– By Grant Gross –
Ximian — the company formerly known as Helix Code — announced its first deal with a major technology player during LinuxWorld, but Nat Friedman, Ximian’s CEO, promises it won’t be the last.

The Gnome desktop is everywhere from the
movies to Chinese desktops these days, and the folks at Ximian are doing their part to keep up the momentum. Hewlett-Packard has picked Ximian Gnome for the default desktop to replace CDE for its Unix HP-UX workstations after the release of HP-UX-11i, scheduled for later this year. Gnome should start appearing on the Hp-UX desktop later this year, and Friedman praises HP for “getting it” that the Open Source community is a partnership where the 800-pound tech gorilla can’t be heavy handed.

Ximian, a commercial Gnome services company, will customize the Gnome desktop for HP-UX, and give the hardware company an “enhanced, tested” version of
Gnome. Ximian put together the demo for its monkey-themed booth at LinuxWorld in nine hours, but the full-functioning version of Gnome for HP-UX will take a couple of months.

Ximian offers its customers several incarnations of Gnome, from the up-to-the-day latest release for the cutting-edge user to a 1-year-old stable version
requested by HP and its “conservative” customers such as Ford and AT&T, Friedman says. Users can also pick several other versions between those two extremes.

Because Ximian specializes in the desktop, complete with a quality assurance team to turn around bug fixes, companies are seeing it as a more cost-effective alternative than creating their own desktops, Friedman says. “Also, we’re a unifying force in the sense that now your Linux desktop and your HP-UX desktop will work exactly the same.”

The Turbolinux distribution is shipping Ximian Gnome with its next release, and Ximian is currently negotiating to bring the Gnome desktop to even more eyeballs, but he can’t talk more about those potential deals. “There’s a lot of interest,” he says. “(More deals are coming) within the next three months. They range from small Linux distributions to very specialized markets to the brand names we know and love, operating systems vendors.”

The next step for Ximian is to market itself as a basic “communications appliance” with network services built into the desktop, because, for most people, email, word processing, and browsing are the main uses for a computer, as opposed to the small number of Microsoft Office-type users.

The desktop network services Friedman hopes Ximian can market include things like Spam-abatement services, off-site storage of email, and a Web-based calendar. “We think that there’s a real opportunity for these communications tools to be the springboard for Linux to make its way onto the desktop,” he says, “especially in the corporate environment.”

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Posted to LWN.net: ” A problem exists in all versions of CUPS prior to 1.1.5 with the
httpGets() function. It could go into an infinite loop if a line
longer than the input buffer size was sent by a client. This could be
used as a DoS attack.” Follow the link for information and updates.

Nathaniel Haas writes “Washington, DC (February 1, 2001) – Intes.net, an internet solutions provider based in Washington DC, has released the foundation of its OpenInteract Portal environment to the open source community. OpenInteract is an application framework built to speed and enhance development of Internet applications and online environments.

Developed as a pure-perl application, OpenInteract uses many modules from CPAN along with Apache and mod_perl to provide better and more scalable performance. OpenInteract’s data abstraction layer can store all of your data in one (or more!) of a number of SQL databases. Generally, if the database is supported by Perl’s rock-solid database interface (DBI), it will be supported by OpenInteract. To date it has been tested with Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise and MySQL, and adaptations for Sybase Adaptive Server Anywhere, PostgreSQL, Oracle, DB2, LDAP and XML are on the way.

OpenInteract provides three primary advantages for developers:

First, a productive environment for web development. OpenInteract provides features needed by all web applications such as authentication, user and group management, session handling, task security, themeable pages and more. The environment also provides a rich templating scheme so you and your content providers can become productive quickly using only their web browser.

“One of the more powerful notions exploited by technology like Wikis and Manilla is the idea that, while viewing a web page or data object, you click a ‘Edit this item’ link right on the page,” says Chris Winters, lead developer of OpenInteract. “This takes you to a form in your browser to edit that content, and changes are made immediately to the data object. OpenInteract gives you this same functionality.”

Second, a data abstraction layer. This layer (called SPOPS, for Simple Perl Object Persistence with Security) allows you to use any supported data store to fetch, create, update and remove objects. Current data stores include DBI (which supports most SQL databases), GDBM and configuration files. However, SPOPS can be easily extended to support CORBA objects, LDAP directories or even simple text files.

One of the primary benefits of SPOPS is that in most cases, you don’t even need to write any code to implement an object class! Only a simple configuration file is required to not only define objects and their properties, but also the relationships between objects and different behaviors that can be applied to an object.

SPOPS also makes it simple to apply consistent logic and grouping schemes that cut across different types of objects: for example, a full-text search which not only includes web documents, news items and events, but also electronic manuals, uploaded documents or more.

And because SPOPS is object-oriented, it’s simple to provide functionality that doesn’t currently exist.

According to lead developer Chris Winters, one of the goals for SPOPS is to make it powerful yet non-obtrusive, and not lock developers into an elaborate framework. “SQL databases are becoming more pervasive by the day, and people have desire to link their data more ways than we can imagine. SPOPS exploits the power of perl as a glue language and allows coders to use a common paradigm (object-as-hashref) to perform some amazing tasks.”

Finally, a consistent security layer. You can assign security on a per-object basis for a user, group or the entire world. Security rights for groups are inherited by the users who belong to them, making it simple to create secure access to individual objects.

“With OpenInteract, we’re trying to make it easy to write web apps, and one of the biggest hurdles is security,” says Winters. “When we looked at existing application frameworks, security was a big gap. So we’ve taken a simple paradigm for security and applied it consistently to both tasks and objects.”

Upcoming development of a robust security policy scheme will make it even easier to ensure that the right users and groups have access to the right objects.

Both OpenInteract and SPOPS (which can be used separately from OpenInteract) have been released under the artistic GPL. Both can be found at www.openinteract.org/, along with extensive documentation, frequently asked questions, and more. Intes.net provides support, custom tool development and upgrades in a per installation fee structure.”

ZDNet News examines the XML-based User Interface Language (XUL), an offshoot of the Mozilla Project. Is it something that Microsoft should be concerned about? The Redmond company responds per usual with a .NET promotional piece.

LinuxPlanet has an interview with David Boswell and Pete Collins of Mozdev.org, a developer’s group associated with (but not the same as) the Mozilla Project. Thanks to the contributions of developers with Mozdev.org and other groups, “Mozilla is more cross-platform than Java,” says Collins.

A PCWorld item on CNN wraps up both sites’ LinuxWorld Expo coverage. Best booth honors go to Ximian’s jungle themed display; Linus Torvalds gets the “Most awkward moment for a kernel creator” award for failing to correctly define BogoMips, a term he himself created, during the Golden Penguin Bowl.

Sun Microsystems answers the fifteen questions asked by Microsoft regarding its new software strategey. Check out the opening shots: “We think Chuck (Humble, of Microsoft’s PR agency Waggener-Edstrom) has a dilemma. You see, he thinks the race just started and is feeling good because Microsoft sees Sun in his rear view mirror. Poor Chuck. He doesn’t understand that Microsoft is about to be lapped.”

Reuters reports that Pope John Paul is thinking about making Saint Isidore of Seville the
patron saint of Internet users and computer programmers. “Saint Isidore, who lived in the seventh century, was believed to have written the world’s first
encyclopaedia, the Etymologies, which included entries on medicine, mathematics, history and
theology.” Here’s a prayer to say before logging on. How will this affect all those, ummm, very secular chat rooms?

“Microsoft’s Product Activation technology has triggered a row in the company’s
official Whistler beta newsgroups, with testers threatening defection to Linux or
piracy over the matter. The irate testers – who, as far as we know, haven’t actually
been hit by a real live Product Activation Whistler build yet – seem to have been
sent further up the wall by the intervention of a Microserf, who referred them to a
couple of FAQs on the site.” From a report at The Register.

IDG.net: “Last month’s unveiling of the National Security Agency’s attempt to create a
truly secure Linux was the first good security news of the year. On Jan. 2 the NSA
announced that it had been figuring out how to harden the popular open-source
OS, and that it was sharing its prototype, dubbed Security-Enhanced Linux, and
source code with the public.”