“Issue #30 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.”

Issue #30 of Georg's Brave GNU World, the monthly GNU forum has been released.
Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 20:41:34 +0200
From: "Georg C. F. Greve" 
To: Brave GNU World Announcement Mailinglist ,  GNU Announce ,  "comp.os.linux.announce Moderator" 


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


                 Issue #30 of Georg's Brave GNU World, 
                the monthly GNU forum has been released.
                                                 -- Georg Greve


Hi !

Issue #30 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 30th issue covers the following topics:

 * TINY                  [ a minimal GNU/Linux distribution (not only)
                          for evolving countries ]

 * GNU TeXmacs           [ LaTeX grade WYSIWYG text processing ]

 * CD-ROM Control       [ a little applet to control your CD-ROM ]

 * Saxogram             [ for everyone having to translate Latin... ]

 * GNU libiconv          [ the GNU character conversion set library ]

 * Mozart/Oz             [ a very special development platform ]

 * Free Software and 3D [ why is there not a whole lot of Free 3D software? ]

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 30th issue can be found at

  http://www.gnu.org/brave-gnu-world/issue-30.en.html
  [ English version ]

  http://www.gnu.org/brave-gnu-world/issue-30.fr.html
  [ French version ]

  http://www.gnu.org/brave-gnu-world/issue-30.de.html
  [ German version ]

  http://www.gnu.org/brave-gnu-world/issue-30.ja.html
  [ Japanese version ]

  http://www.gnu.org/brave-gnu-world/issue-30.es.html
  [ Spanish version ]

  http://www.gnu.org/brave-gnu-world/issue-30.ko.html
  [ Korean version ]

  http://www.gnu.org/brave-gnu-world/issue-30.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

– by Tina Gasperson –
Penguin Computing has laid off about 25% of its staff across the board, according to Scott Weinbrandt, vice president of sales and marketing at the San Francisco Linux solutions seller. “We are going through restructuring to support our business model,” says Weinbrandt.As of last Friday, the company laid off 25 people in an effort, says Weinbrandt, to refine its operations and stay true to the company vision to provide built-to-order Linux-based servers, and to provide customized software configurations for the Web, for applications, and for database servers. Weinbrandt claims that the company is growing, despite the cutbacks.

Penguin recently announced a partnership with Scyld Computing Corporation, using Scyld’s Beowulf Cluster OS, in which the Linux-based distribution is placed on Penguin’s custom hardware configurations. Tom Quinn, the director of operations at Scyld, says there’s an informal relationship whereby Penguin is “bidding and selling systems with our product. They provide integration and support.” Quinn was unaware of the layoffs at Penguin. “They’ve been very active lately,” he says.

Penguin wants to increase its focus on custom applications, and according to Weinbrandt, is completing the second phase of moving out of the server manufacturing business. Instead of putting the machines together in-house, the company is outsourcing the manufacturing to NexTrend Technology, an OEM-services company based in Fremont, California. “We started this transition 12 months back,” says Weinbrandt. “But we are definitely still in the hardware business.”

Weinbrandt says that by the end of this month, Penguin should be releasing at least one or two new Intel-based hardware configurations. He sounds optimistic about the future of the company, but refused to comment in response to a question about whether Penguin Computing executives had been asked to take pay cuts as part of the company’s refining and restructuring.

So what exactly is the deal with the month of August and all these technological milestones? We’ve had the 20th anniversary of the personal computer, and we’re about to see Linux turn 10. And the World Wide Web, the protocol that made the economy boom for a couple of years, celebrated its tenth anniversary on August 6. The birth of the computer and the Web are celebrated in this article at BBC News.

A Japanese government agency has been implicated in an attempt to break into the computers of a New Zealand medical research institute. While not clearly stated, the NZOOM report on the matter hints at an allegation of state-sanctioned industrial espionage against Japan. As The Register points out in their coverage of this story, NZOOM doesn’t actually mention the form of the attack, or even raise the possibility that the attack may have been generated by a zombie agent or compromised server. Was the NZOOM story nothing more than a “sexy” angle to promote a new government computer security agency?

“Interested in keeping up to date with the Kernel, KDE, Evolution or Nautilus ? The third release of MandrakeFreq is for you!”

MandrakeFreq is intended for power users who like to stay on the "cutting edge" and run the latest software on their Mandrake Linux
system. The MandrakeFreq distributions are tested, but are not "officially" supported by MandrakeSoft as it may contain beta software
with unresolved bugs. This third release is based on Mandrake Linux 8.0 and features, among other things, the 2.4.6 version of the Kernel. 

MandrakeFreq #3 overview:
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/mandrakefreq.php3

To purchase a MandrakeFreq CD, please visit the MandrakeStore at :
http://www.mandrakestore.com

To download MandrakeFreq, please go through our FTP mirrors :
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/ftp.php3#freq

Major points of discussion on the kernel-dev mailing list this pas week included the status of SMP on AMD computer systems, SCSI disk support, new kernel build tools, and the statise of the Tulip driver. Editor Zack Brown takes a well-deserved vacation, so enjoy what will likely be the only edition of Kernel Traffic posted this month. At kt.zork.net.

“Alban Hertroys found a buffer overflow in Window Maker (a popular window
manager for X). The code that handles titles in the window list menu did
not check the length of the title when copying it to a buffer. Since
applications will set the title using untrusted data (for example web
browsers will set the title of their window to the title of the web-page
being shown) this could be exploited remotely.” Details posted at Linux Weekly News.

The latest kernel prepatch is now available from kernel.org or from your closest/favorite mirror site. This is a minor update, featuring driver merges and one nfsd tweak; changelog below.

pre2:
 - me: fix forgotten nfsd usage of filldir off_t -> loff_t change
 - Alan Cox: more driver merges

pre1:
 - Rui Sousa: emu10k1 module fixes, remove joystick part.
 - Alan Cox: driver merges
 - Andrea Arkangeli: alpha updates
 - David Woodhouse: up_and_exit -> complete_and_exit
 - David Miller: sparc and network update
 - Andrew Morton: update 3c59x driver
 - Neil Brown: NFS export VFAT, knfsd cleanups, raid fixes
 - Ben Collins: ieee1394 updates
 - Paul Mackerras: PPC update
 - me: make sure we don't lose position bits in "filldir()"

FreeOS.com reviews Gaim, the Open Source clone of AOL’s Instant Messenger, calling it “…a perfect demonstration of Open Source at its best.” Ultimately, says the writer, the little clone that could is actually far better than the original software produced by America Online.

LinuxDevices offers a sneak preview of IBM’s TechMobile, a Ford Explorer outfitted with two computers that will demonstrate the advanced capabilities of Big Blue’s Linux and Java technologies. The public will be able to get a closer look at the TechMobile next week, at LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco.