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Thursday, December 28, 2000TABLE 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 Army3) 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 Linux4) 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
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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