LINUX NEWS
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Thursday, July 5, 2001
Read By Over 6,000 Linux Enthusiasts Weekly!TABLE OF CONTENTS
1) Sean’s Notes
2) Linux News
Microsoft's "Dot Truth"
Estimating the Size of Linux
Linux Standards Base
MS Calls GPL "viral"3) Linux Resources
MRTG and SNMP Software
LILO Help
12 Steps to Freedom
Sorting in PERL
Call me a Sucker4) App o’ the week
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1) Sean’s Notes
It’s been a pretty exciting week. July the 1st was Canada Day, the 4th was Independence Day, and the Linux kernel bumped up a notch to 2.4.6. If you’ve been following the development of 2.4, this is one to grab. Besides some important fixes to ReiserFS, there appear to be a lot of other fixes and improvements.
It’s also been a busy week for attacks on Open Source. On one of my regular visits to Slashdot, I was startled by this article:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid/07/04/013249&mode=thread
It seems Adobe is going after the author of KIllustrator for trying to confuse their trademark. Even though he immediately took down his website until it could all get worked out, they insist that he pay the $2,000 in legal fees, along with a threat of a $400,000 lawsuit.
I’m no lawyer, but those are pretty nasty tactics. I for one will not support a company that makes such threats.
At this point, I’m happy to say I’m Adobe free. I use xpdf to read PDF files, GhostScript to write them, and the GIMP to work with graphics:
http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/ http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/index.htm http://www.gimp.org
xpdf is far faster than the Adobe PDF viewer. If you’re a Netscape Navigator user like myself, you can set it up as your PDF viewer of choice from the Edit->Preferences menu, selecting Navigator->Applications, and finding the option marked “Portable Document Format”. Change “Handled by” to “/usr/bin/xpdf %s”. If the option isn’t there yet, just create one with new, using “application/pdf” as the MIME type, and “pdf” as the suffix. Not only are you making a statement about Adobe, but you’ll notice a significant increase in startup speed, and less memory used.
To write a PDF file requires a Postscript input, which is usually easy to obtain under Unix. (Yes, I realize the irony of using the Adobe file formats.) From the command line, you can run
cat output.ps | gs -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=/tmp/test.pdf -
Replace output.ps with the name of your PostScript file, and the /tmp/test.pdf with what you want the result to be called. Don’t forget that dash at the end of the command. It signifies that GhostScript (gs) is to get the input from STDIN rather than a file. “cat output.ps” dumps output.ps to STDIN, and the rest is history.
If you want to be really slick about it, you could create a print queue that does all that automagically, and emails you a link to the file. I’ll leave this one as an exercise to the reader.
On another note, check out the news about Microsoft calling the GPL and other software “viral software”. This one has me pretty steamed, but you’re spared from hearing my opinion until I have a chance to see how Microsoft explains this one.
Long live the Penguin,
Sean mailto:swalberg@brainbuzz.com
Visit the Linux News Board at http://boards.brainbuzz.com/boards/vbt.asp?b2
2) Linux News
Microsoft’s “Dot Truth”
Microsoft directly attacks Sun Solaris on this website, with multiple pseudo articles claiming that Solaris doesn’t quite stack up to NT. It’s almost sad to see what Microsoft’s marketing department is willing to try. I think this all stems from Sun’s “Reality Check” column, which makes comparisons against other vendors (though it is done far better than dot truth.)
http://www.dot-truth.com
Estimating the Size of Linux
If you had to write all the applications that came on the Red Hat 7.1 CD, what would it cost you? What is the breakdown of various licences within the CD? (this one surprised me!) Believe it or not, someone figured this out, compared it to previous results from Red Hat 6.2, and came up with some very interesting numbers.
http://www.dwheeler.com/sloc/redhat71-v1/redhat71sloc.html
Linux Standards Base
The LSB is a project designed to increase standardization across distributions. This will make it easier for all of us to do our work, not to mention make life easier on the vendors who may be considering porting to Linux. The first release of the document is finally out, so it might be a good idea to see what is in store.
http://www.linuxbase.org/
MS Calls GPL “viral”
In the licence for Microsoft’s Mobile Internet Toolkit is a clause stating that it can’t be used with “potentially viral” software, including Perl and Linux. Nope, not abusing their monopoly position, are they?
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/zd/20010702/tc/ms_attacks_open_source_ 1.html
3) Linux Resources
MRTG and SNMP Software
MRTG is a great tool for monitoring network traffic. This page has some helpful advice on how to use it, some Perl scripts to do some other cool stuff with routers, and even a Windows front end to MRTG.
http://www.geocities.com/mrtg_daemon/
LILO Help
LILO is a pretty complex program, a bit of troubleshooting advice is always welcome. The message in this link has a great summary of the README file, and some good advice on how to troubleshoot.
http://www.linux.cu/pipermail/linux-l/2000-November/006554.html
12 Steps to Freedom
Here is a twelve-step program on how to get Microsoft out of your life. It’s not your typical “Microsoft Sucks” site, but a well thought out Linux advocacy manifesto. Anyone that considers themselves a Linux evangelist should give this one a read.
http://i-want-a-website.com/about-microsoft/twelve-step.html
Sorting in PERL
Sorting can be easy or hard, depending on the data you’re dealing with. Perl has some features that you may not know about, that make sorting easier than you’d think. What I really like about this article is that it progressively builds the code, suggesting better ways to do it.
http://www.cpan.org/doc/FMTEYEWTK/sort.html
Call me a Sucker
I’m a sucker for online contests. But, can you blame me? This one is for a Cobalt Raq 4, and all you have to do is give them a good joke.
http://www.cobalt.com/ads/isp-market/index.html
4) App o’ the week
Looking for a good CAD program for Linux? This one is full of features, and can read/write AutoCAD files. The Linux version is open sourced, though there appear to be add-on packages that you have to pay for.
http://www.qcad.org/index.php3
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