Posted at LWN.net: The version of mktemp shipped with Red Hat Linux prior to version 7 does
not support creating temporary directories.

In order to quell further rumours regarding MandrakeSoft’s
alleged pressing needs for financial liquidity, recent layoffs of part of its senior management team and
planned layoffs in its Development team, MandrakeSoft Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO Jacques Le
Marois explains that “former CEO Henri Poole and himself mutually agreed on the management change
over a month ago as a result of a divergence of views regarding the Company’s strategic outlook:
Henri’s vision was to establish MandrakeSoft as a leader in the e-learning and e-support arenas
without a specific focus on Linux, whereas my view is that the source of our success and very essence
of our Company is the Linux-Mandrake operating system, and that all of our online services such as
MandrakeExpert and MandrakeCampus should be geared to support it and bring value to our user
community.Furthermore, there is absolutely no foundation in the rumour that we are planning to
layoff our Development team, who represent a crucial asset for MandrakeSoft, especially in light of our
refocusing on our core Linux values.”

Le Marois further points out that “MandrakeSoft’s prospects have never looked so good: In 2000,
Linux-Mandrake took #1 slot in US Linux retail sales (Source: PC Data). The recent management
changes and refocusing of our strategy on our core distribution and related online and offline services
have allowed us to make major savings and we are on course to break even within a few months. The
announcement of the latest release of the Linux-Mandrake operating system – version 8.0 – has met
with unprecedented success, both in terms of user adoption, which is made obvious by the hundreds of
thousands of versions downloaded from our Web site since the announcement, and in terms of positive
media coverage and pre-sales to our business partners throughout the world. The imminent launch of
MandrakeStore, our online store, will create a solid new revenue stream: we’ve already pre-sold
thousands of PowerPack Editions online. In addition, there are already more than 35,000 registered
users on MandrakeExpert and MandrakeCampus, which represents massive revenue potential for us
going forward: we will shortly be introducing an online ‘tipping’ system, allowing users to reward those
Experts who provide them with useful responses to their Linux-Mandrake related questions, and
MandrakeSoft will take a commission on each transaction. Besides, a paying user registration system to
MandrakeExpert will also shortly be introduced, which represents yet another source of revenue for the
Company”. Le Marois concludes that “all these positive elements, together with the fact that we have
built a very large individual and professional user community at very little expense, and have an
experienced and highly committed management team to execute our strategy, are playing in our favour
for our plans to IPO in the coming months, so watch this space!”

About MandrakeSoft

Mandrakesoft provides a trusted interface between users of information technology and open
technologists. The Linux-Mandrake distribution received the awards for “Best Product of the Year” and
“Best Linux-Distribution/Server” at LinuxWorld Expo 99, as well as the PC Answers Platinum Award in
April 2000, the Linux Magazine Editor’s Choice Award in September 2000 and the Chip Magazine
“Best Technique and Winner of the Test” in December 2000.

MandrakeSoft established headquarters in Pasadena (US), Montreal (Quebec – Canada), London (UK),
Germany and Paris. Information on Mandrakesoft can be found on their Website:
www.mandrakesoft.com.

Linux Journal has a review: “AppGen PowerWindows for Linux is an integrated suite of business applications for small to mid-sized Linux-based businesses. If
you purchased their $9.95 US demo advertised in Linux Journal and elsewhere a while back, you may want to give it another look, as
AppGen has significantly improved the Java runtime client. In this review I’m going to cover the installation of the provided demo
application and discuss the potential advantages PowerWindows could provide you as an established or aspiring Linux
consultant/VAR.”

Antioffline.com has a story about Linux firewalls. “IPChains in my opinion is a poor man’s firewall. Now while most Linux binaries are open
source I mean this in the sense that most people who use IPChains have little knowledge
about firewalls or protocols and look for IPChains as a solution to a firewall. IPChains
has its ups and downs, but a strong firewall by comparison should be the ultimate
resolution. However a strong firewall does not mean you neccessarily have to run out
and spend some hefty cash on a product.”

eWeek has a rewrite of NewsForge’s last two stories, on the management shakeup at Mandrake and an interview with new MandrakeSoft CEO Jacques LeMarois.

It’s at ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/2.4/. Intermediate diffs are available from http://www.bzimage.org.

Cox writes, “Rather than starting to propogate these fixes to other drivers I’d be
greatful if they would audit the changes (especially the sound one)
carefully. That way we can ripple correct changes to the other drivers
rather than duplicating several rounds of fixes into each driver we
touch.”

2.4.4-ac14
o Fix error corner case on max file size check (Andrew Morton)
o Do first bits of applicom.c cleanup (me)
| This needs a lot of cleaning yet
o Fix open/close locking on dsp56k (me)
o Clean up the obvious namespace mess in h8.c (me)
| Wants verifying by Alpha folks
o Fix locking errors in machzwd watchdog (me)
o Fix printk levels on nwflush , someone with a
netwindup needs to see the FIXME cases still (me)
o Fix out of memory oops in pcwd.c (me)
o Add more Dell raid devices to sparselun table (Matt Domsch)
o Add hotplug table entry for aic7xxx (Marcus Meissner)
o Drop deceased APA1480 driver to match Linus tree(me)
o Fix ali15x3 nodma behaviour (Jeff Garzik)
o Further quota fixups (Jan Kara)
o Update a2232 to current version (Geert Uytterhoeven)
| Older one got merged in error.
o Clean up sonicvibes pci handling (Marcus Meissner)
o Remove dead radio miscdevice bits (Al Viro)
o Merge ATI Rage XL console support (Geert Uytterhoeven)
o Fix problems with pyxis iommu on Alpha (Ivan Kokshaysky)
o Fix compile errors when built without /proc (Andrzej
Krzysztofowicz)
o Encapsulate shmem inode info using macros (Christoph Rohland)
| So Al can attack the inode struct.
o Move small symlinks into shmem_inode_info (Christoph Rohland)
o Count shmemfs pages and put them in /proc (Christoph Rohland)
o Put back accidentally reverted PnPBIOS parport (Marcelo Jimenez)

“The first quarter was a rocky one for Unix servers, as the U.S. market shrunk by about 2
percent because of a slowing economy, according to a survey by market researcher
Dataquest.

But despite the contracting market, Sun Microsystems and Dell Computer managed to eke out
double-digit growth, while IBM stayed its course with sales remaining basically the same.” Story at CNET News.com.

“Looking out from the LinuxPlanet bullpen it looks like this incredible frenzy has swept through the Linux community, crippling
anyone and everyone it touches.

“Look out!” we cry, “another barrage from Craig Mundie! Oh, heavens, what will we do?”

Or (my personal favorite): “Company X is gone/acquired/laying people off, the end of Linux is coming!”

Tomorrow it’ll be something other thing to whip ourselves into a frenzy about.

I know I have been advocating calm, reasoned responses to all of these crises, so we don’t trip up over our own panic. But people,
enough is enough!” More at Linux Planet.

Trolltech has released the first beta version of Qt 3.0. According to the notes on the Trolltech site, the beta includes database access, an improved Qt Designer, Qt Linguist, improved international text display, a new component model, support for multiple monitors, and more.

In this tenth edition of news from the KDE mailing lists: “Busy cursor while applications load” … “House cleaning in kdeutils” … “Default address book front end chosen.”