Category: Linux

This announcement notes that some Debian servers have been compromised.  Via Mark’s b-links.

Nokia’s Series 90 MIDP SDK now supports Linux.  And by Linux, the release notes mean Red Hat Linux 8.0.  It was tested secondarily on RH 7.2.  No mention of Red Hat 9, Fedora, or Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

This whole Linux thing is just going to get more complicated.

Newsforge:

DriverLoader licenses for end-users have been affordably priced at USD $19.95 and can now be purchased online from Linuxant’s web store (https://www.linuxant.com/store). Upgrades to future versions will be provided at no extra charge for at least one year or longer. Free 30-day trial licenses also remain available. Due to significant development/support costs, and inconclusive discussions with hardware vendors, it is not possible to make DriverLoader completely free for end-users at this time.

This is ka-huge.  I’ve been using the trial version of the Linuxant drivers on my Laptop.  It allows me to use my otherwise unusable Broadcom 802.11g chip under Linux.  I hope that eventually the wlan-ng project will support the chipset, but the Linuxant drivers are worth every penny of that $19.95.

So far the Linuxant drivers have been working just fine under SuSE 9 and I will definitely be picking up the $19.95 full version of the drivers.  Sure, I could stick in my Linksys 802.11b card, but that totally kills the all-in-one nature of my laptop.  I was worried that Linuxant would price the drivers out of the range of normal users, but they managed to keep prices below what I am willing to pay.

ZDNet:

CyberGuard, a manufacturer of security and networking hardware, announced a plan to acquire a competitor called SnapGear, which builds Linux-based products, the companies said Thursday. Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based CyberGuard will pay $16 million, $1.6 million of which is cash and the rest of which is stock, in a deal expected to close by the end of the current quarter.

And two Linux-based VPN/firewall companies become one.

Via EntLinux, Novell is picking up SuSE:

PROVO, Utah — Nov. 04, 2003 — Novell today announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire SUSE LINUX, one of the world’s leading enterprise Linux companies, expanding Novell’s ability to provide enterprise-class services and support on the Linux platform. With the open source expertise of SUSE LINUX and Novell’s world-class networking and identity solutions and support, training and consulting services, Novell will be able to deliver Linux and all its components – from the server to the desktop – and give organizations a secure, reliable and mature Linux foundation. Novell will pay $210 million in cash to complete the acquisition. The transaction is subject to regulatory approval and the winding up of shareholder agreements. Novell expects the transaction to close by the end of its first fiscal quarter (January 2004).

I must not have been paying attention, because I didn’t see that one coming.  I really hope that Novell manages to do well with Ximian and SuSE, kicking butt in the enterprise without forgetting the little guy that runs SuSE in his basement…

More coverage:

• Fooworks
• Nat
• Chris Gulker
• PCLinuxOnline
• Emergic
• Infoworld
• Kevin Devins

Newsforge has details about the keynotes scheduled for Linux World Conference & Expo scheduled for January 20-23 2004 at the Javits Center in New York.

It looks like IDG is embracing BOF sessions this year, which is A Good Thing ™.  I will definitely head up to LinuxWorld for at least one of the Expo days, and depending on how the sessions work out I might spend a day or partial day in some of those.

If anyone is planning to head up/out/over to LinuxWorld NY, let me know and maybe we can meet up.

I would definately have both Raggle and PyTone in my console-based app dream team.  Who is on yours?

Edd pointed me to Broadcom 54g Drivers for Linux released by Linuxant via a press release posted to LWN.

It’s not the One True solution, as Edd put it, but it’s a start.  Ideally I’d like to use drivers that were GPL’d/LGPL’d and incorporated into Wlan-ng or the kernel source.  The licensing of these drivers also concerns me a bit:

* Linuxant is happy to provide free trial DriverLoader licenses, while discussions are under way with hardware vendors to finance development costs. Linuxant hopes that DriverLoader will remain free for end-users.

This is definately a great product, and very useful, as there are bajillions of Broadcom chipsets out there in the wild.  I’ll definately be keeping an eye on this and other 802.11g Linux projects.

One of the interesting things that hit me as “way cool” while using Mandrake 9.1 was the inclusion of Zeroconf (aka Rendezvous) in the network setup wizard.  You could configure manually, or you could use BOOTP/DHCP/Zeroconf.  How cool is that?

I wasn’t able to test Zeroconf out, as I only have aging Mac hardware (one has a G4 processor upgrade though, does that count?) and nothing that runs OS X.  There is a Sourceforge project that includes a partial yet working implementation of Zeroconf for Unix/Linux, but it’s really nice to see something like this enabled by default in a Linux OS.

You can download zcip for Unix/Linux, and there is also a Debain package.  It appears that Mandrake also uses zcip.  A quick googling yields no RPMs for Red Hat, but it shouldn’t be too hard to compile from source.  At the time of this writing, I can not access zeroconf.org, but it is/was an informative site.

Today I tried out Mandrake 9.1 on my ze4430us laptop.  I tried Debian the other day with mild success, but I’m looking for something that ‘just works’ out of the box.  The Mandrake 9.1 install went just fine.  The install process was extremely easy and quite pretty.  One thing to note is that if you configure your mouse as a ‘Microsoft Wheel Mouse,’ you’ll be able to use the scroll pad to the right of the touchpad.

The major problem that I have with Mandrake 9.1 is that it hangs while initializing PCMCIA, which is a classic death scene for many Linux distros.  I was able to get around it by passing PCMCIA=no to the kernel at boot.  Unless there’s a reasonably easy fix, Mandrake 9.1 probably isn’t going to work for me, since I need to use a PCMCIA Wi-Fi card.  I am currently downloading 9.2-rc2 to see if that will solve my problems.

Overall I was impressed with Mandrake.  The install process was easy but at the same time allowed me to put various dialogs into ‘expert’ or ‘advanced’ mode.  The package selection was pretty straightforward, and it allowed me to select individual packages.

Once I was able to get it to boot, everything looked nice.  The desktop is minimal yet functional, with pretty much everything you need on the start menu (the foot or the K depending on your environment of choice).  I have not really had a chance to poke around, but it seems quite zippy with clean lines.

I’ll be installing another OS this evening, but I think I’ll be keeping a Mandrake partition, at least for now.

Update: 9.2rc2 still hangs at PCMCIA init.  🙁

I managed to misplace the three Red Hat 9 CDs that I had burned for installing.  For some reason the install was freezing at the very first screen with input.  I was ready to give up, but Erik suggested the catchall linux nousb boot option, which tends to play nice with some laptops.  I was going to give it a go, but since I can’t find the CD’s, I’ll have to move on.

I was considering the latest Red hat beta, but since I’m running low on blank CD-R’s, I burned a Debian (Woody) mini-cd and away I go.

I’ve installed a Debian system or two, but I’m by no means a Debian power user, so some of my observations might be obvious to the hardcore Debian user.

First off, the boot from mini-cd went fine.  I went through the ugly but helpful menu driven installer.  Everything was fine until I needed to choose an apt mirror.  Debian didn’t like the on-board 10/100 NIC.  That’s okay, I slapped in a PCMCIA card, connected it up and configured it the manual way.  Alt-F2 took me to a new window.  I logged in and typed ifconfig eth0 up followed by ifconfig eth0 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.  I had to fiddle with route for a minute to add a default gateway, but other than that things went smoothly.  I also added a few nameservers to /etc/resolv.conf and went back to the main install window (Alt-F1).

Hopefully I’ll be able to get the built-in NIC working after the install is complete.  I am currently apt getting a ton of stuff for my barebones net install.

Update: Any error that ends with Aiee, killing interrupt handler can’t be good.  Trying again.  It seems to have worked.  I still need to get X and the built-in NIC working though.

My new laptop dropped by around 4:30 yesterday afternoon.  I managed to repartition the drive (after defragmenting and CHKDSKing) in a non-distructive way (nods: Partition Magic).  So far the current plan is to leave about 20 gigs for the XP install, 10 gigs for a FAT32 drive that I can easily access from XP and Linux, and the remaining 7 gigs for Linux.

This brings me to my current dilemma: which distro should go on it?  I have a feeling that I might go through several before I find one that works well and that I really like.  It looks like Red Hat 9.0 works with only minor niggles.  SuSE 8.2 also works pretty well.  Of course the Broadcomm Wi-Fi chip doesn’t work, but I wasn’t expecting it to.  Mandrake 9.1 works with minor issues.  The latest Red Hat Beta might be a good place to look.

It looks like no matter which way I go, something isn’t going to work quite right, but overall it should function.  Of course I’d really like to run something that doesn’t deal with RPMs, such as Debian or Gentoo.  So far I haven’t been able to dig up any information about running these distros on the ze4430us.

I can be my own mobile install party!

OSNews points to a Linux Devices article about SnapGear Embedded Linux, an embedded distro based on the 2.6 kernel.  It is available for download, though you’ll have to build it for your taget architecture:

The following link is the latest snapshot source package that includes support for a wide variety of CPU architectures. It contains support for X86, M68k, ColdFire, ARM/XSCALE, Sparc, NEC v850 and Hitachi SuperH based target hardware. It also contains 2.0.39, 2.4.22 and 2.6.0-test5 Linux kernel sources, glibc-2.2.5, uC-libc, newer uClibc-0.9.21 libraries and a huge collection of application packages – everything you need to build fully functional embedded Linux systems.

Brandon White at Linux Devices reports that many of the improvements being made to the 2.6 kernel are benificial to embedded systems.  From a glance, it looks like latency has been cut dramatically in the 2.6 kernel.  This is definately good news to developers of realtime and near-realtime applications.  There are many other improvements in the 2.6 kernel that allow it to operate on very lightweight hardware (MMU-less processors for example) to very high end systems (64GB addressable RAM on a 32 bit architecture).

The entire article is definately worth reading even if you’re not into embedded systems.  The 2.6 kernel will be good for all machines, big and small.

Atomic Rocket Turtle is a great blog/site that, among other things, documents many hacks (read: modifications), third party compatability reports, and other great info about Plesk Server Administrator.

I really like the SpamAssassin/Qmail/Plesk tutorial.  Thanks.

The site runs on a *nuke, so good old backend.php is an rss feed.

Linux Journal’s Ultimate Linux Box runs on Opterons.  If money were no object, so would mine.