Linux Journal reviews the PictureBook, the latest nootbook in Sony’s VAIO product line. The PictureBook’s features everything including the kitchen sink — representated figuratively by the presence of a built-in digital camera. What’s more, that camera will work just fine under Linux, snapping away JPG stills and AVI videos.

Linux Journal offers a quick set-up guide for Sendmail, the most widely used mail transport agent on the Internet, in a small office or home network environment.

Slashdot: “If my calculations are correct, on Thursday, April 19, 2001, at 04:25:21
UTC (00:25:21 EDT and late Wednesday at 21:25:21 PDT), the UNIX clock will read
987654321, which is pretty cool. This will be the first of two such “significant” events in
2001, the second being 01:46:39 UTC on 2001-09-09, when the clock will read 999999999 (and then of
course “roll over” to 1000000000 one second later).”

ZDNet eWEEK reviewed GNOME and KDE, and reviewers decided that they favored KDE and that users expecting “the sort of smooth interface that users have come to expect from the Macintosh and Windows operating systems.” Note that reviewers also said that upcoming releases of GNOME (not to mention the inclusion of Eazel) is expect to make “substantial gains” with its next major release, due out near the end of the year.

SiliconValley.com talks with BeOS leader Jean-Louis Gassee about his company’s financial health and the possiblity of making Be an Open Source product. “Getting it ready for an open-source release would require some engineering work
on the company’s part. For one thing, Be itself licensed some of the components of
the OS from other companies and would have to extract that code.

‘Stipulate that we do all this hard work,’ Gassee said. ‘What would it do for my
shareholders? I don’t know. If I felt it was a way to make my shareholders happy I
would do it in a heartbeat.’ “

– By Dan Berkes –

IBM this week eliminated the Linux multimedia gap with the release of the T22 ThinkPad. Big Blue’s latest offering is the first commercially available Linux computer with the ability to play back DVDs.There is no love lost between the communities of Open Source and the Motion Picture Association of America, especially since the MPAA hauled a Web site operator into court for merely linking to a few lines of code that bypassed the DVD location restriction features. The court decided that DVD’s not-so-secret workings were protected by copyright.

Using existing Open Source solutions to provide DVD playback under Linux was out of the question for IBM. The challenge for Big Blue’s mobile computing division was to create a solution that could preserve the copy protection essential to avoiding an MPAA lawsuit.

That challenge became the responsibility of Keith Frechette, the Linux development lead for IBM’s Mobile Computing Options and Software Development division. “While I can say (those challenges are) ‘interesting’ now, several months ago I would have chosen a different word,” wrote Frechette in a post to the linux-thinkpad mailing list.

IBM chose a new product from InterVideo, known for its WinDVD software for the Windows operating system, and bundled with many new computer systems. LinDVD offers many of the same features as its Windows counterpart, including movie and interactive DVD playback along with support for Video CDs (VCD) and MPEG files. Also included is a decoder for multi-channel Dolby Digital audio.

Getting the copy protection features working with Linux and LinDVD took considerable time. “For laptops, the primary mechanism for stopping DVD movie piracy over the S-Video port is to encode out-going video signal using Macrovision,” said Frechette. First developed to thwart copying of videotapes, Macrovision is now the industry standard “digital rights management technology” to prevent the transfer of DVD contents to tape or hard drives.

Windows’ video driver architecture offers developers a standard mechanism for enabling Macrovision; no such standard exists for Linux. Frechette’s group worked with InterVideo to develop an interface that allows LinDVD to enable Macrovision’s copy protection when it’s needed. Pratchette considers IBM’s work a start, not a standard, instead hoping that “perhaps the Linux community will define a standard interface for this, possibly taking advantage of some of the work that we did.”

After tying all that together, it was time to figure out where to put the Macrovision control logic code. Windows places it in the video driver, which is a perfect location for a closed-source operating system. The video drivers behind X, however, are Open Sourced. While some users would love to take a crack at the Macrovision code, that simply wouldn’t do for this project.

Frechette’s solution was to drop the code into a binary-only kernel driver. “This provides adequate protection, but it does tie the Macrovision support to specific kernels,” he admitted. Plans for future version of IBM’s Linux ThinkPad DVD playback system might include placing the Macrovision code into a user-mode driver/daemon.

“I hope that our success helps to raise the bar just a little, that in the future DVD movie support on Linux will be commonplace, and that we can say to Windows users, DVD movie playback — yeah, we’ve got that.”

The IBM T22 ThinkPad features a base configuration that includes Caldera OpenLinux eDesktop 2.4, a 900Mhz Pentium III processor, 128MB RAM, 14.1″ TFT active matrix display, and a 20GB hard drive — and DVD support, of course. Manufacturer’s suggested retail price is $3,499.

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

From LinuxSecurity.com: A number of security problems have been found in the Linux kernels
prior to the latest 2.2.19 kernel. Following is a list of problems
based on the 2.2.19 release notes as found on http://www.linux.org.uk/.

Here’s The Register’s take on the Samba 2.2 release: “One of the cornerstones of free software, Samba, took another leap forward project
leads Jeremy Allison and Andrew Tridgell announced yesterday.

Unglamorous but hugely important, the new version of the Windows file and print
services substitute, now at version 2.2.0, adds a bundle of goodies. As before, it
continues to enhance its appeal as a replacement Windows authentication server.
Samba makes Microsoft Client Access Licenses — mandatory for printing and basic
file sharing in a Microsoft environment — effectively redundant. Which at $50 a pop,
makes for a potentially huge saving.”

From CNet: “Blaming a “rapid deterioration” in consumer IT spending, Hewlett-Packard on
Wednesday said its second-quarter earnings and revenue will fall short of estimates.

HP also said it would lay off up to 3,000 people in management positions as part of broader
cost-cutting moves.”

ZD Net has a guest colunn from the president of K Computing about a recent plan to establish a specification for embedded Linux. He raises a few questions about how a standard will work, including the standardization group’s timeline.