From LinuxProgramming.com: “Watching the recent food fight over Red Hat’s 7.0 release brings to mind something
that very few people in our industry, especially programmers, seem to remember:
Learning from our own mistakes is always a good thing, but learning from the
mistakes of others is even better. After all, if we’re open-minded enough we can
still get the benefit of the lesson without having to endure the
pain/embarrassment/inconvenience/whatever of making the error. Think of it as
open source learning.”

For all you systems administrators out there, and the people who love them, Linux.com serves up a feature on Unix password management.

Founded by a group of GNU/Linux enthusiasts, MLX s.r.l. has set from the
very start an ambitious project: become a reference point for Linux and Open
Source technologies in Italy. The press release is at Linux PR.

Sun Microsystems has released the source code for its StarOffice, but the Web-based StarPortal version of the software is still delayed, InfoWorld reports. Linux PR has the press release about the code release.

NewsForge was down for about 12 hours Monday because of a faulty power supply on our main server, but returned about 6 p.m.

The server, which had been rebooting randomly late Sunday, refused to boot up about 6 a.m. Monday, said Jamie McCarthy, head programmer at NewsForge. “It was stuck on fsck, waiting for someone at the console
to tell it what to do,” he said.

Server administrators pressed a quad-Xeon 550 into service, and McCarthy spent most of the day copying files over and configuring it — a complete Slashcode installation.

McCarthy wasn’t sure NewsForge needed the power and size of a Type III server, but it does have multiple backup power supplies. “But it turned out that it helped us again already,” he said. “Around 3 p.m., we had a hell of a scare when one of the hard drives apparently flaked out. But since it’s parity RAID, and since the others are working fine, nothing was corrupted.”

NewsForge began posting news again shortly after 6 p.m. Monday, and our service should be back to normal. We’ll try to catch up on all the Open Source news that happened while we were down.

As always, we welcome readers’ input on everything we do at NewsForge. We apologize for the down time Monday.

— Grant Gross, managing editor
grant@newsforge.com

The Secure Digital Music Initiative may not have been hacked yet after all, reports 32bitsonline. “A report in Web ‘zine Salon last week quoted Secure Digital Music
Initiative (SDMI) insiders as saying that all six technologies were
successfully mastered after the organization issued a public
challenge to code-breakers last month. However, the SDMI is saying
this week that it is not yet sure whether challenge participants, who
were competing for $10,000 prizes offered for each technology, have
actually defeated the six methods.”

From a column at LinuxPlanet: “I’m of the opinion that while code forking in and of itself isn’t necessarily a
bad thing, it can lead to a lot of wasted effort (time that could be spent
developing ends up being wasted through postings to nasty flame wars in
discussion groups) and at worst cripple essential projects. I think we can
all agree that embedded Linux is A Good Thing and doesn’t represent a
threat to the main Linux kernel: no one is going to grab a version of
embedded Linux from MontaVista or TimeSys and expect to run it on their
PC. While I’m not entirely sure anymore that embedded Linux represents
the future of Linux, the forking of Linux in the embedded world certainly
doesn’t bother me.”

Enhydra XMLC and next-generation protocol support guarantees
application
delivery to any analog, WAP, i-mode, or J2ME cellular device.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Oct. 16, 2000–Lutris Technologies Inc., the
leading
Open Source enterprise software and services company, today announced
Lutris
Enhydra Wireless, the latest product in Lutris’ family of certified and
supported Open Source Enhydra Java/XML application servers. Lutris
Enhydra
Wireless offers developers, systems
integrators and corporate IT departments the ability to develop a
single
internet application that delivers content to any device, in any
geographic
region, by supporting every major wireless protocol: i-mode, WAP, J2ME,
and
VoiceXML.

“Supporting the protocols that make targeting every device possible is
only
the beginning. What Lutris Enhydra Wireless delivers to our customers
and
ISV partners is the ability to seamlessly deploy one application that
is
accessible by all of their customers, regardless of their Internet
device or
geographic location,” said Yancy Lind, president and CEO, Lutris
Technologies. “Through the power of Open Source, Lutris Enhydra
Wireless
benefits from a worldwide community of developers with local wireless
expertise, and thus guarantees the ability to deploy global
applications.”

Lutris Enhydra Wireless provides developers with the first development
platform specifically designed to deliver content to wireless and wired
devices including phones, PDAs, handheld computers, desktops and
laptops.
Further, unlike other application servers that require a unique
code-base
for each device that will access the application, Lutris Enhydra
Wireless
leverages Enhydra XMLC, a technology developed by Lutris, to
effectively
separate the business logic from the presentation layer, enabling a
single
application to deliver content to any number of devices. This
“one-to-many”
approach significantly decreases time to market and dramatically
improves
application manageability. Additionally, this extensible XML
architecture
ensures that future wireless devices that depend on new presentation
technologies can be easily added to the application with minimal
impact.

“Wireless technology adds yet another level of complexity to the
deployment
environments that today’s application developers must support. A lack
of
standards means that applications targeted at wireless devices must
support
multiple protocols. To ease the burden on the developer Lutris is
taking
their support one step further, beyond just supporting all the
available
wireless protocols,” said Tracy Corbo, senior analyst, The Hurwitz
Group.
“In addition, Lutris is using XML to separate business and presentation
logic making their wireless applications more flexible. This enables
developers to focus on writing applications without worrying about the
wireless protocol du jour.”

To ensure that developers using Lutris Enhydra Wireless have the
technologies needed to meet the new demands of wireless development,
and to
address the absence of a global wireless standard, Lutris has included
support for a variety of leading presentation protocols. These include
HTML,
WML, cHTML, XHTML-Basic, VoiceXML and the new J2ME/MIDp protocols
required
for the emerging Java phones. In addition, Lutris has bundled emulators
for
many of the leading mobile phones, empowering developers to see how the
applications they have built will appear on the phone’s screen at run
time.
To aid in development and deployment, the product also includes
PostgresSQL
7, JBuilder Foundation, Forte for Java Community Edition and
comprehensive
wireless sample applications and source code.

Pricing and Availability
Lutris Enhydra Wireless will be generally available in December 2000.
Pricing for the product is still under consideration, and will include
options for selected training and support packages.

About Lutris Technologies
Lutris Technologies, a leading Open Source enterprise software and
services
company, is the original developer and primary sponsor of Enhydra, a
leading
Open Source Internet application server supporting Java, XML, and
wireless
technologies. Lutris offers a full range of support services and
technical
training to Lutris Enhydra customers and provides complete Internet
consulting services, including strategy and development services, to
the
Enhydra community and to Internet-savvy businesses. Clients range from
entrepreneurs and companies launching new Web ventures to Fortune 500
IT
organizations growing their business with an online presence.
Additional
information about Lutris products and services is available at
www.lutris.com.

Lutris and Enhydra are registered trademarks of Lutris Technologies,
Inc.
Java is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and
other
countries. All other trademarks belong to their respective holders.

Open Source print-and-file server vendor Samba Corp. announced Friday plans to fork its code base because of two warring camps in the company, and reactions have ranged from ho-hum to “we need this like we need a hole the head, reports ZDNet. Linux.com also has an opinion piece called “The Right to Fork.”

LinuxToday.com.au looks at some of the system administration issues that the Red Hat Network confronts users with. “The first thing that you will need to know is that currently only Red Hat Linux 7 is
supported by the RHN, although soon 6.2 will also be supported. So if your
company is running an old 5.2 box, as well you might be, for 5.2 was quite a
reliable release, then forget about the RHN. It’s not supported.”