eWeek has a story about Sun’s plans to release StarOffice 6 later this year. Among other things, version 6 will include the XML file format specification.

Wired.com reports: “A trio of federal judges lobbed sharp questions on Tuesday at a law school dean who argued it should be legal
to distribute a DVD-descrambling utility.

The judges, from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, spent an hour quizzing attorneys for both sides in Universal Studios v.
Remeirdes et al, a high-profile case that has pitted Hollywood against the open-source community.

The panel of three judges appeared to be more sympathetic to the legal arguments raised by the entertainment industry.” Here’s another take on the story from CNet.

Here’s CNet’s take on the decision to call off the merger: “After three months of operating as a single company, Turbolinux and Linuxcare have called
off their merger because of difficulties joining the companies’ finances and operations.

Facing a chilly investor environment regarding the Linux operating system, the two companies
announced their intent to merge in January and closed the deal Feb. 21. The justification was that
Linuxcare’s specialization on services complemented Turbolinux’s product emphasis, but now it
appears the two different businesses didn’t dovetail so smoothly after all.” More from ZDNet.

– by Tina Gasperson –
Craig Drummond is porting his graphical font installer, kfontinst, to KDE’s control panel. Previously, the program was a stand-alone designed for use in the KDE desktop environment, but Drummond plans to make it a tightly integrated function that has the potential to be distributed right along with the rest of the KDE modules. Drummond has set up a website to display project progress and screenshots at www.cpdrummond.uklinux.net/kfontinst-new/. One of the improvements to the new version of kfontinst he promises is the ability to configure X11, Ghostscript, and Star Office for truetype and type 1 fonts, and to preview fonts.

kfontinst isn’t the only graphical font previewer and installer that’s been developed for X, but it appears to be one of only a handful. A project called gGlyph is listed at filewatcher.org, but appears to have been neglected since about a year ago. Another, called gfontview, previews fonts but doesn’t install them. Drummond is soliciting comments and suggestions for improvements to kfontinst. He can be contacted at cpdrummond@freeuk.com.

NewsForge editors read and respond to comments posted on our discussion page.

From daemonnews.org: “Did you ever wish that there was an easier way to configure and administer your BSD server? Well… other than whipping out your
favorite editor and hack configuration files? How would you like to remotely manage a server without using [insecure] Telnet or SSH?
There are several products that allow a sysadmin to configure a server via a web-browser. Some of the most flexible ones aren’t
available for free (like Plesk), although trial versions can be downloaded.”

From LinuxPR: The Second Annual Libre Software Conference will be held in Bordeaux France
at the ENSIERB from July 4 – 9th, 2001. This is a request for papers and
presentations.

Dr Philippe Auriol of Bordeaux, France and Dr Irving Buchbinder of Hartford CT,
US are co-chairing the 2001 meeting of LSM/ABUL. This is a call for papers
and presentations at the Medical Topic Section for the Libre Software Meeting
of the Association Bordelaise des Utilisateurs de Logiciels Libres, that is, the
“Libre Software User’s Group of Bordeaux. This year the topic in the Medical
Section is “Interoperability in Medical Software”.

The Linux Journal has a story about a buffer overflow attack at a U.S. university. It’s an interesting chronological description of the attack.

From BusinessWire: Extended Systems, a
leading provider of mobile data management and wireless connectivity solutions, announced today that its
Advantage Database Server will support the Linux operating system.

Beta version of Advantage Database Server for Linux is expected to be available in June 2001 with the full
release scheduled to ship in August 2001. With this enhancement, Extended Systems now provides developers with a high-performance
relational database server (RDBMS) that can be distributed on a variety of platforms including Windows 95/98/ME, Windows NT/2000, Novell
NetWare and Linux.

Posted at LWN.net: A new version of GnuPG, 1.0.5, has been released that fixes a number
of bugs and security problems, including a widely-publicized
vulnerability that makes it easier for the attacker to recover your
private key if they can steal your key ring. As always, the
confidentiality of your key ring is paramount to the security of
public key encryption.

From LinuxPR: Downright Software, the first team to
launch a 100% web-based website performance testing solution, today
announced the availability of Assisted Testing Services for their
membership-based StressMy.com. Assisted Testing Services give
StressMy.com subscribers access to experienced Internet application
performance engineers to help them plan, conduct, and interpret a performance
test of their web-based application. Subscribers using Assisted Testing Services
will find they can supercharge their testing plans by applying the expertise of
Downright’s WebSledge Performance Engineers to their testing situations.