situations such as inventory tracking inside of holding tanks.
The VersaTRAK IPm will be just the tip of the Linux iceberg for SIXNET, long known for its industrial ethernet and I/O controllers. Schoenburg calls the highly configurable controller “our first, second, 10th and 20th (Linux) product. You have a box with so many sensors and actuators … so you can read temperatures, you can turn on motors, you can read serial ports and ethernet ports, read data and talk to radios and telephones. You pick the right collection of pieces to make a system, and then with the right Linux application added to it, it’s anything you want it to be.”
But SIXNET won’t stop there with its Linux adoption. The company is moving its entire programmable product line to its customized embedded Linux based on Red Hat, Schoenburg says. “All the programmable products we have that are built on proprietary things or other operating systems categorically are going completely obsolete the day we ship the first Linux product,” he adds. “Part of the power of Linux is we’ve taken the application that’s in our RTU and ported it to be a Linux application. Day one, our customers will be able to take their current applications on our most sophisticated versions of our other products and just load it into the Linux box and throw out the other box.
“You can buy a Linux box for the same money you can buy the legacy product, have it instantly, and run it as if it was transparent, and then have a future with it,” Schoenburg says. “{The Linux box} is physically smaller, it costs less, it does more, and it is absolutely compatible.”
SIXNET’s customers include both end users and OEMs, which build upon the company’s hardware to create specialty products. For end users, the change to Linux is no worse than unnoticeable, Schoenburg says, except that the product has shrunk from 30 square inches to 5 square inches and users don’t have to pay software licensing fees. “Having Linux inside … gives us the path of creating a very capable product that we can keep modern, keep putting features in, keep delighting the end users, but the fact that the Linux is in there is really transparent to them.”
The real advantage for SIXNET comes with its OEM partners. Linux allows OEMs to tweak SIXNET boxes easier than they could with Windows software, Schoenburg says, instead of his company trying to keep up with customer requests. Basically, the more open the system, the more uses OEM customers can get out of SIXNET’s products.
“We can tell the OEMs, ‘Here’s the source code — control your own destiny,'” Schoenburg says. “(When) things can be open and shared and other people develop software that can run on our platform, everybody benefits. Other vendors will develop products and the users can mix and match.”
The switch to Linux helps his company reverse a trend of committing more resources to software development, he adds. “It’s an interesting new model, because the more open we get, the better our revenue streams become,” he says. “We spent about 70 percent of our engineering resources on software, and we’re a hardware company. We were on a path of doubling that, because our customers needed more and more. We’re doing more what our expectations were going to be, and we’re going to do it with less effort on our part because of the Open Source.”
Because of the open software, interested developers will be able to start working with the new RTU months before SIXNET releases it, Schoenburg says. SIXNET is meeting with interested developers Jan. 7 to start the applications ball rolling.
“Ordinarily, you put out generation one of a product, customers come back with feedback, and you say, ‘I wish I’d done that,'” Schoenburg says. “We’re going to have the unbelievable opportunity to have customers thoughtfully working with the product for three or four months before we deliver the first one to them. The first product out the door can best be thought of as generation two.”
Schoenburg says his company is excited about the possibilities that Linux is presenting, and he hopes the Open Source community can find value and new uses for SIXNET controllers.
“The Linux world has done us a major favor by bringing us software that helps deliver our hardware. We’re going to turn the favor around: We’re giving the software people a rugged, industrial platform,” he says. “We’ve got controllers -40 to -80 degrees rated — that’s a completely different thing than running on a Pentium. Our boxes can put up water-pumping stations in the Arctic. We’re putting boxes out in the desert, up on the roof of buildings. Right here in town, there’s a water tower with a box on it and a radio hooked on it. It gets damned cold and windy up there.”
Category:
Author: JT Smith
Category:
Author: JT Smith
