Just over 24 hours after Linux kernel 2.4.2ac4 was announced, Alan Cox released Linux kernel 2.4.2ac5, and also announced Linux kernel 2.2.19pre15.

ZDNet reports on a soon-to-be DVD writer for PCs from Pioneer. The drive is currently only available in high-end Macintosh systems.

ComputerWorld reports on Sun Microsystems’s efforts to developing a Web-based software platform — JXTA — which
developers could use to write distributed peer-to-peer applications.

From ZDNet: ” company in the business of reviving abandoned technologies is preparing a peer-to-peer
search engine aimed straight at the heart of Google.

Web search technology has long been vexed by the problem of prioritizing the thousands of Web
pages that common queries yield. Project Pandango, the work-in-progress of Seattle-based i5
Digital, attempts to determine that priority by examining the Web surfing histories of a wide
network of computers on the Web.”

LinuxWorld interviews Open Source activist Bruce Perens, including his new employer Hewlett-Packard’s relationship with CollabNet. “I don’t have much to do with CollabNet so far, although we certainly will talk. A big part of
Collab’s business is gated communities, something less than real open source. They know I’m not thrilled by
that. One of Collab’s customers, Vita Nuova, has been taking out full-page ads in Embedded Linux Journal to
spread FUD about Linux. So, the Collab folks will get an earful about that from me.”

Activator writes: “The 10 nominees have been finalized, now it’s time for the real voting!

ActiveStatehas kicked off the first annual Programmers’ Choice and Activators’ Choice Awards. We’d like to honor those unnamed heroes who’ve *actively* contributed to making Perl and Python the most popular open source programming languages.

We have 10 winning nominees, five Python programmers and five Perl programmers are contenders for a pretty cool trophy, check it out here
Vote for one of the finalists now!

We’re also acknowledging those we deem worthy for their accomplishments with Perl and Python in an Activators’ Choice award. Following a month long discussion period of late caffeine-filled nights, our dev team will through a rigorous evaluation process cast their votes for one deserving Perl and Python programmer.

Winners will be announced March 6, 2001.”

LinuxPR has a press release about ActiveState recruiting a bunch of people. “ActiveState, the leader in open source programming languages, is assembling a
substantive team of leading developers and senior management from around the
world.

Top senior management now includes: Kevin Mallory, VP Engineering, and John
Jensen, VP E-commerce, both from the Silicon Valley. On the development side,
leading new staff consists of: Jeff Hobbs, Senior Tcl Developer also from the
Silicon Valley; Paul Prescod, Senior XML Developer from Dallas; and Shane
Caraveo, Senior PHP Developer from Miami.”

LinuxPower.org has an interviewwith Erick Walthinsen of the GStreamer project. “One of the
projects which recently seemed to burst onto the Linux scene out of nowhere with explosive power is
GStreamer. In this interview with project founder Erik Walthinsen we will discover that there was nothing
overnight about GStreamer’s recent rise to fame at all, rather the hard work off a dedicated team. This hard
work has really paid of with Erik getting hired by embedded Linux distribution company RidgeRun, Inc. to
work fulltime on GStreamer.”

LWN.net features Ximian on its new desktop page. “Ximian’s crew was most excited about Red Carpet, their package management
product designed to make updating RPM-based systems seamless and painless. It
resolves dependencies in an intelligent fashion across the network. It is supported
across all major distributions, including Debian. One of the interesting features of Red
Carpet is Ximian’s use of Internet cache pioneer Akamai. Akamai’s globally
distributed Web caches are used to distribute RPM packages to make Evolution users
downloads very fast.”

Posted at LWN.net: “Trustix today released an updated version of the sudo package fixing a
buffer overflow, as announced by the sudo maintainer Todd C. Miller.” Here’s even more information.