Slashdot readers talk about an announcement XOSL, the Extended Operating System Loader, “a
free (as in beer and as in GPL), full featured, graphical boot loader that
can work in conjunction with Lilo or separately” to boot several OSes.

Posted at Advogato.org: “I have set-up a project called ‘Humanity – The Movie’ that aims to be the bazaar way of writing a
movie.

Needless to say the end and intermediate results will be pulished under an open content license. (in this
case the Open Content License). However, that’s not the whole point. I intend that many interested
writers and observers collaborate on writing the script using Internet resources. Plus, every scene can
have several alternatives, and every alternative can have several rendering options.”

Slashdot readers discuss this question: “My company is currently sending out
RFPs to various real-time collaboration software vendors. However, for open source projects, where
should the RFP be sent? But, as my company possibly pursues other open source alternatives, how do we
answer this question?”

The USENIX Association and The System Administrators Guild (SAGE) today announced the addition of speaker William LeFebvre of CNN to their LISA, the 15th System Administration Conference in San Diego, California in December. “CNN.com: Facing a World in Crisis” will examine the need for vigilance in system administration and discuss the trials CNN system administrators faced when their internet site failed during the news deluge of the September 11th tragedy.

“Complacency during easy times can turn the unexpected event into a calamity,” LeFebvre said. “Our site was brought back up by talented administrators whose work is vital to the health of the web site.”

The LISA 2001 conference has always been a popular learning and networking venue for system administrators internationally. Its program addresses technical problems and diverse levels of experience combined with discussion on political, legal, and business aspects of computing. It regularly attracts a stellar list of industry luminaries such as Keynote Speaker and Science Fiction Writer Greg Bear, Security gurus Avi Rubin and Marcus Ranum, Sendmail creator Eric Allman, Perl expert Tom Christiansen, and Evi Nemeth, co-author of the sysadmin’s bible “The UNIX System Administration Handbook.”

The greater opportunities in this conference lie in hearing new ideas from the industry’s international experts starting with Program Chair Mark Burgess, Oslo University College; Frode Sandness, Oslo University College; and US based presenters Tom Perrine, Rob Apthorpe, and Jim Waldo.

“This is where system administrators find like minds and hear groundbreaking research as well as practical solutions for what they face everyday in their environments,” said LISA 2001 Program Chair Mark Burgess. “Every major operating system is always represented at LISA because we know that practitioners are expected to have as diverse a range of skills as they can manage. LISA has strong connections with the Open Source and Free Software communities as well as established Windows and UNIX groups. We bring together a broad international community of researchers, practitioners and vendors and provide them with a unique, intelligent, and forward thinking program.”

Interest in security and networking has intensified within the popular conference, which began adding security-centric topics to the menu in 1999 as systems became more complex and required greater levels of protection against intruders. Today, computer and system security topics are an integral part of LISA’s tutorial and technical conference slate.

“In prior years, security was perceived as an optional component of system administration,” said Phillip Cox of SystemExperts and a LISA 2001 instructor and speaker. “In today’s environment, one of the ‘check boxes’ for a properly administered system is how well it is secured. No one considers an unsecured system to be a properly administered system.”

LISA 2001 offers over 50 professional-level tutorials and three days of refereed papers and invited speakers within its technical program. It also provides an array of special events for project presentation, networking and socializing including the Advanced Topics Workshop, Work-In-Progress Reports, and Birds-of-a-Feather sessions. On a more commercial front, LISA features a large vendor exhibition showcasing the companies, products, and services leading today’s IT market.

Program and registration details for LISA 2001 are available online at www.usenix.org/events/lisa2001. Press and Media representatives are eligible for complimentary passes. Email your name, publication, title, street address, email, phone/fax, and URL to Monica Ortiz at monica@usenix.org.

LISA, the 15th System Administration Conference
December 2-7, 2001
Town & Country Resort Hotel
San Diego, California
www.usenix.org/events/lisa2001

About the USENIX Association
USENIX is the Advanced Computing Systems Association. For over 25 years, it has been the leading community for engineers, system administrators, scientists, and technician working on the cutting edge of the computing world. USENIX conferences are the essential meeting grounds for the presentation and discussion of technical advances in all aspects of computing systems. For more information about the USENIX Association, visit http://www.usenix.org

About SAGE
SAGE, The System Administrators Guild, is an international membership society and a Special Technical Group (STG) of the USENIX Association. It is organized to advance the status of computer system administration as a profession; establish standards of professional excellence and recognize those who attain them; develop guidelines for improving the technical and managerial capabilities of members of the profession; and promote activities that advance the state of the art or the community. For more information about SAGE, visit http://www.sage.org

ZDNet reports on the second day of some non-Microsoft browsers not working at MSN.com. “Late Thursday, the
Washington-based trade
group ProComp joined the
outcry against the browser
lockout by asking state and
federal trustbusters to get
involved.”

Posted at LinuxSecurity.com: “Rafal Wojtczuk found a vulnerability in the 2.2.19 and 2.4.11 Linux
kernels with the ptrace code and deeply nested symlinks spending an
arbitrary amount of time in the kernel code. The ptrace vulnerability
could be used by local users to gain root privilege, the symlink
vulnerability could result in a local DoS.”

Slashdotters discuss an article at Mozillazine.org describing a new calendaring project for Mozilla.

eorg’s Brave GNU World is a monthly column which is being released
simultaneously in seven languages (English, German, French, Japanese,
Spanish, Korean and Portugese) on the web and printed in the German
“Linux-Magazin” as well as the “Linux Magazine” U.K. and the “Linux
Magazine France.” This makes it the monthly column with the widest
distribution worldwide (afaik).

[Please repost and forward this article widely, wherever it
is appropriate.]


                Issue #32 of Georg's Brave GNU World, 
                the monthly GNU forum has been released.
                                                -- Georg Greve


Hi !

Issue #32 of the column is now online and it can - as usual - be found
on the GNU Webpage and its mirrors. Otherwise just follow the links at
the end of this posting.

Georg's Brave GNU World is a monthly column which is being released
simultaneously in seven languages (English, German, French, Japanese,
Spanish, Korean and Portugese) on the web and printed in the German
"Linux-Magazin" as well as the "Linux Magazine" U.K. and the "Linux
Magazine France."  This makes it the monthly column with the widest
distribution worldwide (afaik).

If you would like to receive mail about new issues directly, you can
subscribe to the "Brave GNU World" announcement mailinglist. Just
send mail to  with "subscribe" in
the body. The mailinglist is only for announcements that are related 
to the "Brave GNU World" and is of very low volume (between 1 and 2
mails a month).

The 32nd issue covers the following topics:

 * Ganesha's Projekt            [Free Software helps stopping child
                                 labor in Nepal] 

 * Logidee-tools                [more efficient creation of courses
                                 and tutorials]

 * HTMLDOC                      [making information accessible based
                                 on HTML] 

 * GNU Passwords On Card        [store your passwords in a secure way]

 * Sketch                       [Free Software vector drawing & a new
                                 way of support]


This column intends to provide a forum for all GNU maintainers,
friends and associates and I am always open to suggestions. So if  
you 

 * have questions about the GNU Project that might be of general
   interest 

 * have a GNU Project and would like to improve its profile

 * would like to start a GNU Project you are looking for people to
   start it with 

 * think something doesn't get the publicity it deserves

 * would like to see something made public

send mail to:

        "Brave GNU World "


This column is for everyone with an interest in Free Software,
so don´t hesitate to contact me if your project is under a Free
Software license and you´d like to see it introduced here.

The 32nd issue can be found at

  http://www.gnu.org/brave-gnu-world/issue-32.en.html
  [ English version ]

  http://www.gnu.org/brave-gnu-world/issue-32.de.html
  [ German version ]

  http://www.gnu.org/brave-gnu-world/issue-32.ja.html
  [ Japanese version ]

  http://www.gnu.org/brave-gnu-world/issue-31.pt.html
  [ Portugese version ]

or via the "Brave GNU World" homepage

  http://www.gnu.org/brave-gnu-world/brave-gnu-world.en.html
  [ English version ]

  http://www.gnu.org/brave-gnu-world/brave-gnu-world.fr.html
  [ French version ]

  http://www.gnu.org/brave-gnu-world/brave-gnu-world.de.html
  [ German version ]

  http://www.gnu.org/brave-gnu-world/brave-gnu-world.ja.html
  [ Japanese version ]

  http://www.gnu.org/brave-gnu-world/brave-gnu-world.es.html
  [ Spanish version ]

  http://www.gnu.org/brave-gnu-world/brave-gnu-world.ko.html
  [ Korean version ]

  http://www.gnu.org/brave-gnu-world/brave-gnu-world.pt.html
  [ Portugese version ]

That´s it for now...

Regards,

                Georg Greve

IBM developerWorks: “With the growing popularity of the Linux operating system, it’s not surprising that many IT shops are
examining what it might take to move their existing applications and development environments to Linux.
Whether you are thinking about adding Linux as an alternate deployment platform for your code or about
doing your primary development there, porting to Linux need not be difficult (particularly if your UNIX
applications are written to common standards). Here, we provide a roadmap to guide those who are
contemplating using Linux.”

ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/linux-2.4/. Intermediate diffs are available from http://www.bzimage.org.

Alan Cox writes, “The usual warnings apply. This is an initial merge against
2.4.13.The patches are still getting smaller which is good.”

2.4.13-ac2
o Cast fixes for warnings (Jeff Garzik)
o Parse MP OEM data for NUMA nodes (Martin Bligh)
o Possible fix for the X/screenblank hang on
console switching (Chris Ahna)
o Fix cycle detection on PC164/LX164 Alpha boxes (Richard Henderson,
Ivan Kokshaysky)
o Small parport update (Tim Waugh)
o Remove now unneeded PAE export (Hugh Dickins)
o PnPBIOS driver update (Thomas Hood)
o Update AGP tables and idents for SiS devices (Can-Ru Yeou)
o Merge newer SiS frame buffer drivers (Can-Ru Yeou)
| Clean up is my fault so if it broke tell me
o Fix ac97 unknown codec oops (Tachino Nobuhiro)
o Acenic + highmem patch (Dave Miller)
o Add pci tables to zoran drivers (Andrey Panin)
o Switch neomagic 256 to ac97_codec (Jeff Garzik)
o VIA audio pause fix (Thomas Sailer)
o SYS5 changelog update (Jeff Garzik)

2.4.13-ac1
o Merge with Linus 2.4.13

2.4.12-ac7
o Fix i2o_proc locking thinko (me)
o Aiptek tablet driver (Chris Atenasio)
o Update ARM920T support (Russell King)
o Add some additional PCI idents (Tim Hockin)
o Further SA1100/CERF ARM updates (Russell King)
o Reduce printk noise in amd flash driver (David Woodhouse)
o Add missing schedule()
to jffs2 gc thread (David Woodhouse)
o Add license tag to NTFS (Richard Russon)
o PCMCIA suspend fix for SA1100 ARM (Russell King)
o Increase close wait tracking for ip_conntrack (Darrell Escola)
o PCI hot plug support (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o Compaq FC driver update (Steve Cameron)
o Fix UP APIC without IOAPIC build fail (Mikael Pettersson)
o Intel 82092 PCI/PCMCIA bridge support (Arjan van de Ven)
| Based heavily on the pcmcia package
o Include buffer size extension in dhcp frames (Andreas Steinmetz)
o Fix u14f/u34f build problem (Andreas Steinmetz)
o Fix trident.c build on Alpha (me)
o Various other Alpha build fixes (Jeff Garzik)
o Simplify serverworks mtrr check (Dave Jones)
o ARM configuration updates (Russell King)
o Update natsemi driver (Jeff Garzik)
o Computone ip2 update (Michael Warfield)
o Fix CONFIG_SIMNOW (Andi Kleen)
o Update 8139too docs (Jeff Garzik)
o Make autofs4 return symlink lengths

2.4.12-ac6
o Fix more preprocessor oddments (Jean-Luc Leger)
o Fix ipconfig build (Mauricio Zambrano)
o Radeonfb updates (7500, 8500, fp support)
(Ani Joshi)
o Excalibur ARM support (Altera)
o Enable SA1110 clock scaling on Cerf (Russell King)
o ARM config updates (Russell King)
o Fix ulong->unsigned long in videodev.h (Felix von Leitner)
o Miscellaneous ARM bits (Russell King)
o Support the Promise SX6000 better (Vojtech Pavlik)
o Fix a problem with ymfpci and civctp (Pete Zaitcev)
o Update the ARM shark maintainer contact info (Alexander Schulz)
o PF_MEMALLOC kswapd death fix (Manfred Spraul)
o Remove now surplus quota ifdefs from ext3 (Andrew Morton)
o USB locking fix (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o UHCI fixes (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o Add more pegasus driver idents (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o Scanner unload race fix (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o ARM assabet updates (Russell King)
o Add additional APIC message retransmit handling (Stephen Tweedie)
o Add excalibur ARM include files (Altera)
o RTL8139CP driver (Jeff Garzik)
o Sun network driver license tags (Jeff Garzik)
o Add some new pci idents (Jeff Garzik)
o Sundance alta driver updates
o Airo driver update (Javier Achirica, Jean Tourhilles,
Jeff Garzik, Ben Reed)
o Add license tags to various sound drivers (Frank Davis)