From MSNBC: “Reports of PowerPoint 2000 hanging when using the
Intellimouse scroll wheel are preliminary, says Microsoft. At the
time of this writing, the culprit hadn’t been determined. The
current workaround: Turn off IntelliPoint Mouse features.”

From Daemon News: “In 2000, on the bsdi-users mailing list, a question was asked about how to do transparent HTTP caching/proxying using BSD/OS. At the time, I hinted at using
the SO_BINDANY socket option in BSD/OS, along with the Squid cache (http://squid.nlanr.net) to implement this function. Recently, I was asked the specifics of
how to do this, so I spent a little time making this technology go. What follows is a short writeup of the work I did to make transparent Web caching work.”

Daemon News shows us how to install and use grub.

“With more and more script kiddies being born, we all need to learn a few basic rules of protecting ourselves. This guide will outline the basics of FreeBSD
security, and works best with FreeBSD version 4.x.” From Daemon News.

Kelly McNeill writes “The man responsible for conceiving and implementing the project that delivered the first complete graphical user interface OS to market, Jef Raskin, has recently found himself out of favor in the Mac community, a group that normally includes him with the other apostles that surround the legend of Apple Computer. His crime was referring in an offhand way to OS X as a “throwback” during a recent interview: “Look at OS X, that Apple’s coming out with: everybody who works on it says it’s a throwback to the 1970s in terms of structure. It’s UNIX, it’s backwards.””

– By Dan Berkes –

There were dozens upon dozens of companies with slick multimedia presentations at the LinuxWorld Expo in New York this week. Despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent to bring a company’s message to the masses, some of the most innovative stuff could be found in the tiny .org Pavilion in the center of the show.That’s where I ran into Alex Perry, a member of the worldwide development team behind Flight Gear, an Open Source flight simulation program. Indeed, the Flight Gear booth was one of the more popular destinations within the .org Pavilion, often drawing a crowd that outnumbered most of the software and hardware titans located nearby.

It’s hard to describe Flight Gear without gushing: Once you’ve seen the program in action, it’s hard to understand why Microsoft’s Flight Simulator program gets any sort of consumer consideration at all. Based on scenery alone, Flight Gear is almost photo-realistic in comparison to the Microsoft offering.

There wasn’t much concern about directly competing with Microsoft, understandable considering a more serious goal involved with Flight Gear: FAA certification. “There are very few FAA certified programs, and (Flight Simulator) isn’t one of them,” says Perry.

It is understandable why almost everyone, including Microsoft, has avoided the government’s certification process. Getting the approval of the Federal Aviation Administration is a long and winding three-part ordeal involving the production of full and technically complete documentation, realistic functions of flight controls, and constant program updating that will factor in the latest hardware and regulatory changes.

Combine those requirements with the sometimes-frustrating demands of an Open Source project, and you might begin to realize what a momentous undertaking Flight Gear actually is. It’s obvious, however, that this program is a labor of love — those awe-inspiring graphics (including some for the flight deck), for example, aren’t required for official approval.

“It’s the controls themselves that have to be equivalent to an aircraft,” explains Perry. As long as the basic functions are there, almost everything else is icing on the cake. And what icing there is: Some of the ground scenery, including complex designs for urban populations, is enough to make any novice pilot run his plane into the ground in order to get a closer look.

The FAA certification process presents a unique situation for Open Source software. While the version that Perry is helping along will, he hopes, eventually bear FAA’s official stamp of approval, there is the undeniable fact that because it’s Open Source, anyone can come along and modify the code and create an entirely new version of Flight Gear. What, then?

In turn, each individual or group looking to create an official FAA-approved version would have to submit its own project to the FAA office in charge of approving such things. Considering the interest in the computer and aviation industries in a comprehensive yet affordable flight simulation offering, Perry expects a near-revolution in at least one part of the FAA bureaucracy.

“That little certification office will be overwhelmed,” he says with a half-smile. “I hope they’re ready.”

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

Info World reports that Intel’s Swope has previewed his keynote address at Linux World in New Fork.

Kelly McNeill writes: “Big companies like IBM and Sun are taking notice of “the Hacker’s Hobby” and are looking for it to do great things. There are people who are worried that Big Blue is trying to take Linux over. You really can’t do that with an open source operating system, but what the big companies are doing is taking a casual, informal approach to development and making it professional. I think that the main developers of the kernel (and other open source software) should realize this trend, and begin working on it in a more professional way.” The column’s at OS Opinion.

IDG reports that “Hewlett-Packard will soon offer Linux support on 44 printers and will ship servers and development tools aimed at users of the OS.”

Anonymous Reader writes “Posted at LWN.net is this story about Red Hat releasing their beta release of “Fisher” – what may well become their next distro, 7.1, of Red Hat Linux. Red Hat Inc’s Preston Brown writes, “Red Hat, Inc. presents a beta release of Red Hat Linux for your hacking pleasure.”. The story contains links to several mirrors for downloading this beta release.”