LinuxProgramming.com posts the latest edition of Dr. Dobb’s Tcl-URL, a weekly roundup of news and resources for the Tcl developer community.

A new release candidate of WWW gateway to LDAP server web2ldap has been released. According to Michael Stroder’s post at LinuxProgramming, “If there are no real showstoppers found in 0.9.0rc1 this will be
almost the final release 0.9.0 which is scheduled for 2001-05-10.”

From Linux Today: “SuSE Linux today announced the complete SuSE Linux 7.1 package is now available in
Japanese as a free download with full support in Japanese. As worldwide economies tighten,
interest in Linux continues to grow. SuSE’s highly reviewed version 7.1 highlights the
company’s enterprise initiatives.”

Aaron J. Seigo posts a summary of traffic and topics from the KDE mailing lists. The latest issue features discussion of KMail’s message scoring system, and extending the KDE Address Book.

The latest version of lightweight window manager Xfce is now available. Version 3.8.0 offers faster performance, uses less memory than previous versions, and features new tools including an SMB browser. More details at Moongroup; or download the program from xfce.org or SourceForge.

Zack Brown posts the latest summary of traffic on the linux-kernel mailing list. Hot topics in this issue include discussion on the status of CML3 and debate over the spam filtering used on the mailing list.

“The Redhat useradd script creates a group for the new user with the
same name as the username by default. When the user logs in, any
shell that uses /etc/profile will set the umask to 002 if the user’s
username and groupname match and their uid is greater than 14. If the
user then issues su to become root without specifying the -l option the
root account inherits the umask of 002. As root the user may then create
files with somewhat insecure permissions. Redhat seemed to understand
that system users should have a umask of 022, because /etc/profile will
set the umask that way for users loging in with a uid less than 14, but
they forgot about su.” Full details at Help Net Security.

ZDNet has an item on the upcoming release of the W3C’s long-awaited XML Schema. Reportedly, the Schema is so complex that several XML experts have decided to create alternative, more understandable versions.

ZDNet: “As it kicks off its newest technology initiative, Sun
Microsystems is training gunfire on one of its oldest
enemies: Microsoft.

Sun this week expects to launch Jxta, an open source
project to develop infrastructure software for peer-to-peer
applications. What does Sun hope to accomplish with
Jxta? Perhaps nothing more than to establish a
beachhead against Microsoft in the emerging – and, so
far, mostly hype-driven – area of P2P, a computing model
in which users’ computers exchange data directly.”

The problem with grabbing a hot new version of your favorite distribution on the day of release is that everyone else wants to do the same. Now you can get at least one distribution — Mandrake 8.0 — without having to deal with slow, overburdened servers. As this article at Teledynamics explains, it’s all thanks to Swarmcast, a new file transfer technology with a P2P architecture for distributing network load.