Maximum Linux reports on ALS, Day Two: “Tim O’Reilly has a new project up his sleeve called Peer-to-Peer. A conference for the project will take
place in February in San Francisco discussing Peer-to-Peer networking.”

There’s a format bug in the logging code of the mod_php3 module.
It uses apache’s aplog_error function, passing user-specified
input as the format string. The advisory is posted at LWN.net.

ZDNet has a short story about the number of downloads of the Open Source version of Sun’s StarOffice crashing the server Friday afternoon. Can you say Slashdotted? The Register adds this commentary: “Little by little Sun is getting religion, and when it comes to productivity
apps there’s not actually a great deal of choice, even before you
consider that Microsoft just bought a slice of the other contender.”

LWN.net has an advisory: “The version of curl as distributed with Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 had a bug
in the error logging code: when it created an error message it failed to
check the size of the buffer allocated for storing the message. This
could be exploited by the remote machine by returning an invalid
response to a request from curl which overflows the error buffer and
trick curl into executing arbitrary code.”

From Reuters: Scour Inc., an Internet file-swapping service a la Napster whose investors include Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz, said on Thursday it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

An eWeek story reports on an SEC filing that claims Corel will be able to port Microsoft’s .Net to Linux. But does Linux want it? The Ottawa Citizen adds: “Corel has become the insurance policy that Microsoft needs to ensure it
won’t be left behind if the Linux operating system takes off.”

By Grant Gross
Managing Editor

Perhaps it is appropriate that the Atlanta Linux Showcase and Conference is being staged on the second floor of a shopping mall. The show, in some ways a smaller version of the Linux World conferences, is a shrine to the commercial possibilities of Linux.

But hey, it’s a trade show, and that’s what trade shows are all about. If you wander the show floor, you should expect to have someone try to sell you something, whether a stuffed Tux, a development toolkit for Linux, or a magazine.

One group working hard to pitch their product, and getting a large crowd at the booth, was PocketLinux, an application platform aimed at embedded systems such as PDAs, cellular phones, and digital TV sets. ALS attendees were drooling over PocketLinux installed on Compaq’s iPAQ Pocket PC, the VTech Helio and other PDAs. Minimum system requirements for PocketLinux include a 75-megahertz processor and eight megabytes of RAM.

Tony Fader, PocketLinux’s vice president for marketing, was busy handing out T-shirts Thursday, and sticking little fuzzy penguins with sticky feet on people’s shoulders. In between dealing with customers oohing and ahhing over the half dozen PDAs in the booth, Fader explained that PocketLinux works with Kaffe, an Open Source Java-compliant programming platform, and XML to run on PDAs and other “small resource-constrained devices.”

It should be noted here that you can download PocketLinux for free. The company was selling its product on handhelds at ALS.

The iPAQs at the PocketLinux booth included applications to play music files, to check email, to store addresses, and to write on a notepad. The speakers aren’t great, of course, but you can play MP3s.

PocketLinux’s goal is to provide Linux for all kinds of emerging markets, from powering cell phones to home appliances that could give users reports on their performance. Ean Schuessler, with the PocketLinux partner Brainfood.com, gave the example of home heater, which because of PocketLinux’s use of device-networking standard XML, can than give a report on how its functioning to your handheld or desktop computer.

“The same XML infrastructure we use on the handheld is virtually the same XML standard we’re running on a server,” Schuessler said. “PocketLinux is scalable — it’ll go small and it’ll go big.”

Also at ALS, Epitera announced AbsoluteX, a new Open Source development toolkit based on C++. Booth workers were demonstrating AbsoluteX, and the company plans a full release later in the year. Epitera is calling AbsoluteX “Linux with a twist,” and the company says it’s the answer to existing toolkits for the X-Window platforms that are complex and hard to manipulate.

LinuxPlanet has a review of the newly Open Sourced Star Office: “StarOffice is still the monolistic, monster program it once
was; although it appears to load in a slimmer package, under the hood
you’re always running all of StarOffice, no matter what appears on the
screen. But the look and feel of the product is improved, thanks to some
new True Type fonts; and some elements, like email, are still in
development.”

Slashdot readers talk about Sun’s release of the StarOffice code. The original story is from ZDNet.

SEBASTOPOL, CA — The Internet is driving an unprecedented demand for
access to information, and many of the leading Internet businesses run
their growing enterprises on Oracle databases. There has never been a
better time to be a web application developer who can exploit both XML
(Extensible Markup Language) and the Oracle database.O’Reilly’s just-released “Building Oracle XML Applications” (Steve
Muench, $44.95) gives Java and PL/SQL developers a detailed look at the
many Oracle tools that support XML development-including the Oracle XML
Parser, the Oracle XML SQL Utility, and the XSQL Servlet.

“More than ever before, developers need to be able to rapidly acquire,
integrate, repurpose, and exchange information with other applications
to feed their growing databases and to coordinate their business
operations with those of partners and suppliers over the Web,” says
Muench. “XML dramatically simplifies these tasks.”

Oracle describes Oracle 8i as “the first XML enabled database.”
“Building Oracle XML Applications” shows how to combine the power of
XML and XSLT with the speed, functionality, and reliability of the
Oracle database to build flexible applications. Muench, Oracle’s lead
XML Technical Evangelist and development lead for Oracle XSQL Pages,
delivers nearly 800 pages of useful, timesaving hints and extensive
examples that developers can put to use immediately to build custom XML
applications.

Muench has been a catalyst in helping Oracle development teams weave
XML and XSLT sensibly into their future development plans, and is
uniquely qualified to provide a hands-on, practical guide to the nuts
and bolts of XML and the intimately related XSLT and XPath standards.

Building Oracle XML Applications abounds with tested, commented, and
fully explained examples that can be used to jump-start your own Oracle
XML web development projects. The companion CD-ROM contains JDeveloper
3.1 (for Windows NT/2000), an integrated development environment for
Java.

For more information about O’Reilly’s “Building Oracle XML
Applications,” see: http://www.ora.com/catalog/orxmlapp/noframes.html

Chapter 7, Transforming XML with XSLT, is available free online at:
http://www.ora.com/catalog/orxmlapp/chapter/index.html

To read an article about Oracle and XML by O’Reilly author Steve Muench
go to: http://oracle.oreilly.com/news/oracle_xml_0900.html

Look for the October release of “Oracle SQL: The Essential Reference,”
by David C. Kreines. For details, go to:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/orsqlter/