“A Journal Filesystem keeps track of all the transactions undertaken. And the lack of a proper journal filesystems has
always been sited as one of the reasons holding back widespread adoption of Linux in the enterprise space. But this
argument no longer holds true, for currently, there are four journal filesystems to choose from — XFS, JFS, ext3 and
ReiserFS. Here we shall look into ReiserFs.” More at FreeOS.com.

FairFaxIT: “Meet Grendel; an old-style computer that takes up a whole room. Billed as Australia’s most powerful publicly available supercomputer, and in the top 100 such machines in the world, it officially started working at the new Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing in Carlton last week.”

FairFaxIT: “Take the poster child of the open-source rebellion, a company noted for paranoid secrecy to rival the Illuminatus, and a prominent semiconductor developer, and you have a bona fide enigma.”

MSNBC.com tells us: “If Microsoft Outlook 2000 is installed as the mail client with
the Internet Mail Only option turned on, trying to send and
receive e-mail may trigger this error: “Internet Mail is not
registered properly. Please reinstall and try again.” Culprits
include an incorrect version of Inetcomm.dll or an
Outlmime.dll that isn’t registered correctly.”

TheStandard: “The clock is ticking for Napster. On July 1, the
runaway hit that’s given millions of consumers an
easy way to access a virtually limitless selection
of music they otherwise couldn’t – or wouldn’t –
buy from their local record store is scheduled to
be reborn as a for-fee service that pays royalties
to copyright holders.”

LinuxSecurity: “This week, the interesting articles include, “Make SSH do more,” “Tools and Their Signatures, Part One: bind8x.c,” and
“Using Certificate Revocation Lists.” Also, today the i386 version of EnGarde Secure Linux v1.0.1 will be available for
download. Please see EngardeLinux.org to download it.”

ZDNET: “Hewlett-Packard’s endorsement of an application server that uses
open source code holds the promise of saving corporate users big
money.

The Enhydra application server is emerging as another software
building block of open source code – alongside the Apache Web server
and the Linux operating system – around which a company can build
its business.”

ZDNET: “To breathe in the electronic environment of Microsoft’s .Net
imaginings, consumers must first hand their private information over to
Microsoft, and trust the Redmond company to store it securely and
parcel it out judiciously.”

– By Grant Gross
–

It was another bad news week for Open Source business models, at least for one high-profile Linux project. Indrema, which was putting together a Linux-based gaming and Internet console, announced Tuesday it was shutting down the project.

The decision followed several weeks of questions about Indrema being vaporware. NewsForge’s own business columnist, Jack Bryar, commented on what an uphill battle the Indrema dream was. On Wednesday night, after the news had leaked, Indrema officials answered developers’ questions about what was left of the project. NewsForge news editor Dan Berkes was there, and found out that most of Indrema’s existing code won’t be released.

Indrema wasn’t the only Open Source business plan to go through changes this week. Embedded systems company ZF Linux Devices, which had recently changed its name to include the word “Linux” in it, changed its name again this week by taking Linux out. Apparently, fewer of the new ZF Micro Devices’ customers were interested in Linux than the company originally thought.

On the other hand, another report had developer interest
in embedded Linux growing at an “astronomical pace.” From virtually no interest in using Linux in embedded systems in 1999, a survey found 38% of developers considering using embedded Linux for new projects.

Torvalds: I didn’t comment on OS X

News reports last week had Linux creator Linus Torvalds ripping on Mac’s OS X, but the mild-mannered tech genius responded by saying he was misquoted. Frankly, the reports that Torvalds said OS X’s Mach microkernel was a “piece of crap” didn’t sound like the Linus we all know and love (or at least think we know).

Microsoft: We’re more secure

The only surprise should be the audacity of that statement, but Microsoft is really selling its development model as more secure than Open Source. According to Microsoft officials, nobody is reviewing Open Source code for security flaws. I know a couple of Linux security experts who might be offended at being called “nobody.”

New in NewsForge

Stories only in NewsForge this week:

News editor Tina Gasperson reported on some problems IBM created while sponsoring a KDE themes contest. IBM did respond to KDE developer complains and fixed the contest.

Hardware reviewer Jeff Field looked at the 3Com 3C905TX-C network interface card and explained how easy it is to install.

Columnist Julie Bresnick talked to Jeroen van der Zijp about his Open Source FOX GUI toolkit and asked why it kind of looks like Windows.

Happy spring holiday of your choice, everyone.

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

As reported by LWN, the exuberant-ctags program creates temp files insecurely. They have fixed this (hopefully to use mkstemp(3)) in the latest version.