Reviewed at Overclockers Australia: “As the name indicates: a radiator is the heart of this device. Normally a heatsink is absorbing the CPU heat at the bottom and dissipating it through fins or pins into the surrounding air either by itself or with the help of a fan. The Zen radiator follows a different principle: within a meandering aluminum pipe a refrigerant is circulating.”

Version 2.2.0 of Slashdot Like Automated Storytelling Homepage (Slash) has been released. From the site: “Slash is written in Perl, and is built on top of Apache and mod_perl. It
requires a database backend, though the only well-supported database
used with it is MySQL (more databases will become well-supported as time
goes on; PostgreSQL support is already well on its way). Slash is fast,
scalable, and secure (as evidenced by one of the best test cases you
could have, running Slashdot itself).”

“Given its size, when IBM talks about Linux, people listen. Two years after IBM laid out its Linux strategy, the company seems to have met its goals and then some. Joe Barr talks to IBM’s Linux czar to find what’s ahead for the computer giant and open source.” From LinuxWorld.

From the Boston Globe: “Sure enough, while the state attorneys general yesterday studied their options now that the US Justice Department has settled, IBM announced it would donate $40 million worth of Java-based software to the burgeoning open-source software development community, in an effort to galvanize it further. Details, including the creation of a research consortium with a multicompany board, will be announced this month. Red Hat, Rational, Merant, QSSL, TogetherSoft and other open-source companies will be involved.

The name of the new open-source software is Eclipse, as in the overshadowing of Microsoft’s proprietary approach that IBM hopes eventually will take place.”

Commentary from LinuxPlanet: “There are no two ways about it: The settlement that the United States Department of Justice reached last week with Microsoft Corporation is only barely better than the one the parties reached in 1995. Microsoft, adjudged guilty of essentially hijacking the software industry, has agreed not to do it anymore unless it wants to.”

From Anthony Towns: “As of the weekend just past we’ve finally obtained the legal advice we
needed to go about putting crypto in main. This was the final policy
issue I’d been waiting on to move the freeze onward, so, voila, the
freeze moves onward.”

Hello world,

As of the weekend just past we've finally obtained the legal advice we
needed to go about putting crypto in main. This was the final policy
issue I'd been waiting on to move the freeze onward, so, voila, the
freeze moves onward.

As of today, policy is frozen. Any further changes to packages need to
be made by unanimous agreement amongst all the maintainers the change
will affect.

Some important changes to debian-policy are documented at
        http://people.debian.org/~ajt/woody_policy_addenda.txt
These shouldn't affect most poeople directly, but I'd encourage you to
give it a quick skim.

Further, as of today, no new packages will be being added to base. This
especially means maintainers of base packages should definitely
avoid fiddling with their dependencies, or compiling against new
libraries. Additionally, base packages should not be bumping shlibs
versions from this point, under any circumstances (Hi BenC!).

The freeze goals as of now are to make sure standard, boot-floppies,
and debian-cd are releasable, and to fix up any remaining bugs in base.

Remaining RC base bugs are:

        console-data
                116022: broken on PPC (3 weeks old, patch)
        cyrus-sasl
                115708: FSH non-compliances (3 weeks old)
                118004: security bug (under a week old, patch)
        debianutils
                113453: poor behaviour of rotatelog (over a month old, not RC?)
        gcc-2.96
                115978: broken stringstream behaviour (3 weeks old)
        manpages
                90901: copyright doesn't list upstream source (7 months
                       old, patch)
        openldap2
                112499: remote crash bug in openldap (over a month old)
        pcmcia-cs
                109903: unresolved symbols (2.2.19-pmac)
                116479: user build problems; user error?
                116603: user build problems; not RC?
                97188: uninstallable (2.2.19-pmac)
        ppp
                117497: unversioned build-depends (a week old, patch)
        slang
                115376: slang-utf8 severely broken (four weeks old)
                118003: overflow bug with large windows (under a week, not RC?)
        util-linux
                118367: embedded ppc breaks util-linux (under a week, not RC?)

There are large numbers of non-RC bugs in base packages too, that should
be being worked on over the next couple of weeks if possible. The emphasis
is on making base packages work though, not on doing risky things that
will make them better in the long term.

Additionally, two new architectures, hppa and S/390 are having significant
problems: hppa's toolchain has been completely broken recently, but seems
like it will be fixed by the end of the week; and S/390 needs some support
in some packages due to its different environment compared to most ports:

        db2/db3
                114574: S/390 support (over a month old, patch)
        db3
                98918: S/390 support (over 5 months old, patch)
        openldap2
                98039: S/390 support (over 5 months old, patch)

hppa and S/390 will be dropped from woody if these aren't resolved in an
adequate amount of time.

Boot-floppies on some architectures are having issues with sysvinit and
glibc invoking "init q" when debootstrap unpacks them. This could be
a busybox bug (it appears to be giving it's init a PID other than 1),
or a sysvinit bug ("init q" possibly should be a no-op if PID 1 isn't
sysvinit's init), or it could need to be worked around in debootstrap
somehow (ensuring that /sbin/init is a no-op). See also bug 116829.

RC bugs in packages in standard and tasks are:

        apache
                113900: PHP and LDAP problems (over a month, help!)
                114826: PHP problems (almost a month, help!)
                117616: -dev package should Depend: on libdb2-dev (a week)
        cxterm
                94631: doesn't build on arm (6 months)
        gnuplot
                100612: includes some non-DFSG-free code (4 months)
        gpm
                85551,110112: libgpm segfaults if gpm not running (9 months)
                102031: format string bugs (4 months, security, patch)
                118033: doesn't cooperate with X (under a week, user error)
        kdeutils
                110707: doesn't build on alpha (2 months, not true?)
        libtool
                66135: LIBTOOL_IS_A_FOOL broken (16 months, fix available but
                       not uploaded or confirmed to work)
        lincity
                104852: missing build-depends (almost 4 months)
        mc
                103102: upgrade breaks due to old data in ~/.gnome (4 months)
                108375: gmc dies (over 2 months; not RC?)
                111142: gmc dies (2 months; Ximian bug)
                112235: gpm bug (see 85551)
        mime-support
                94869: security problems in run-mailcap (6 months, security,=20
                       patch)
                115401: configuration ordering bug (almost a month)
        mutt
                118294: build-depends on non-US (fixed in non-US incoming?)
        openssh
                115228: built against bad libc (almost a month)
                117396: ssh dies (user error)
        pdl
                104630: doesn't build on hppa (over 3 months)
        plotutils
                111846: missing build-depends (almost 2 months)
        postgresql
                118362: upgrade breaks (a day)
        python-gnome
                118378: strange breakage (a day, not RC?)
        python-imaging
                117859: needs update to new python policy (under a week)
        python-ldap
                76717: doesn't work with openldap2 (almost 12 months)
        python-xml
                118442: needs update to new python policy (a day)
        strace
                117218: doesn't build on ppc (a week, will be fixed in glibc)
        tetex-base
                111284: non-DFSG-free files in tetex-extra (2 months)
                113899: install problem (1 month)
        tetex-bin
                117500: note needed in copyright file (under a week)

The deadlines, at this point, are that all the bugs in base packages
that are going to be fixed need to be fixed (and in testing) by Saturday
the 8th of December. If they're not correctly fixed and uploaded during
November, they probably won't make it. Similarly, standard packages,
tasks, boot-floppies and debian-cd need to be in a releasable state by
the same time.

Most of the bugs above have been around for a long time, and as such,
many of them will be just ignored if they're not fixed, making for a
substantially lower quality release than we might want or hope for.

To emphasise: if you want a pleasant, consistent, bug-free woody release,
please start looking at the bugs in your favourite packages and sending
the maintainer patches for them now. A number of the bugs above will
need some real analysis, not a five minute tweak. This coming weekend is
a bugsquash party, so hopefully many of the above will end up fixed soon.

Otherwise, we could have some hold ups due to archive maintenance issues
(implementing the necessary changes to support crypto-in-main and
woody-proposed-updates), however these are mostly implemented already,
and should be done in enough time: implementing technical solutions
is a lot easier and faster than finding an answer to political/legal
problems which've been the major hold up of late.

Our major risks at this point are no longer schedule related, but
quality related. Please help fixing bugs.

Cheers,
aj (woody release manager)

--=20
Anthony Towns 
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.

 "Security here. Yes, maam. Yes. Groucho glasses. Yes, we're on it.
   C'mon, guys. Somebody gave an aardvark a nose-cut: somebody who
    can't deal with deconstructionist humor. Code Blue."
                -- Mike Hoye,
                      see http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/armadillos.txt

--J2SCkAp4GZ/dPZZf
Content-Type: application/pgp-signature
Content-Disposition: inline

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org

iQCVAwUBO+jRa+RRvX9xctrtAQGVyQQAgrCmXPyi9NmDRD52B/1toduOcMcI+dAg
O2jOaNC6T6A6mALmmIq9HTe8rWuZeqCBd+N6VkMpjHl5fuCUtmLsgYPKRyCfFuoO
Z/naVx7xqB5dA3aBtRbxV+IjjOtAy7+9jWzrmMA00pWAUHQhckqooeMP499SNXdT
82BqiPoqgZs=
=TUVk
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

CNET News.com: “A proposed economic stimulus package from the federal government is the perfect vessel to hold a tax credit for family computers, as far as a Virginia senator is concerned. The act originally proposed by Allen would give a tax credit to cover the cost of computers, along with ancillary equipment and services, to any family with students in elementary or secondary schools.” Childfree and childless families, whom Congress usually only considers for taking and never giving, are naturally not included in the plan.

The free section of Salon.com reviews Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig’s new book, “The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World.” Lessig “urges the Internet generation not to forget what made the last 10
years exciting: an open platform that did not discriminate among applications or content, an
environment for creativity and innovation, a public commons for an information age. In a word:
the Internet. And instead of calling for the removal of regulation to encourage freedom, he
recommends that there is a place for some regulation, if we want to preserve liberty.”

MDS Proteomics and IBM today announced the
completion of one of the world’s most powerful supercomputing clusters —
and Canada’s fastest system. With the ability to compute more than 600
million calculations per second, the Linux* system is part of an advanced
technology infrastructure supporting research on proteins’ roles in causing
diseases such as cancer, AIDS and depression.

Located at MDS Proteomics’ new global research headquarters in Toronto and
research facility in Denmark, the newly completed system consists of three
clusters of IBM eServer** xSeries** 330 systems running Linux, with 100
servers in each cluster. The xSeries 330 Intel-based server — about the
size of a pizza box — is the most powerful thin server in the industry.
It employs self-healing and self-protective technologies and offers high
availability, reliability and ease of use, with maximum server density.

The Linux supercluster is part of an integrated computing platform deployed
at MDS Proteomics to identify, analyze and compare proteins and protein
interactions. Other systems — which support both wet-lab (real life) and
in silico (computer simulation) analyses — include:

— A network of ultra-sensitive mass spectrometers, which can identify and
analyze thousands of proteins each day.

— A network of IBM UNIX-based servers, including an IBM SP supercomputer;
eight IBM pSeries** H80 servers; three IBM pSeries M80 servers; and two IBM
p680 servers. These servers support:

• MDS Proteomics’ new Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS) —
  the backbone of the company’s day-to-day research operations;
• MDS Proteomics’ in-house databases, including BIND*** (Biomolecular
  Interaction Network Database), a repository that stores descriptions of how
  biomolecules interact and how they participate in biological pathways to
  carry out specific cellular functions; and
• Software applications for identifying proteins, bioinformatics
  analyses, and drug discovery, including BLAST, which is designed to
  compare existing protein and nucleic acid sequences against National Center
  for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) databases of sequences; SeqHound, a
  protein sequence finder; and MDS Proteomic’s Small Molecule Interaction
  Database (SMID)***, which contains information on small molecule
  interactions.

— A 120-port Foundary Gigabit Ethernet — one of Canada’s largest fibre
optic network switches — to enable the servers to work on analyses in
tandem.

— IBM DB2 Universal Database, which provides a scalable relational data
management system for managing complex, heterogeneous proteomic data.

IBM Enterprise Storage Server (code named “Shark), a high-speed solution
for storing, accessing and retrieving the enormous quantities of protein
sequence data generated daily by the mass spectrometers.

— IBM Linear Tape Open tape library system, which provides 28 terabytes of
backup storage capacity.

— Fault-tolerant, cluster-based software to manage system and network
availability and reliability, including Tivoli Storage Manager** (TSM).

MDS Proteomics also plans to use IBM’s DiscoveryLink** software, which
provides data integration capabilities to seamlessly integrate proteomics
data from a variety of sources, formats and file types. DiscoveryLink
enables researchers to consolidate information from many sources into a
“virtual database” to solve complex medical research problems.

* Indicates registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
** Indicates trademark or registered trademark of IBM Corporation.
*** Indicates trademark or registered trademark of MDS Proteomics.

Augustus writes, “LinuxHardware.org has posted an article covering the basics of PC power supplies and how to choose the best one for your needs. Take a look a some of the terminology of power supplies as well as what makes some supplies better than others. Featured in this review are power supplies from HEC and PC Power & Cooling.”