2000 12 28


                    LINUX NEWS
        RESOURCES & LINKS FROM BRAINBUZZ.COM
            Thursday, December 28, 2000


TABLE OF CONTENTS

1) Sean’s Notes

2) Linux News

The Year in Review
Sendmail, Inc, Acquires Web/Wireless Email Company
Linus Speaks on Red Hat 7
Linux Enlists in the US Army

3) Linux Resources

Will Unix Certs Ever Catch on?
SSH and SSL Safe for Now
What's a Honeynet?
Why Can't You Run Linux on a P4?
AVI and ASF Under Linux

4) App o’ the week

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-------------------------
1) Sean's Notes
-------------------------

As the year 2000 draws to a close, it comes to the time
where years of journalistic tradition dictate that I review
highs and lows of the year. Don't worry -- you won't find
any top N lists in this article!

2000 was certainly not the year of the Linux stock. Red Hat
(Nasdaq:RHAT) hit its high point of $148/share in mid-
January, and began a slow and steady decline to where it
sits now, at under seven bucks. Corel (Nasdaq:CORL) didn't
do a heck of a lot better. VA Linux (Nasdaq:LNUX) started
off the year at around $200 and dove to around $9. These are
extreme examples, mind you, but it's a trend. The Linux
Weekly News tracks Linux stocks (and Linux related stocks):

http://www.lwn.net/stocks/

Kernel 2.4 was the talk of the community, and it managed to
earn fourth place in Wired's annual vapourware contest:

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,40484,00.html

I must disagree, though. It wasn't Linus who was making all
the promises (his only promise was December, which he'll
narrowly miss), it was mostly the media talking about it.
Right now, we're at Linux 2.4.0test13pre4ac2 (how's that for
a mouthful), which has Linus' and Alan Cox's trees merged,
along with a lot of the stuff that was fixed in 2.2.18.

Not all Linux software is vapourware though...The GIMP (GNU
Image Manipulation Tool) was released as version 1.2 after
a long development period. The GIMP is a Photoshop quality
drawing tool, and a fine example of how well Open Source
works.

http://www.gimp.org

PERL was released as 5.6.0. All the major distributions
went through a couple of release cycles such as Red Hat and
Mandrake 7.0. It was also a big year for the BSDs, as Free
BSD came out with a release featuring high-grade cryptography
(yes, I know OpenBSD has been doing it for ages).

All in all, a good year for Linux (as long as your retirement
fund didn't rely on the stocks). I wish I had some usage
figures handy, but judging from all of the media attention,
it has to be growing quickly.

Here's to all the best in 2001.

Long live the Penguin,

Sean Walberg
swalberg@brainbuzz.com


-------------------------
2) Linux News
-------------------------

-------------------
The Year in Review
-------------------
Linux has made a lot of progress this year. It survived the
Y2K scare in January, and December marks the release of
2.2.18, Gimp 1.2, and one of the last releases towards
kernel 2.4. In between this were a whole lot of press
releases from people announcing support, hardware, and new
companies starting up. Here is a timeline of 2000.

http://www.lwn.net/2000/features/Timeline/?month=all


--------------------------------------------------
Sendmail, Inc, Acquires Web/Wireless Email Company
--------------------------------------------------
Sendmail, Inc, the corporate arm of the popular sendmail
MTA, announced that it has acquired Nascent Technologies.
Through this arrangement, Sendmail gets the technology to
allow web-based email access and wireless WAP email.

http://www.businesswire.com/webbox/bw.121900/203540182.htm


-------------------------
Linus Speaks on Red Hat 7
-------------------------
You may recall the first edition of Linux News where I
talked about some of the bugs in Red Hat 7. One of the big
things was the snapshot compiler that was shipped causing
a lot of problems with the symbols inside object files.
Alan Cox, one of the chief maintainers of Linux spoke out
on Red Hat's behalf, but Linus doesn't agree.

http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn 00-12-14-002-21-NW-RH-SW



----------------------------
Linux Enlists in the US Army
----------------------------
Red Hat has a product called "uClinux", which is an
environment for running Linux on embedded microprocessors.
The US Army recently announced that they will be testing
uClinux out in tanks and other vehicles for monitoring, and
possibly rolling it out to as many as 50,000 vehicles!

http://www.linuxtoday.com.au/r/article/jsp/sid/440053

-------------------------
3) Linux Resources
-------------------------

------------------------------
Will Unix Certs Ever Catch on?
------------------------------
The domain of Unix certifications has been pretty quiet.
Each vendor has their own, and there are a couple in the
Linux world. But does anyone actually get these things? A
wise Unix admin explains his view on the whole thing.

http://www.networkingnews.org/headline_news/main_news/12week_3/week
3_unixcer
t.html


------------------------
SSH and SSL Safe for Now
------------------------
It all started off with Kurt Seifried writing an article
about dsniff, a hacking tool, and the potential impact on
protocols like SSL and SSH. It was pretty doom and gloom,
which prompted a response from a noted author on SSH,
Richard Silverman. Kurt's an intelligent fellow and raises
some good points, but I'm afraid my money is on Richard.

http://sysadmin.oreilly.com/news/silverman_1200.html


-------------------
What's a Honeynet?
-------------------
No, it has nothing to do with Pooh bear...a honeynet is a
network of computers designed to be hacked, but with a
watchful eye. Lance Spitzner explains his project to learn
the way of the hacker by watching them do their work.

http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2666273,00.html?chkpt
=zdhpnews
01


--------------------------------
Why can't you run Linux on a P4?
--------------------------------
It was big news the other week -- Most distributions of
Linux won't run on a P4. Of course, the reasons behind it
were never published. The author blames Microsoft (and a
case could be made for it) but I'll just chalk it up to
miscommunication on Intel's part.

http://www.linux.com/hardware/newsitem.phtml?sid=1&aid457


-----------------------
AVI and ASF under Linux
-----------------------
Here is a plug-in for XMMS to let it play AVI and ASF files,
two formats common to Windows machines (the latter more than
the former). Read the comments on this page if you're going
to install it, as there are some traps you may run into.

http://www.xmms.org/comments.html?show=P122

-------------------------
4) App o' the week
-------------------------

Anyone remember the DOS game, Scorched Earth?  Destroy the
enemy tanks with high-powered weapons before they get you.
Well, it's been ported to X, and is as fun as ever.  It has
hooks for network play... Anyone up for a game?

http://freshmeat.net/projects/xscorch/

-------------------------
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