ZDNet reports that a “federal judge has ordered American Online to temporarily stop distributing a recent version of its popular service, AOL 6.0, saying the software likely violates copyrights for computer code used to play back MP3 files.”

Still without a nice pumpkin for the trick-or-treaters? Light the way with one of these Open Source/Free Software-themed gourds, posted on Andrew Bradford’s home page.

Red Hat has updated its white paper describing the ext3 journaling file system: “The ext3 file system is a set of incremental enhancements to the robust ext2 file system that provide several advantages. This paper summarizes some of those advantages (first in general terms and then more specifically), explains what Red Hat has done to test the ext3 file system, and (for advanced users only) touches on tuning.”

InfoWorld: “Maybe those complaining about a lack of innovation in open source need to do some innovation of their own. They could start by devising a new excuse not to use open-source solutions. The “no innovation” line is getting rather old.”

From LinuxPlanet: “There’s a good chance that when installed from scratch on a perfectly clear drive, SuSE 7.3 is as wonderful as SuSE’s distributions tend to be. As I mentioned, I’ll find out and pass the word along. But the “update” install, or at least one of the configurations therein, is not just unacceptable, it’s very much to be avoided. Here, it actually corrupted data in my home directory.”

“Back after a small vacation, this issue of AWN is delayed by a week. Developement progressed as usual though, and we gained a few new (user visible) features and some bug fixes. There’s also plan for a feature freeze after the 0.9.5 release.” Posted at AbiWord.

MPEG in a console, Linux down under, pearls of wisdom from RMS and more. Read the latest edition of the Debian Weekly News below.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2001/28/
Debian Weekly News - October 30th, 2001
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

MPEG in a Console. Last week we mentioned that Uwe Herrman had
announced an [1]Intent to Package (ITP) for an MPEG player running in
a text console. We got an email from Adam Sjogren saying that plaympeg
from the smpeg-plaympeg package has this capability already. By
running plaympeg in a console, or unsetting the DISPLAY environment
variable in an xterm, it will run in console mode.

Linux Down Under. James Bromberger wrote in to tell us about a Debian
Conference being planned for February 2002 in Australia. The
conference will be February 4th and 5th, two days before the
Linux.conf.au conference. For more information, or to read the Call
for Papers, visit the site at
[2]http://www.linux.org.au/conf/debiancon.html.

Feedback from RMS. We got a response from Richard M. Stallman about
our statement on discussing free and non-free software in DWN, and we
promised to pass it on:

"The situations of GNOME and Debian are not the same, because GNOME is
a part of the GNU Project. The GNU Project policy since the outset has
been that we don't advertise availability of non-free software. GNOME
ought to follow this policy. (I wish that Debian would adopt it, too.)

The reason that GNU has this policy is to follow our own principles
seriously. The reason for developing the GNU system, and the central
principle of what we say to the public, is that non-free software is a
bad thing. If we recommend a non-free program, we contradict that
principle. Others whose actions are based on different principles
might be able to recommend a non-free program without contradicting
their principles, but not us."

For the time being, DWN will continue to report on non-free software
when appropriate -- however, when we do list non-free software in the
"New Packages" section or elsewhere, it will be labelled as such.

Buildd for Debian/Hurd. Jeff Bailey happily [3]announced that he has
gotten the Debian [4]build daemon to run on his Debian/Hurd machine.
That should help the Hurd port keep up with the rest of the archive.
Logs from this buildd are available on the buildd website above.

LSB Specification Update. Upon request, Christopher Yeoh posted an
[5]update on the LSB Specification. There is ongoing work being done
for a 1.0.1 release which will primarily be editorial changes and the
fixing of a few very obvious errors. Both the released version 1.0 and
daily snapshots are found [6]here. There is also a [7]database of
results from LSB tests online.

New Potato Release Behind the Door. Joey is working hard on getting a
new release of Potato out. This will contain most security updates
since the last Potato release as well as a couple of corrected
packages. The plan is to release 2.2r4 at the beginning of November
this year. See his [8]second take on the package list and send him
comments if you feel that he's missing something in the [9]current
list.

Debian on DVD! Slashdot recently [10]reported that [11]LAN Comp
Systems is distributing snapshots of the upcoming Debian release,
codenamed 'woody', on DVD-R. There are source and binary-i386 DVDs,
containing main, contrib, non-free and non-US. Looks like an
interesting alternative to a 4-5 CD set. Jim Westveer [12]explained
how a DVD is mastered with Debian's tools.

FHS Transition. Joey Hess [13]checked if his system complies with an
old [14]tech committee decision from over 2 years ago on how /usr/doc
will be transitioned. Joey says that we are currently near the end of
step 2 and /usr/doc consists only of symlinks to /usr/share/doc.
Except for very few packages the same applies to /usr/man and
/usr/share/man, while the transition for /usr/info hasn't yet
finished.

First OpenOffice Debian Package. Peter Novodvorsky [15]announced the
first successful build of OpenOffice #638c for Debian. It compiles
into one single package which is 75MB large. Dooh. It is packaged
lousily and reflects only a pre-pre-alpha stage, but it's a start. Use
at your own risk! OpenOffice, however, has a modularized structure,
and thus should be split up in smaller packages. However, [16]license
problems with the JDK still remain. See the discussion above for
details. In addition to that Jan-Hendrik Palic recently posted a
comprehensive [17]status report.

New or Noteworthy Packages.
 * [18]brltty -- Access software for a blind person using a soft
   braille terminal.
 * [19]xmms-jess -- A "funky" visualisation plugin for XMMS.
 * [20]pari-gp -- A computer algebra system. Formerly under a
   non-free license, now released under the GPL.

No News is Good News? We have no security issues to report this week.

Keep it Coming. We've been getting a lot of useful feedback and tips
about new packages and so on. Keep it up! Until next week, have a
happy Halloween!

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
References
  1. http://bugs.debian.org/116359
  2. http://www.linux.org.au/conf/debiancon.html
  3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-hurd-0110/msg00233.html
  4. http://buildd.debian.org/
  5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0110/msg01811.html
  6. http://www.linuxbase.org/spec/
  7. http://base.freestandards.org/lsb/test/results/
  8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0110/msg00009.html
  9. http://master.debian.org/~joey/2.2r4/
  10. http://slashdot.org/articles/01/10/25/2250255.shtml
  11. http://www.linux-cd.com/
  12. http://lists.debian.org/debian-cd-0110/msg00084.html
  13. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0110/msg01902.html
  14. http://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte-9908/msg00038.html
  15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-openoffice-0110/msg00036.html
  16. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal-0110/msg00138.html
  17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-openoffice-0110/msg00041.html
  18. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/brltty.html
  19. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/xmms-jess.html
  20. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/math/pari-gp.html

Short item at CNET: “Apple Computer on Wednesday released iDVD 2, its DVD recording and editing software that can take full advantage of Mac OS X version 10.1.”

ZDNet: “I am currently in the fourth week of my self-imposed exile in 10.1.

About a month ago, I decided I wanted to know whether Mac OS X 10.1 was ready for me to switch to it full time, or whether I–a long-time Mac-using professional–still need Mac OS 9 to get my work done.”

PR Newswire: “Linux NetworX, a provider of
powerful and easy-to-manage Linux cluster computing solutions, announced today
plans to unveil its innovative ICE Box(TM) 1500 cluster management hardware
appliance at the SC2001 trade show in Denver, Nov. 12-15. ICE Box empowers
administrators with advanced serial switching and remote power control
capabilities, and is the only appliance of its kind designed specifically to
improve the manageability of Linux clusters.”