“Many developers use the excellent OpenSSH as a secure, encrypted replacement for the venerable
telnet and rsh commands. One of OpenSSH’s more intriguing features is its ability to authenticate users using
the RSA and DSA authentication protocols, which are based upon a pair of complementary numerical “keys”.
One of the main appeals of RSA and DSA authentication is the promise of being able to establish connections
to remote systems without supplying a password. In this second article, Daniel [Robbins] introduces ssh-agent (a
private key cache) and keychain, a special bash script designed to make key-based authentication
incredibly convenient and flexible.” Read the article at IBM developerWorks.

– By Grant Gross –

One of the lingering questions since Hewlett-Packard announced a week ago that it plans to buy rival Compaq for $25 billion has been: What happens to Open Source projects that Compaq has participated in? HP’s answer so far: It’s too early to say.

Although you have to dig for it, Compaq lists several Open Source projects it supports on its Linux@Compaq Web pages. Among the Open Source projects Compaq lists as supporting are a handful of driver projects, the Open Source Database Benchmark project, Single System Image Clusters for Linux, and Solaris-compatible Thread Library. Most of those projects, hosted at SourceForge.net, have about a half dozen developers working on each of them.

HP has its own list of Open Source projects supported, including SAMBA, Apache, and Squid. In December, HP hired prominent Open Source advocate Bruce Perens as a strategic advisor of the company’s Open Source initiatives. Perens was unavailable to comment on this story.

But Dave Berman, manager of corporate/HP Labs media relations, hints that the merging companies have more to worry about right now. “It’s really premature to discuss what happens with Compaq open source projects once the merger is complete,” he writes, in response to a question from NewsForge. “The merger has just been announced and we expect it to close in the first half of next year.”

Avatar writes: “E3D has a little teaser up for a project we have been watching. The.Vertex.Project has preliminary web page
up, but no details. So what is it? Well, that wouldn’t be any fun now
would it? Instead, we are holding a contest to see who can guess just what it is all about. The
winner will be awarded a copy of Tribes 2, Soldier of Fortune, and Shogo:MAD,
all which are for Linux. So, take a look at the page and make you guess
here. A drawing from all the winning entries will be done on 21st of this month.”

Anonymous Reader writes: “It has only been about a month. That’s when a bipartisan bill introduced in the House of Representatives by Chris Cannon and Rick Boucher was introduced to free up the air surrounding Online music. Now a new bill has been introduced in the Senate by Senator Fritz Hollings that does the opposite, looking to further restrict “Fair Use” rights of consumers by forcing all electronic devices and PCs to include embedded copyright restriction technology.

http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2001/sssca.html“

Wired: “Microsoft’s Xbox gaming console will be released just in time for the holidays. But it will probably be impossible to get one unless it is pre-ordered. Retailers are taking advance orders, but Microsoft is forcing customers to also pay hundreds of dollars for extra games and hardware.”

CNET: “Known as DivX, the technology has until now has been most closely associated with growing piracy of Hollywood
movies on the Internet. But DivXNetworks, the company behind the format, is determined to put its bootleg past
behind it and become a viable purveyor of legal downloads and full-blown video-on-demand services.

That ambitious goal inched a step closer to reality last week when alternative film distributor Strand Releasing said it
had licensed the DivX Open Video System, becoming the first commercial partner to use its video-compression format
for secure DivX downloads.”

The Register: “In an email circulated to Bluetooth SIG members, Maloney now explains: “Unfortunately, the reporter
did not grasp that I was addressing a common mis-perception [sic] that the Bluetooth specification
competes with 802.11b as a wireless networking technology (Bluetooth wireless is not a WLAN). Intel
believes the Bluetooth specification and 802.11b are complementary technologies that address
different wireless needs and will coexist in many environments).”

Computer News Daily: “For more than 60 years, the revered ideology of HP’s late founders, William Hewlett and David
Packard, was the management mantra that helped define Silicon Valley. But like the Bible, the
philosophy that stresses treating employees like one happy family has been subject to conflicting
interpretations.”

Michael Robinson writes: “On September 7, Lutris pulled their support for Enterprise Enhydra, citing Sun Microsystems’
refusal to accomodate an Open Source license for J2EE. An announcement at the site states: ‘We attempted for
more than a year to get an Open Source compatible license for
J2EE but have not been successful in this regard. While others
in the Open Source community may find violating the J2EE license
an acceptable risk, as a company Lutris has a responsibility to
protect its assets. We hope you understand the difficulty we
had in coming to this conclusion.’ This is unfortunate, but should not come as much of a surprise in
light of Sun’s historical ambivalence toward the Open Source
community.”

“Mainly a large sync with Alan (more to come), although some tulip owners
will probably like the erratum workaround even more.”

Linux 2.4.10-pre7
From: Linus Torvalds 
To: Kernel Mailing List 
Date: Sun, 9 Sep 2001 19:38:57 -0700 (PDT)


Mainly a large sync with Alan (more to come), although some tulip owners
will probably like the erratum workaround even more..

                 Linus

----

pre7:
 - Alan Cox: big driver/mips sync
 - Andries Brouwer, Christoph Hellwig: more gendisk fixups
 - Tobias Ringstrom: tulip driver workaround for DC21143 erratum

pre6:
 - Jens Axboe: remove trivially dead io_request_lock usage
 - Andrea Arcangeli: softirq cleanup and ARM fixes. Slab cleanups
 - Christoph Hellwig: gendisk handling helper functions/cleanups
 - Nikita Danilov: reiserfs dead code pruning
 - Anton Altaparmakov: NTFS update to 1.1.18
 - firestream network driver: patch reverted on authors request
 - NIIBE Yutaka: SH architecture update
 - Paul Mackerras: PPC cleanups, PPC8xx update.
 - me: reverse broken bootdata allocation patch that went into pre5

pre5:
 - Merge with Alan
 - Trond Myklebust: NFS fixes - kmap and root inode special case
 - Al Viro: more superblock cleanups, inode leak in rd.c, minix
   directories in page cache
 - Paul Mackerras: clean up rubbish from sl82c105.c
 - Neil Brown: md/raid cleanups, NFS filehandles
 - Johannes Erdfelt: USB update (usb-2.0 support, visor fix, Clie fix,
   pl2303 driver update)
 - David Miller: sparc and net update
 - Eric Biederman: simplify and correct bootdata allocation - don't
   overwrite ramdisks
 - Tim Waugh: support multiple SuperIO devices, parport doc updates

pre4:
 - Hugh Dickins: swapoff cleanups and speedups
 - Matthew Dharm: USB storage update
 - Keith Owens: Makefile fixes
 - Tom Rini: MPC8xx build fix
 - Nikita Danilov: reiserfs update
 - Jakub Jelinek: ELF loader fix for ET_DYN
 - Andrew Morton: reparent_to_init() for kernel threads
 - Christoph Hellwig: VxFS and SysV updates, vfs_permission fix

pre3:
 - Johannes Erdfelt, Oliver Neukum: USB printer driver race fix
 - John Byrne: fix stupid i386-SMP irq stack layout bug
 - Andreas Bombe, me: yenta IO window fix
 - Neil Brown: raid1 buffer state fix
 - David Miller, Paul Mackerras: fix up sparc and ppc respectively for kmap/kbd_rate
 - Matija Nalis: umsdos fixes, and make it possible to boot up with umsdos
 - Francois Romieu: fix bugs in dscc4 driver
 - Andy Grover: new PCI config space access functions (eventually for ACPI)
 - Albert Cranford: fix incorrect e2fsprog data from ver_linux script
 - Dave Jones: re-sync x86 setup code, fix macsonic kmalloc use
 - Johannes Erdfelt: remove obsolete plusb USB driver
 - Andries Brouwer: fix USB compact flash version info, add blksize ioctls

pre2:
 - Al Viro: block device cleanups
 - Marcelo Tosatti: make bounce buffer allocations more robust (it's ok
   for them to do IO, just not cause recursive bounce IO. So allow them)
 - Anton Altaparmakov: NTFS update (1.1.17)
 - Paul Mackerras: PPC update (big re-org)
 - Petko Manolov: USB pegasus driver fixes
 - David Miller: networking and sparc updates
 - Trond Myklebust: Export atomic_dec_and_lock
 - OGAWA Hirofumi: find and fix umsdos "filldir" users that were broken
   by the 64-bit-cleanups. Fix msdos warnings.
 - Al Viro: superblock handling cleanups and race fixes
 - Johannes Erdfelt++: USB updates

pre1:
 - Jeff Hartmann: DRM AGP/alpha cleanups
 - Ben LaHaise: highmem user pagecopy/clear optimization
 - Vojtech Pavlik: VIA IDE driver update
 - Herbert Xu: make cramfs work with HIGHMEM pages
 - David Fennell: awe32 ram size detection improvement
 - Istvan Varadi: umsdos EMD filename bug fix
 - Keith Owens: make min/max work for pointers too
 - Jan Kara: quota initialization fix
 - Brad Hards: Kaweth USB driver update (enable, and fix endianness)
 - Ralf Baechle: MIPS updates
 - David Gibson: airport driver update
 - Rogier Wolff: firestream ATM driver multi-phy support
 - Daniel Phillips: swap read page referenced set - avoid swap thrashing