Linux World reviews “Programming Linux: A Beginner’s Guide”, calling the book “suitable” for users new to Linux interested in beginning to learn about programming.

Frank writes, “New project: SBLIM, the Standards Based Linux Instrumentation for Manageability, helps make GNU/Linux systems easier to manage. It does this by enabling GNU/Linux for WBEM (Web Based Enterprise Management), which is a set of standards defined by the DMTF and fostered by the WBEMsource initiative. This project is licensed under the Common Public License.
SBLIM Project at IBM.com.”

LinuxPR: “he Clara OCR Project is proud to announce the availability of its new version
0.9.7, associated with a new web site and mailing lists.

Clara OCR is an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program. It features both a
powerful GUI for the X Window System, and a web interface. The web interface is
able to collect revision efforts from the Internet, using a simple revision model.

Clara OCR is intended to be used in the cooperative optical recognition of old
books. It tries to facilitate fine-tuning, so an optical recognition project is enabled
to invest resources in tuning the OCR, in order to achieve better recognition
results for one specific book, and reduce the overall revision cost.”

Linux kernel 2.4.7-pre7 has been released. kernel.org and your nearest mirror site should have the latest update by now.

-pre7:
                  - Andreas Dilger: various ext2 cleanups
                  - Richard Gooch: devfs update
                  - Johannes Erdfelt: USB updates
                  - Alan Cox: merges
                  - David Miller: fix SMP pktsched bootup deadlock (CONFIG_NET_SCHED)
                  - Roman Zippel: AFFS update
                  - Anton Altaparmakov: NTFS update
                  - me: fix races in vfork() (semaphores are not good completion handlers)
                  - Jeff Garzik: net driver updates, sysvfs update

FlightGear version 0.7.8 (source code release) is now available for
download from http://www.flightgear.org.

FlightGear is a free, open-source flight simulator project. The
source code is licensed under the GPL.

There is a new 0.7.8 version of the base package that corresponds with
this new release.  You must have this new base package to go along
with the 0.7.8 source code.

Other prerequisites if building from source:

  - You must have plib version 1.4.0 or newer (http://plib.sf.net)
    installed before building both SimGear and FlightGear.

  - You must have SimGear-0.0.16 (www.simgear.org) installed before
    building FlightGear-0.7.8

For more information on the FlightGear project, please visit the
Flight Gear web page at:

    http://www.flightgear.org

GNU MDK 0.3.5 has been released. It is available from
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mdk/ and mirrors of that site (see list of
mirror sites at http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html) [0]. GNU MDK provides a simulator of D. Knuth’s MIX computer, and a
development environment to write, run and debug MIXAL programs on it.

New in this release:

** In gmixvm, when the mouse pointer is over a MIXAL source line, the
   status bar shows the value of the variables appearing in this line.

** The current symbol table can be displayed, in gmixvm, using the menu
   command Debug->Symbols...

** Bug fix: the load, compile and run file dialogs now get the correct
   filename under linux.

** Bug fix: fonts used by gmixvm are now always correctly saved.

** Bug fix: 'psym' now works correctly in gmixvm.

** Bug fix: the symbol table for a MIX file is now correctly recovered
   both in gmixvm and mixvm (negative values where incorrectly
   converted to a positive value).


Visit the MDK home page at http://www.gnu.org/software/mdk/mdk.html.

Bug reports should go to bug-gnu-mdk@gnu.org.

Enjoy!


[0] GNU MDK source and binary packages can also be downloaded from
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=13897&release_id=35894

If you’ve been wondering if those ballyhooed music CDs with copy protection would ever make it to your local music merchant, wonder no more. According to digital rights vendor Macrovision, the disks with that new technology have been shipping to selected test markets for the past four to six months. It will probably be hard to tell what disks have the new technology, since none of the disks released so far identify themselves as copy-protected, If that track you just ripped to disk contains plenty of clicking and popping sounds, it’s most likely protected. Full story at CNET News.com.

Info World reports on Hewlett-Packard’s latest patent for something the company likes to call “atomic pixie dust.” It’s a method (well, just a concept at this point) to hook up molecular-sized computers to the real world.

From an AP report at CNN: “Critics fear
proposed changes to the way the
government protects the nation’s
technology backbone from terrorism
could bog down the process and
remove the accountability of having
a single person in charge.

A draft executive order from President
Bush, obtained by The Associated
Press, would abolish the high-profile
post of security chief in favor of a board
of about 21 officials from all major
federal agencies.”

AT&T’s board of directors on Wednesday rejected Comcast’s unsolicited $44.5 billion bid for its cable unit. The company felt that the offer simply didn’t reflect the value of its cable and broadband operations, and that the proposed multi-tier voting structure the deal offered would mean AT&T shareholders ended up with less of a say in corporate matters. The rejection of the deal opens the door to other potential suitors. Full story at CNNFN.