njcajun writes, “I’ve already read this book, pretty much cover-to-cover, and found it so useful that I was compelled to write a review of it to share my experience with it. It’s an awesome book, and the review at LinuxLaboratory.org will tell you why.”

It’s posted at Seul.org. Among the items: “At long last our Linux in education case studies are beginning to come online … We hope this list
will continue to grow; we’ll announce an updated submission form in the near future so everyone can add their Linux in
education success stories.”

From Businesswire: Covalent Technologies today announced the general availability of Enterprise Ready Server (ERS), a comprehensive Web server
product designed to minimize the resources required to deploy and manage Apache Web servers. The product provides the first
distributed graphical management tool for the Apache Web server; it combines Apache 2.0 with a Java application server and
improves Apache’s security and reliability features. The combination of these features results in the first “enterprise ready” solution
for the Apace Web server.

REDSonic, Inc., a leader in
real-time Linux solutions for the embedded market, today announced its
strategic partnership with New Level Telecom (NL Telecom) for the distribution
and support of REDSonic’s real-time embedded Linux solutions.

Under the terms of the agreement, NL Telecom will be a licensed
distributor of REDICE-Linux(TM), RED-Builder(TM), RED-Probe(TM), secure
gateway, thin-client, set-top-box, and IA solutions, in South Korea. NL
Telecom’s engineering team will provide technical support, training, and
product installation for REDSonic’s real-time embedded Linux solutions.

NL Telecom and REDSonic will begin hosting embedded Linux training
seminars in Seoul beginning early next year. These training sessions will
focus on the technical aspects of creating and deploying solutions utilizing
real-time embedded Linux and development tools.

For NL Telecom, the partnership will allow the company to expand its role
in the quickly evolving embedded Linux market. “The development of embedded
Linux IA solutions is expanding at an exponential rate in the Korean
marketplace and we see ourselves as key players within this market,” said Jin
Yu, international business manager at NL Telecom. “The flexibility of
REDSonic’s real-time Linux technology, REDICE-Linux, and its powerful embedded
Linux development tool, RED-Builder, will enable us to expand our leadership
role. By collaborating with REDSonic, we can offer embedded software
solutions that significantly decrease time-to-market and lower total
development costs for embedded developers in South Korea.”

From REDSonic’s point-of-view, the partnership further solidifies its
market share in Asia while also fulfilling the growing demand for powerful
embedded Linux solutions in Asia. “Our newly established relationship with NL
Telecom complements REDSonic’s comprehensive Asia-Pacific sales strategy.
REDSonic now has a presence in all major Asia-Pacific countries, including
China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore,” said Kevin Tobin, REDSonic’s
director of sales. “REDSonic welcomes NL Telecom as a valued strategic
partner and distributor to meet the rapidly growing embedded Linux market in
South Korea.”

About New Level Telecom
New Level Telecom provides total development solutions for South Korea’s
communications industry. With a comprehensive portfolio of specific vertical
market software-integrated hardware expertise, NL Telecom is the leading
provider of emulation and debugging tools in South Korea. The company offers
development tools, technical support, and consultation for the 68K, CPU32,
ColdFire, M.CORE, MPC8xx, 82xx, 5xx, 6xx, 7xx, 4xx, MIPS, Hitachi, ARM, and
Intel XScale microprocessor families. For more information, call
+82-2-813-7474 or visit www.nltelecom.com.

About REDSonic, Inc.
REDSonic, Inc. is a leader in total real-time Linux solutions for both
embedded and server systems markets. With its headquarters in Santa Ana,
Calif., and offices in Taiwan, China, and Singapore, REDSonic offers a
complete integrated development environment (IDE) that includes REDICE-Linux,
a real-time Linux kernel, and builder tools to develop embedded systems. The
company also provides professional services, including training, support,
porting, and custom-application development. For more information, please
visit www.redsonic.com or call 949-833-9679.

ZDNet UK quotes Jacques Le Marois, president of Linux distributor MandrakeSoft, as saying big companies are continuing to move many of their systems to Linux,
despite reports that downplay the operating system’s role in business.

See http://dotgnu.org for general information about DotGNU. In this issue:

* Assistant maintainers needed for GlobalLogin auth project
* New versions of Portable.NET and pnetlib
* Status of Free Software efforts on Java
Assistant maintainers needed for GlobalLogin auth project

Mason Ham is working on the final preparations for the release
(under GPL) of the fully functional GlobalLogin virtual identity
system which is implemented in Java. Since he expects a high
level of interest for this system, he is looking for three people
who are interested in helping him maintain it. For each of the
areas “database”, “crypto”, and “servlets” one such sub-maintainer
is sought. Mason Ham can be reached by email at
mlham AT zambit DOT com.

New versions of Portable.NET and pnetlib

Portable.NET 0.2.2 and pnetlib 0.0.6 have been released:

Web Page: http://www.southern-storm.com.au/portable_net.html
Download: http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/pnet-0.2.2.tar.gz
Library: http://www.southern-storm.com.au/download/pnetlib-0.0.6.tar.gz

The major changes in this release are to the runtime engine and
the linker. The engine now understands most of the IL instruction
set. The main omissions are exceptions, interfaces, delegates,
and tail calls.

The engine can now run “Hello World” slightly better than the
last release. Because virtual methods now work, it can use the
stream classes in “System.IO” to do the heavy lifting on “stdout”.

Status of Free Software efforts on Java

I asked about the status of the Free Software efforts on Java,
here is the answer Brian Jones gave me:

With the exception of the AWT, I would say the essential components
are mostly working. There are things like cleaning up the JNI code to
check for exceptions more appropriately and the possibility of using
APR (Apache Portable Runtime) to make that code more portable to other
platforms without much effort. A few places within the code base have
UNIX-isms that shouldn’t be where they are. I don’t think the
SecurityManager is integrated into every method it is supposed to be.
It would be nice to support multi-language exception messages in both
Java and native code but that might be too much overhead. I’m not
confident in our text/string/character implementation which is
different from what gcj uses… mostly because it seems to fail every
Mauve test. Finally, there are not enough Mauve tests to make me say
it works well because a lot of functionality does not yet have a Mauve
test.

That’s the ugly side… the other side is that multiple VMs use some
form of Classpath and you can actually run some applications with it.
Contributing to Mauve is really easy and if you just barely know Java
you can still make valuable contributions there.

P.S. Translations of “This week in DotGNU” into other laguages are
very welcome; please let me know about them. Currently the only
language into which “This week in DotGNU” is translated is Polish.

“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.

Augustus writes “LinuxHardware.org has posted this review of three Intel 845-based motherboards:
“Intel’s 845 chipset has arrived and now Intel fans finally have an upgrade path that will allow them to keep their existing SDRAM and still upgrade to the Intel Pentium 4 processor. The big question though is, what sort of performance hit can you expect from not taking the plunge with RAMBUS? LinuxHardware.org has gotten hold of three Intel 845 motherboards from Intel, SOYO, and Abit and we’ve put them through the tests and have the answers to the Pentium 4 with SDRAM questions. Is purchasing an SDRAM-based Pentium 4 system worth it? Is using an 845-based motherboard a good upgrade path for those interested in going the Pentium 4 route?””

Covalent Technologies today announced the general availability of Enterprise Ready Server (ERS), a comprehensive Web server product designed to minimize the resources required to deploy and manage Apache Web servers. The product provides the first distributed graphical management tool for the Apache Web server; it combines Apache 2.0 with a Java application server and improves Apache’s security and reliability features. The combination of these features results in the first “enterprise ready†solution for the Apace Web server.

The Apache HTTP server has seen wide acceptance and unparalleled popularity as an open-source product powering over 18 million Web sites. Covalent Enterprise Ready Server will further fuel this adoption by providing functionality much needed by large corporations wishing to make use of Apache. Covalent has enhanced Apache in three key areas: manageability, security and reliability.

“As more and more companies have relied on the Web server as their presentation layer, the management of that layer has grown increasingly cumbersome,†said Dan Kusnetzky, vice president, system software research at IDC. “Covalent’s Enterprise Ready Server is likely to make Apache more attractive to large organizations who are bringing together multiple Web-centric solutions and creating a more unified environment.â€

Highlights of Covalent Enterprise Ready Server include:
· The first one-to-many management portal for configuring, managing, and monitoring hundreds of Apache servers and thousands of virtual hosts.
· Vastly improved Apache performance on both UNIX and Windows operating systems.
· The first comprehensive, programmatic authentication and authorization services for Apache (which integrates into a wide range of existing infrastructures).
· The first consolidated logging service over multiple servers and multiple types of content.
· Multi-protocol content serving capabilities, including support for HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, with shared services across all of those protocols.

“Covalent Enterprise Ready Server is for those who’ve been dying to replace their slow, buggy, and insecure traditional Web server software with something truly worthy of the term ‘Enterprise’,†said Brian Behlendorf, president of the Apache Software Foundation and founder and chief technology officer of CollabNet. “Covalent ERS brings together the reliability, flexibility, and security of the Apache 2.0 Web server platform with the manageability, integration, and ease of administration that enterprise software deployments require.â€

Reducing Operational Complexity
Operations groups at large enterprises face an increasingly complex information technology landscape. On the one hand, they are seeing a vast rise in the number of Web servers they must manage. As mission critical applications have increasingly relied on the Web as their client front end, IT groups have been left to manage this ever-growing and ever more important aspect of their company’s business. On the other hand, as these groups simultaneously experience server proliferation, they are also faced with flat or shrinking headcounts, forcing them to manage more and more servers – on average up to 350 Web servers – with the same or fewer personnel. Covalent, after frequently encountering this scenario with its enterprise customers, designed and built Enterprise Ready Server to alleviate these pain points.

Benefits of Enterprise Ready Server
Covalent has focused its efforts on enhancing the already powerful Apache 2.0 platform in three key areas: manageability, security and reliability. The benefits of these enhancements include:

· Manageability – Covalent’s Enterprise Ready Server lowers the cost of managing and maintaining complex Internet infrastructures through the advanced Covalent Management Portal (CMP), a centralized management tool for deploying, configuring, controlling and monitoring Apache Web servers and virtual hosts. A single administrator can now manage, configure, and install hundreds of Web servers and virtual hosts located in dozens of data centers from a central location.

· Security – Covalent ERS utilizes the most secure SSL encryption technology available—the RSA B-safe libraries. Covalent ERS enhances Apache’s standard authentication and authorization capabilities. It combines the most requested functionality of several authentication modules and provides a rich set of authentication options, including ANON, DB, Oracle, LDAP, NIS and several others.

· Reliability – Covalent’s Logging Services provide the first real-time, shared infrastructure environment for monitoring and analyzing Web usage. Covalent Logging Services makes it easy to get a complete and consolidated view of multi-server environments, no matter where the servers reside. The Logging Service also ensures data integrity across restarts and downtimes.

Apache 2.0
Covalent Enterprise Ready Server is based on the secure and flexible Apache 2.0 platform. Apache 2.0 is HTTP 1.1 compliant and includes support for distributed authoring and versioning; proxying and caching; IP and named-based virtual hosting; and Java, Perl, and PHP applications. Apache 2.0 also contains a completely new and innovative internal processing architecture. Apache’s Multi Processing Module (MPM) lets administrators choose between a stable parent-child process model and a hybrid prefork/threaded model. The Apache Portable Runtime feature also ensures greatly increased performance on all platforms, most notably Windows.

What’s Included
Covalent Enterprise Ready Server includes the complete binary for Apache 2.0, Tomcat 4.0 Java server, Covalent Management Portal, Covalent User Tracking, Covalent Logging Services, Covalent Authorization and Authentication Services, Covalent SSL, Covalent FTP, Covalent SNMP, PHP and mod_perl.

Platforms, Pricing and Availability
Covalent ERS will initially ship on Solaris, Linux, HPUX and Windows for $1,495 per CPU. Covalent Enterprise Ready Server is available today from Covalent’s direct sales force at 800/444-1935.

About Covalent Technologies, Inc.
Covalent was founded in 1998 by Randy Terbush, one of the eight developers who originally started the Apache Web Server project. Today, Covalent is the leader in products and services for Apache. Funded by leading venture capital investors including Sequoia Capital and Granite Ventures, Covalent is the only company offering a comprehensive “enterprise-ready†solution for Apache. Companies such as Lucent Technologies, Dow Jones and others depend on Covalent for their Apache Web Server infrastructure. More information about the company can be found at www.covalent.net.”

Patrick McGovern posted at Slashdot: “The ability to export data from SourceForge.net
has not changed. There is no conspiracy to ‘lock projects in’
to SourceForge.net. Every project has the ability to download
a nightly tarball of their CVS code. If people have any concerns
about their code, we recommend they set up a cron job to download
the latest version.” SourceForge.net, along with NewsForge, is an OSDN site.

Reuters (via ZDNet): “Walter Hewlett, the son of Hewlett-Packard co-founder William Hewlett, hired proxy solicitation firm MacKenzie Partners, possibly signaling the start of a proxy fight between the Hewlett family and the company over its $20.34 billion takeover of Compaq Computer.”