LinuxSecurity: “This week, perhaps the most interesting articles include “Fireproofing Against DoS Attacks,” “Overview of LIDS, Part Four,”
“Procmail Basics,” and “Do you Trust your System Logs?” Also this week, you should read the “SANS Intrusion Detection
FAQ.”

Anonymous Reader writes: “Texas Instruments today launched its first general purpose dual-core
(RISC+DSP) system-on-chip processors. The TMS320C547x processors
combine TI’s highly popular DSP core along with an ARM7 Thumb based RISC processor plus an extensive set of system and peripheral controllers, including a 10/100 megabit Ethernet port, and are supported by a customized Embedded Linux operating system. Applications for the built-in DSP are expected to include wireless communications, handwriting recognition, text-to-speech, voice recognition, data acquisition and control, and pre/post audio processing. Read the full story at LinuxDevices.com.”

Anonymous Reader writes, “Microsoft has published an online document entitled, ‘Why Microsoft Windows XP Embedded and Not Embedded Linux?’ in which embedded XP is compared to Embedded Linux in eight ways. Given that fact that “Embedded Linux” is not the product of a single dominant vendor, but rather is the result of the collaborative (and competitive) efforts of
an entire market consisting of dozens of large and small companies plus thousands of individual developers, LinuxDevices.com is inviting the Embedded Linux Community to respond to to “Why Microsoft Windows XP Embedded and Not Embedded Linux?” through guest editorials and talkbacks to the story. Read about it here at LinuxDevices.com.”

– By Grant Gross –

A couple of NewsForge/Linux.com stories seemed to touch a nerve — or at least inspire some lively discussion — this week. Robin “Roblimo” Miller, our fearless editor in chief, gently scolded advanced Linux users in his opinion piece, Making Linux harder than it is.

Miller’s point: The command line-loving veterans can scare newbies and non-geek users of Linux off by making it look like it’s beyond the abilities of a user who just wants to browse the Web, write documents, make pie charts, or balance a checkbook. In reality, Linux can do all those things in a way that looks much like most other operating systems. Check out the comments on the story; as I write this, there are more than 90.

A much geekier debate, but a fun one nonetheless, was one sparked by Joab Jackson’s EMACS vs. vi: The endless geek ‘holy war’, a history of the good-natured fight between devotees of the two popular Unix/Linux text editors. It’s a good read, and the comments are entertaining, too.

In other news this week, one LCD maker is predicting that Linux will grow to capture 10% of the handheld market by 2003. Jocob Lin, general manager of Taiwanese LCD maker Picvue Electronics, predicts Palm will lose its market lead to Microsoft, partly because of Linux’s growth.

Along those lines, Sharp Electronics this week debuted its remade Zaurus handheld, powered by Linux. The new Zaurus features a 16-bit color TFT screen, a 206MHz Intel StrongARM processor and 64MB of memory, and if it goes over well, Sharp may roll out other Linux products.

In quasi-related news, one publication is questioning whether embedded Linux is a bust. Embedded.com suggests that Linux isn’t exactly fit for small systems. Hmmmm, that seems to contradict the last two news items.

In news from out favorite monopolist, Microsoft’s Bill Gates admits to a British teen that his computer crashes sometimes, too. Well, Bill, we hate to tell you this but it might not crash so much if you used some other operating system.

Despite an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice in its antitrust case, Microsoft seems to have some continuing legal problems as well. Nine states and the District of Columbia want the software giant to open up its source code, should the company not comply with proposed restrictions on its business practices. Should that happen, Bill, we’d welcome you into the Open Source community. There’s room for one more!

New releases

Intel is promoting VP3, a new Open Source video format that shows promise for transferring video on relatively low-speed connections.

Ximian released its Evolution 1.0 mail client/address book/calendaring package, and freelancer Joe Barr had the details. The company also announced the future release of an Evolution plug-in called Ximian Connector Exchange 2000, which should allow Evolution users to seamlessly interact with Microsoft Exchange 2000 servers.

Not a software release, but IBM and several partners announced the Eclipse.org project, based on IBM’s Open-Sourcing of its Eclipse software tools development platform.

Linux distribution MandrakeSoft announced MandrakeSecure, a Web site dedicated to Mandrake security, of course.

Browser company Opera released Opera 6.0 for Linux and freelance reviewer F. Grant Robertson was quite impressed, even if you have to shell out $35 for it.

Success story of the week

Tommy Hilfiger, the clothing company, chose Linux and IBM for its e-business infrastructure, the company announced this week. The company was sold on the system’s performance and reliability.

On the other hand, the British royal family’s Web hosting company dumped Linux in favor of Microsoft product. But who’s cooler, really — Tommy Hilfiger or the Queen Mum?

Newly reviewed

DesktopLinux.com reviews Elx, which is calling itself “everyone’s Linux.” From the review: “My Elx came along with OpenOffice 6, which is significantly better than version 5.2 which I was previously using. I was told by someone associated with Elx that all
applications have been recompiled with gcc 3.02 which makes
them faster than others … and I did find Elx somewhat faster than my
Mandrake 8 in terms of application loading.”

TuxPPC reviews SuSE 7.3 PPC. From that review: “Considering all the positive aspects of SuSE Linux, rapidity, stability, ease of use, enormous amount of included software, the
manuals and last but not least the free 60 day installation support, I think SuSE Linux has made its way to being the best retail Linux distribution currently available for PowerPC machines.”

New at NewsForge and Linux.com

Other stories that NewsForge and Linux.com reported first this week:

Business columnist Jack Bryar talks about how some governments and government agencies are considering Linux to get away from Microsoft’s famed security problems. Read the comments on this story, too.

We talk to Asset Research & Retention, a financial services software company, about its adoption of an Open Source Web backbone, with help from NuSphere Corporation.

Stock news

It was a mixed week for Open Source-related stocks, with many on our little list making modest to large moves upward for the week, and a handful going south. The tech-heavy Nasdaq ended the week at 2,021.30, down 33.97 points on Friday, but up from 1903.20 a week earlier. The Nasdaq broke the psychologically important 2,000 barrier this week for the first time in months — a 42 percent increase since its three-year low Sept. 21. Part of the Nasdaq rally was attributed to the news that chip-makers Intel and AMD both boosted their fourth-quarter sales forecasts, suggesting that holiday PC sales are doing better than expected.

In Open Source-related stocks, Borland Software, Caldera and IBM all posted healthy gains; TiVO, MandrakeSoft, and Sun Microsystems all dropped.

Here’s how Open Source and related stocks ended this past week:

Company Name	Symbol	11/30 Close	12/7 Close
Apple	AAPL	21.30	22.54
Borland Software Int’l	BORL	14.46	16.89
Caldera International	CALD	0.77	1.09
Hewlett-Packard	HWP	21.99	23.52
IBM	IBM	115.59	120.40
MandrakeSoft	4477.PA	e5.40	e5.10
Red Hat	RHAT	7.98	7.96
Sun Microsystems	SUNW	14.24	13.39
TiVo	TIVO	5.21	4.52
VA Software	LNUX	2.67	3.23
Wind River Systems	WIND	17.20	18.30

Tosatti: “Hi, here goes pre7.”

pre7:

- More USB updates                              (Greg KH)
- Add missing checks on shmat()                 (Christoph Rohland)
- ymfpci update                                 (Pete Zaitcev)
- Add aacraid driver                            (Alan Cox)
- Actually apply some of the Alan's changes
  which were on pre6 changelog.                 (silly me)
- Clean up t128 SCSI driver                     (Alan Cox)
- Clean up dtc SCSI driver                      (Alan Cox) 
- Undo lcall patch from -pre6                   (me)
- More ISDN updates                             (Kai Germaschewski)

This is the GNOME Summary for 2001-11-30 – 2001-12-07.

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

1. GNOME2 Screenshots starting to roll in
2. Gediminas Paulauskas ports nautilus-gtkhtml to GNOME2
3. Accessibility and Multimedia
4. Rodney Dawes releases new Encompass
5. Nice looking archiver released
6. ORBit2 FAQ available
7. GNOME Foundation board election results now final
8. Yelp is on the way
9. Translated GNOME summaries
10. Hacker Activity
11. New and Updated Software

==============================================================
1. GNOME2 Screenshots starting to roll in
--------------------------------------------------------------

As more and more people are able to compile and run GNOME2 screenshots 
documenting their progress is popping up. First one shows Glade2
running, second shows a GNOME 2 desktop running Glade2, GNOME terminal,
Nautilus and in the panel wanda and the pager, the third shows a
suggestion for a new GNOME2 file selector and the fourth show Nautilus
and gedit running on a GNOME2 desktop.

        http://primates.ximian.com/~jacob/gnome2/libglade-gnomeapp2.png
        http://cronos.dci.ubiobio.cl/~gpoo/gnome2/shot1.jpg
        http://glimmer.sourceforge.net/gnome2/gnome-file-selector.png
        http://greebo.homeip.net/gnome2.png

==============================================================
2. Gediminas Paulauskas ports nautilus-gtkhtml to GNOME2
--------------------------------------------------------------

Gediminas Paulauskas posted to the GNOME2 list this week announcing that
he has updated the nautilus-gtkhtml component to use gtkhtml2 and work
with the GNOME2 version of Nautilus. In addition Padraig O'Briain at Sun
are working on adding full accessiblity support for Gtkhtml2. Links
below to a screenshot of the new component running, the full
announcement from Gediminas and the gtkhtml2 homepage.

        http://03bar.ktu.lt/~menesis/screenshots/nautilus-gtkhtml2.png
  
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-2-0-list/2001-December/msg00084.html
        http://gtkhtml2.codefactory.se/

==============================================================
3. Accessibility and Multimedia
--------------------------------------------------------------

Want to learn more about how to make multimedia applications accessible?
Well a few days ago Wim Taymans of the GStreamer project and Bill
Hanneman, Sun's leading accessibility expert discussed this topic on
IRC. Below you find a slighly edited log of that conversation. So if you
missed the opportunity to lurk during this talk, well now you can still
get the info to make your multimedia applications accessible.

        http://www.gstreamer.net/docs/gstaccess.php

==============================================================
4. Rodney Dawes releases new Encompass
--------------------------------------------------------------

After a full rewrite Rodney Dawes releases the first alpha release of
the new Encompass browser. Design goals for this round is extensibility
and flexibility. LLinks below to the full announcement and the Encompass
homepage.

        http://elysium.zoned.net/encompass/index.html
        
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2001-December/msg00010.html

==============================================================
5. Nice looking archiver released
--------------------------------------------------------------

Many people have requested a Archiver that both support a wide range of 
formats, but also looks nice. A Winzip for GNOME so to speak. Well this
week File Roller was relased at it looks like it just might be the
application to fill that role. It even has a bonobo based document
viewer. Check out the File Roller homepage for the details.

        http://fileroller.sourceforge.net/

==============================================================
6. ORBit2 FAQ available
--------------------------------------------------------------

Michael Meeks made a nice FAQ about the new ORBit2 that will be rolled
out togheter with GNOME2. So if you have questions about the new engine
of GNOME2 then read the FAQ.

        http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/ORBit2/docs/FAQ

==============================================================
7. GNOME Foundation board election results now final
--------------------------------------------------------------

The results of the GNOME Foundation board elections are now officially
out. No suprises compared to the preliminary results to congratulations
to Jonathan Blandford, Miguel de Icaza, Nat Friedman, Jim Gettys
Jody Goldberg, Telsa Gwynne, James Henstridge, George Lebl
Federico Mena-Quintero, Havoc Pennington and Daniel Veillard. 

The new board has also had their first meeting, and the minutes from
that meeting you find as the second link below. One of the most
interesting pieces of news from that minute is that GUADEC3 is to find
place in Seville, Spain, 4-6th of April 2002

       
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2001-December/msg00002.html
        
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2001-December/msg00001.html

==============================================================
8. Yelp is on the way
--------------------------------------------------------------

Mikael Hallendal at CodeFactory gave use this screenshot of the new
GNOME2 help browser, Yelp. Looks great and easy to use. Now only if we
can get Star to make a background image for the text it will look even
better :)


        http://people.codefactory.se/~micke/yelp/yelp-02.png

==============================================================
9. 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.php4
        http://es.gnome.org/actualidad/
        http://cactus.rulez.org/projects/gnome/summary/

==============================================================
10. Hacker Activity
--------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks for Paul Warren for these lists.

Most active modules:
 210 gnucash
 92 evolution
 73 gnome-core
 70 gnomemm
 70 galeon
 50 gtk+
 36 gimp
 36 gnumeric
 29 gnomeicu
 29 pan
 29 gnome-control-center
 28 gnome-i18n
 28 web-devel-2
 27 SashComponents
 22 libgnomeui
 22 yelp
 21 ORBit2
 21 gcompris
 20 at-spi
 19 gfax
[150 active modules omitted]

Most active hackers:
 96 peticolas (gnucash)
 79 menthos
 74 murrayc
 53 rlb (gnucash)
 38 rodrigo
 36 kmaraas
 35 linas (gnucash)
 33 cactus
 33 fejj
 32 rasta
 28 pablo
 27 michael
 27 darin
 26 chrisime
 24 hp
 23 kevinv
 22 gfarris
 22 owen
 22 carlos
 22 jbaayen
[153 active hackers omitted]


==============================================================
11. New and Updated Software
--------------------------------------------------------------

galeon  - GNOME web browser based on Gecko
gLabels  - Lightweight program for creating labels and business cards
galeon  - GNOME web browser based on Gecko
gnomeldap  - A client for accessing data stored in LDAP servers
gmmusic  - Music collection database, based on PostgreSQL.
Wildcard  - Program for renaming files.
wavelan-applet  - Applet to display the signal strength of a WaveLan
card.
GNOME Workstation Command Center  - The one stop workstation
adminstartion program
Pan  - Newsreader, loosely based on Agent and Gravity
GnomeMeeting  - Video conferencing software for Linux.
File Roller  - File Roller is an archive manager.
Anjuta  - Versatile Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
Gnome News Applet  - Panel applet displaying headlines
Gnome-vim  - Gnome-vim is a Bonobo component
Scigraphica  - Application for technical graphics and data analysis.
glade--  - Backend for glade to create C++ sources.
gnometris  - Tetris-like game for GNOME.
Truevision  - Truevision is a 3d modeler
Gnome-chord  - Guitar chord index that graphically displays chords
gnome-pilot-conduits  - Additional conduits for gnome-pilot.
gnome-pilot  - Daemon for pilot synchronization
linphone  - Lets you make two-party phone
DevHelp  - Developers help program. Browse and search GNOME API and GNU
Manuals.
euterpe-applet  - Euterpe is a media archive searching applet.
Elysium Download  - Download manager for GNOME using gnome-vfs.
libelysium  - Set of utility functions
bond  - apid application development tool which works with GLADE
gobm4  - m4 macros for gob
gnome mlview  - Tree oriented xml editor
gdkxft  - Anti-aliased fonts to the gnome desktop
GCronTime  - Program for the management of planned operations.
lahelper  - LaHelper is a LaTeX assistant
David  - David is a C, C++ code editor
GNOME SmsSend  - Gnome SmsSend is a user interface to SmsSend
Pybliographer  - Tool for manipulating bibliographic databases

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

Another week of heavy GNOME2 hacking, next week we hope to bring you
news about the new 0.3.0 release of GStreamer so remember to check back
:)
Christian

Vik writes “This one could run and run. Following Microsoft claims that VisualStudio.NET is better for developing websites than WebSphere, IBM debunked it. Now Microsoft debunks the debunk. Anyone seen an IBM debunk of the Microsoft’s debunked debunk yet?”

From LinuxFocus: “In this article we explain how to write little scripts.” This article can be a useful field guide for shell scripting.

Mozilla.org explains the ideals necessary to attain for Mozilla to be named “Version 1.0” in its “Mozilla 1.0 Manifesto”.

MandrakeSoft is announcing the release of Mandrake Linux 8.1 Gmaing Edition, a distribution of Linux oriented toward games.