Tomorrow, handheld maker Palm, Inc. is expected to announce its first steps on the road to converting its operating system for use on ARM-based processors. The company will make public an agreement with chipmakers Intel, Motorola, Texas Instruments, and ARM Holdings to assist with the transistion. Current Palm-based handhelds use Motorola’s Dragonball processors; Palm announced last winter that its future product line would center around ARM technology. Shareholders don’t appear to be shivering with anticipation, shares of PALM were down 19 cents to 5.19 at the time this NewsVac brief was filed.

Fujitsu Siemens today announced that its Primepower 2000 Unix server was available for purchase. The new server is based on 563MHz Sparc64 processors, recently captured the top spot on a SAP R/3 benchmark test, and the company says that its server runs 1.8 times fater than its nearest (unnamed) competitor when combined with Oracle 8.1.7. The Primepower 2000 can be yours for around £5 million (about $7.1 million USD). Full story at The Register.

The Register reports on an item printed yesterday in Sunday Business, a UK newspaper that, as one might assume from its name, is a newspaper about business which is published on Sunday. According to (an unsourced) report in that paper, IBM chief Lou Gerstner will step down from his post in March 2002. Waiting in the wings to assume the helm of Big Blue is Sam Palmisano, currently the company’s COO.

MIMEDefang is a MIME mail scanner designed to run on Linux or UNIX
systems, and intended mainly to protect Windows e-mail clients from
mail-borne viruses. It can, however, be used for many other purposes,
such as restricting access to certain e-mail addresses to specific mail
relays, diverting large attachments to a Web server instead of keeping
them in the message, and so on. MIMEDefang requires Sendmail 8.11 or 8.12.

MIMEDefang is available from:

        http://www.roaringpenguin.com/mimedefang

and is released under the GNU General Public License.

Changes since Version 1.2:

o Addition of "$Subject" variable in filter
o "append_boilerplate" action to add boilerplate text to outgoing mail
o "-f filter -test" options to test filters for syntactic correctness
o Better autoconf script which should work with Sendmail 8.12
o Many other minor fixes and improvements

Doug Loss writes “The latest in a fortnightly series of reports on the use of Linux in education (primarily below university level). Read Here.”

The Mape Global Development Team is proud to announce first release
of the Modular APplication Engine (MAPE). The goal of this OpenSource
system (licensed GPL/LGPL) is to provide capabilities to write multi-
tier applications in multiple programming languages, use different
GUIs on clients and access multiple database systems.

 Whole applications are stored in MAPE system catalog which is stored
 in a supported SQL database  server.   XML  is  used  for  application 
 description - how the application should look and what it should do. 
 Applications are running on the server,  but  some  parts  can run the 
 client too.


Where the thing can be found - http://mape.jcu.cz.


What can do MAPE now:

   * use PostgreSQL for its system catalog location
   * access PostgreSQL, InterBase, ODBC and DB2 data sources for
     application data
   * use GTK+ as a GUI toolkit on clients
   * write applications as functions in any language that can create a
     shared library
   * write applications as Tcl scripts
   * use SQL queries for retrieving/storing application data


 What you can expect in the future:

   * use more DB servers - Oracle, MySQL, ...
   * use more GUI toolkits - Qt, text-ones, HTML (so you can use your 
     Web browser as a client), ...
   * use more scripting languages for writing applications - Python, 
     Perl, ...
   * client implementation in Java
   * XML-RPC support

Dump/retore utilities have reached version 0.4b23. The ‘dump’ command will examine files within a filesystem, determine what needs to be backed up, and then copies those files to a target disk, CD-ROM, or other backup utility of your choice. The ‘restore’ command performs the opposite function of ‘dump’ and can restore single files, directory substrees, or full filesystems depending on your needs and configuration. Full information on the product’s SourceForge page.

cgipasswd is a tool that allows users to change their login password via a user-friendly Web interface. Read on for the full announcement.

"cgipasswd" allows users to change their password by a web interface.

supported systems:

  cgipasswd has been tested with Debian GNU/Linux (potato and woody) and
  Solaris 7 and should work on other Un*ces with pam support. Systems without 
  pam support are only supported if they use the standard password file 
  location /etc/passwd /etc/shadow and the standard crypt function to encrypt 
  the password.

features:

+ an accessdb against brute force attacks. Users with too many invalid tries
  can be locked.

+ The minimum and maximum uid can be set in the configuration file, so you can 
  specify a range of uid's that are allowed to use cgipasswd.

+ you can specify html files with a few PHP extensions for the login screen 
  and error messages.

+ you can use a redirect for the error messages, instead of plain html files.

cgipasswd is available at:

http://www.stafwag.f2s.com/cgipasswd

From Dr. Dobb’s TechNetCast: “The release of Linux 2.4, the downturn in the
tech economy and Microsoft’s .NET strategy
form the backdrop for our conversations with
Ted Ts’o and Jon “maddog” Hall on the state of
Linux ten years after its initial release.” The interview was taped on July 19 at USENIX 2001. Available in RealPlayer or streaming MP3 formats.

UnixReview takes a look at Shaffer Solutions’ AccessNFS, a filesystem and product suite that enables multi-platform file sharing integration between Linux, Unix and the various flavors of Windows. Yes, Samba will do the trick; AccessNFS, however, bills itself as a set of toolls “allowing data conversion from a single point instead of installing the product on multiple machines,” as required by Samba. While noting that AccessNFS could benefit from better documentation, UnixReview says the product “lets Linux shine.”