From the Dallas Morning News: “It was while listening to a longish church sermon one Sunday in 1876 that librarian Melvil Dewey had his moment of genius. “I jumpt in my seat and came near shouting ‘Eureka!’ ” he wrote later, marveling at the “absolute simplicity” of his idea. But for many of today’s teenagers, the Dewey Decimal System sits squarely in the ash bin of history, right next to the Victrola and the Model T. Libraries, once the great storehouses of academic knowledge, are coming in second to search engines.”

CNet and others are reporting that Hewlett-Packard will buy competing computer-maker Compaq for $25 billion. Here’s the New York Times story that first reported the merger, and here’s a a Slashdot discussion on the implications.

DaemonNews has an article discussing a network setup for people who like to put some extra effort into connecting
their machines to the Internet. The goal is to build a secure client and server farm on a single IP address.

From gnome.org: “gdkxft transparently adds anti-aliased font support to GTK+-1.2. Once you have installed it, you can run any (well,
nearly any) existing GTK+ binary and see anti-aliased fonts in the GTK widgets. You don’t need to recompile GTK+ or
your applications.”

Advogato.org: “Should governments require companies discontinuing products, release the source code?

The request for the opening of the BeOS source, made me think further about the nature of computer products.

IBM appears to be discontinuing the SanFrancisco project, which is a massive Java product, for developing custom financial systems.

Palm appears to be about to discontinue BeOS.

HP is discontinuing OpenMail support (and this one’s been discussed to death).

I think there should be a legal requirement to give up the code to discontinued products.”

The Register: “A worm called x.c, which takes advantage of a buffer overflow vulnerability in the telnet daemon
program commonly used on Unix boxes, has being discovered, and security experts fear it is a
harbinger of worse to come.”

LinuxSecurity: “The telnet server which is shipped with SuSE distributions contains a
remotely exploitable buffer-overflow within its telnet option
negotiation code.
This bug is wide-spread on UN*X systems and affects almost
all implementations of telnet daemons available.”

DaemonNews: “A caveat of loadable modules is the security risk they present. They open a wide range of possibilities to a malicious superuser, and can be very hard to detect. As such, modules cannot be loaded or unloaded
at a securelevel greater than 0. If you are a system administrator and wish to have a module loaded, you can add an entry to /etc/rc.securelevel to load the module before the securelevel rises. If you are working
on the development of a module, you will probably want to run at securelevel -1, again, this can be set by editing /etc/rc.securelevel.”

“Sam ‘Criswell’ Hart tells us about a new venture by the people who created Tux Typing: Tux4Kids. “Tux4Kids is a non-profit organization dedicated to producing and promoting quality educational software released under Free-Software or other OSI Certified licenses.” Their current projects include Tux Typing (of course), Tux of Math Command, and TuxReader.” Read the rest of the report at seul.org.

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

2.4.9-ac7
o Add another 1885 ident (Leon)
o Mention G450 in the 200/400 DRI (Pavel Roskin)
o Fix non PCI aic7xxx oops (me)
o Correct centaur chip detection (Keith Owens)
o Correct Dell cable detection (me)
o Fix usb storage warning (Christoph Hellwig)
o Fix symbol clash between core and pwc (Christoph Hellwig)
o Comment out the visws (Christoph Hellwig)
o Small alpha build fix (Ricky Beam)
o NFS client update (Trond Myklebust)
o SE401 update (Jeroen Vreeken)
o Check proc/modules before querying it in (André Dahlqvist)
ver_linux
o Add hppa to unaligned list for reiserfs (Jurriaan)
o i2c Config.in fix (Christoph Hellwig)
o LVM 32/64bit sort out (Patrick Caulfield)
o Softirq update/fixups (Andrea Arcangeli)
o Add arch_init_modules hook (Keith Owens)
o Update slab cache to do LIFO handling and clean
up code somewhat (Andrea Arcangeli)
o Ethtool and alias fix (Arjan van de Ven)
o Self adjusting syscall table filler (Andrea Arcangeli)
o Configure.help typo fix (David Weinehalle)

2.4.9-ac6
o Update compiler requirements doc (me)
o Fix module count leak (I hope)
in cs46xx (me)
o Fix sx.c warnings (Christoph Hellwig)
o Fix seagate.c prototypes (Christoph Hellwig)
o Remove non-modular stuff from mod builds
and fix warnings (Christoph Hellwig)
o Fix missing return value on xirc2ps (Christoph Hellwig)
o Fix atmtcp MODULE_LICENSE (Christoph Hellwig)
o Remove various unused code (Christoph Hellwig)
o Switch drivers/fc4 to use module_init (Christoph Hellwig)
o Config file fixes (Christoph Hellwig)
o Fix AX.25 digipeat crash (Thomas Osterried)
o DECNET update (Steven Whitehouse)
o Fix UNUSUAL_DEV entry for eUSB SmartMedia (Andries Brouwer)
o Remove spare maxinefb setup (Paul Mundt)
o Add USB MODULE_LICENSE tags (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o Update the irq fix for the i810 audio based
on further analysis by Doug Ledford (me)
o make rpm target bug-fixes (Eli Carter)
o Fix missing export-objs in acpi (Keith Owens)
o VIA ide update (support 82c576, other small (Vojtech Pavlik)
fixes)
o Fix tulip bug when using MWI experimental bits (Jeff Garzik)
o Add MODULE_LICENSE tags to telephony (Robert Love)
o Add MODULE_LICENSE tags to drivers/video (Robert Love)
o Fix z2ram tag (Robert Love)
o Ask for 255 bytes of header on scsi pages (Matt Dharm)
| Lots of USB crap can’t even get truncating right
o Fix ver_linux for e2fsprogs 1.23 (Albert Cranford)
o Add MODULE_LICENSE tags to zorro (Robert Love)
o Make __module_license static (Keith Owens)
o Merge some of the PPC64 submission (Peter Bergner, Anton Blanchard,
Mike Corrigan, Dave Engebretsen,
Tom Gall, Todd Inglett, Paul Mackerras,
Pat McCarthy, Steve Munroe, Don Reed,
and Al Trautman)
| I dropped some config bits to keep stuff simpler
| and a few files that definitely didnt follow CodingStyle
o Merge updated gdth scsi raid driver (Achim Leubner)
o Remove escaped debug code from ni5010 (Frank Davies)