Posted at LinuxSecurity.com: “CERT released an advisory that details a number of vulnerabilities as
found in a variety of different LDAP implementations. The results of
these tests showed one vulnerability in OpenLDAP with slapd not
handling packets with certain invalid fields. A malicious attacker
could craft such invalid packets, resulting in a denial of service
attack on the affected server.”

From CNet: “Kids — they grow up so fast.

It was 10 years ago this month that a 21-year-old Linus Torvalds sent an e-mail to the
open-source software community saying an experimental version of the Linux kernel, the core
technology that would end up embodied in Linux operating systems, was up and running.”

From PR Newswire: The response that Cybernet has
received to the recent NetMAX Linux-based Internet Appliance Software
upgrade promotion has been gratifying, moving NetMAX rapidly towards a pure
web sales and support system model.
To continue support for the product line Cybernet is releasing the new
NetMAX 3.2 products and 3.2 product upgrades at LinuxWorld in San Francisco,
August 28-30. At LinuxWorld, Cybernet will also give over 1500 promotional
units of NetMAX 3.0 and 3.1 server and firewall products away to attendees.

Slashdot readers offer their opinions on this question: “My question for all you
Slashdotters out there is this: I would like to ‘reward’ the Cygwin [Free Software developers] for giving
me a great product that fits my needs, but aside from an ‘attaboy’ email, I don’t
see how I could compensate them, preferrably financially. I don’t have any coding
skills of significance, and am not inclined to learn, I’d just like a way to let them
know that I like what they’ve done. In the non-free (as in beer) software world, I
would buy their next release. Is there any way to financially help them along?
Should I just mail them a check?”

Network World Fusion follows up on reports that Red Hat has announced an e-commerce suite of products and services to help businesses build and manage e-commerce applications and sites.

ZDNet has a short item noting that the Ogg Vorbis project, intended to create a completely
royalty-free music technology to compete with the MP3 format, has released another
test version of its software.

ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/2.4/. Intermediate diffs are available from http://www.bzimage.org. “This is a fairly experimental -ac so please treat it with care,” Cox writes.

2.4.8-ac5
o Next batch of IDE driver updates (Andre Hedrick)
| qd6580 driver becomes a qd65xx driver
| 80pin cable detect for serverworks on Dell
| Mode5 on SIS chipsets
o Handle ARM mmap were FIRST_USER_PGD_NR is not
zero (Russell King)
o Make the sl82c105.c code common between ARM
and PPC (Paul Mackerras)
o Update cisco hdlc handling in the isdn layer (Bjoern Zeeb)
o Add called party number to isdn tty emulation (Jan Oberlaender,
Kai Germaschewski)
o Eicon warning fix (Kai Germaschewski)
o Tiny agp cleanup in severworks code (Mike Harris)
o Switch to 2.4.8 nr_free_buffer_pages (Rik van Riel)
o Change bootmem bitmap setup (Rik van Riel)
o Unlazy the queue movement when we touch
inactive cache pages (VM balance assumed this)
(Rik van Riel)
o Update the orinoco drivers (David Gibson)
o Update natsemi driver (experimentally anyway)
(Tim Hockin)
o Update hpt366 blacklists (Kevin Fleming)
o Reclaim buffer cache into inactive list when
it is too large (Rik van Riel)
o Documentation tidy ups (Steven Cole)
o Switch map_user_kiobuf to use down_read (Ben LaHaise)

2.4.8-ac4
o ADFS date/time computation fix (Russell King)
o Add ALS120 ident to ns558 joystick (Filip Van Raemdonck)
o Make Reiserfs endian and alignment safe (Jeff Mahoney)
| Fixes IA64 indirect alignment, S390 alignment
| Big endian
| Update inode generator
o Enable input drivers on ARM (Russell King)
o Add intermezzo file system kernel side (Peter Braam and co)
o First blocks of ppc64 merge (Paul Mackerras, Anton Blanchard,
Tom Gall and the IBM PPC 64 team)
o Fix return value bug in mac nvram driver

o Make oom killer kill all threads of a set (Eric Lammerts)

Will that be paper or plastic? In the latest edition of Debian Weekly News, we learn that German supermarket chain Globus has converted its 400-computer cash desk system to Debian. Also: How to create Debian bootable business card images, the Debian Description Translation server, and woody for the IBM S/390.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2001/19/
Debian Weekly News - August 14th, 2001
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                    
XFree86 4.1 hits unstable.
XFree86[1] 4.1.0-1[2] hit unstable last week, with an impressive 295
line long changelog, so we won't try to summarize everything here. It
supports ATI PCI cards on SPARC and includes a VMWare
driver. Unfortunately, DRI support (except 3Dfx) was out of sync with
the kernel tree, which has been fixed in the latest revision of the
Linux kernel. Last Friday, 4.1.0-2[3] entered the archives as well,
which fixes even more bugs.

It's not just for Web serving any more!
The Debian Multimedia Distribution was announced on the debian-news
mailing list by Martin[4] "Joey" Schulze. You can find the official
DeMuDi Web page at http://www.demudi.org/[5].

Here's my card... 
Jim Westveer was kind enough to share a script for creating Debian
bootable[6] business card images. About 50 MB fit on such a CDROM, so
there is not much space so use. This script copies the Debian boot
floppies onto the image, so that they can be used for an easy
installation and rescue-system. Share and enjoy!

Debian on the cash desk?
It's true. The German "Lebensmittelzeitung" has reported[7] (German
only) that Globus[8], a German supermarket chain, converted about 480
computers in their cash desk system to Debian GNU/Linux. The entire
system is designed so that two cashiers can share one computer (a
486/25MHz is used most of the time). After positive experiences they
now want to shift more functions to Linux, and also want to install an
automatic installation feature in order to automatically push new
functions or other updates to their cash desk systems on a nightly
basis.

Multilingual Debian.  
Michael Bramer has announced[9] the start of the Debian Description
Translation Server, a project to translate all package descriptions
into languages other than English. Currently German, French, Italian
and Brasilian Portuguese are supported (others may follow on
demand). The project was started 11 weeks ago with only German, and
the other languages started 3-4 weeks ago. The German translation
group has already translated 20% of all package descriptions from
sid/main/binary-i386. The other language translations are in the
beginning stages and need more help.

Debian for the professional desktop?
The German site Pro-Linux has a report[10] (German only) about a thin
client Linux Desktop solution.  Produced by Natural[11] Computing GmbH
the system consists of Debian GNU/Linux which is tailored in size and
functionality in order to comply the requirements of an office
desktop. They have also added additional software like StarOffice and
other typical desktop applications. The natural[12].DESKTOP is
designed to fit the needs of an office desktop system in a
heterogeneous network for use in offices and governmental
environments.

OpenOffice for Debian.
Another effort was started[13] to get OpenOffice packaged for
Debian. Fetching a current source snapshot already eats up more than
400MB. Since it's a very large package more than one person should
work on it. Jan-Hendrik Palic is currently trying to form a group of
interested people so one day we can review a couple of openoffice*.deb
files. It is said, though, that the build system for OpenOffice is a
complete mess so there is a lot work to be done first.

S/390 update.
Stefan Gybas has posted a status[14] report about S/390 for woody. All
required and important packages are built, tested on 5 different
systems and even installed into the archive. Some packages like strace
and gdb are currently missing, however, proper patches are available
for both of them, so they should be included soon. Didn't you always
want to run XFree86 on your S/390? There are even patches for XFree86
4.1 sent to the maintainer.

News about Woody's architectures.
Alpha boot-floppies have made much progress the last few days. A major
obstacle for actually uploading them is that the ash in the archive
was severely broken, and the later one didn't build. This seems to be
fixed now. Boot-floppies for mips and mipsel also need some more days
of development and testing.  However, it looks like the porters are
ready for uploading them.  However, documentation is a serious issue
since it doesn't cover these architectures yet.

Installing Debian with only 4 MB RAM.
Jens Scheidtmann has written a mini-HOWTO[15] describing how one can
install Debian GNU/Linux on a machine with only 4 MB of RAM. Older
computers may not be suited for programming or playing games, but
still fit the requirements for a lightwind text terminal. The
bootstrapping process is a bit more complicated as a normal install of
Debian, but it is still doable.

Want to translate?
We're always looking for more volunteers to help translate DWN into
more languages. If you're interested, drop us a line and we'll put you
in the loop.

Help us out!
If you have some news you'd like to see covered in DWN, don't wait
until the issue comes out and complain that we missed it - send us an
email with your news so we'll be sure to get it in the next issue. We
try to keep up with all the happenings in the wide world of Debian,
but it's not easy. Send your news, comments and nude photos to
dwn[16]@debian.org.

New packages

  apt-dpkg-ref[17] -- APT, Dpkg Quick Reference sheet
  cpuburn[18] -- a collection of programs to put heavy load on cpu
  kontour[19] -- a vector graphics tool for the KDE Office Suite
  linuxcookbook[20] -- Tips and techniques to help the busy modern
        computer user
  music123[21] -- A command-line shell for sound-file players
  nqxml[22] -- pure Ruby implementation of a non-validating XML
        processor

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
References
  1. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/xserver-xfree86.html
  2. http://incoming.debian.org/DONE/xfree86_4.1.0-1_i386.changes
  3. http://incoming.debian.org/DONE/xfree86_4.1.0-2_i386.changes
  4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-news-01/msg00030.html
  5. http://www.demudi.org/
  6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-cd-0108/msg00002.html
  7. http://www.lz-net.de/news/webtechnews/pages/show.prl?params=recent=1&type=3&id=23136
  8. http://www.globus.net/
  9. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2001/debian-devel-announce-200108/msg00003.html
  10. http://www.pro-linux.de/news/2001/3339.html
  11. http://www.natural-computing.de/
  12. http://www.natural-computing.de/sites/nd_wptext.html
  13. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2001/debian-devel-200108/msg00473.html
  14. http://lists.debian.org/debian-s390/2001/debian-s390-200108/msg00000.html
  15. http://7thguard.net/files/DebianHOWTO.txt
  16. mailto:dwn@debian.org
  17. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/doc/apt-dpkg-ref.html
  18. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/misc/cpuburn.html
  19. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/graphics/kontour.html
  20. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/doc/linuxcookbook.html
  21. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/sound/music123.html
  22. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/interpreters/nqxml.html

-- 
Debian Weekly News is edited by 
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier, Jean-Christophe Helary and Tollef Fog Heen

You can subscribed to Debian Weekly News by visiting the Debian Mailing List Subscription page.

From a press release at PR Newswire: “Linux is making major inroads
as a platform for the future, and is well positioned to continue to gain
market share at the expense of other platforms. Results from a soon-to-be-
published IDC survey of more than 800 North America and Western Europe server
platform decision makers indicate that end customer spending on Linux-related
hardware, software, services, and staffing will grow to 9% of the IT budget in
2002, up from only 3% in 1999.”

SecurityFocus: “A Dutch cryptographer who claims to have broken Intel Corp.’s
encryption system for digital video says he will not publish his results because he fears being
prosecuted or sued under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Niels Ferguson announced last weekend that he has successfully defeated the High-bandwidth
Digital Content Protection (HDCP) specification, an encryption and authentication system for the
DVI interface used to connect digital cameras, high-definition televisions, cable boxes and video
disks players.”