evil_one writes: "Debian Planet is reporting that the official announcement has gone out regarding Debconf 2002. It's going to be held July 6-8th , making it rather convenient for anyone who wants to attend the Ottawa Linux symposium this year."

Cine writes: "James Troup and Sam Hartman recently sent a note to all debian mirror maintainers, to inform them about the current situation and future plans. Sometime after March 8th, crypto software like OpenSSH, SSL support, and many other enhancements will be integrated into the debian main archive. This is in accordance to legal advice the Debian project received."

GlobalEcho writes: "Developers associated with Darwin are beginning to think about package management and source building. At issue is whether something like dpkg, RPM or *BSD's ports could suffice, or whether they are all just way too mid-90's. Jordan Hubbard himself (now of Apple) weighed in with his opinions (user and passwd 'archives'). Apparently he thinks it is time for something more advanced, and he gives some ideas about what that might look like. Does anyone else have good ideas?"

robstah writes: "Vintage Alpha based systems, such as the DECstation are often available going cheap at auctions or free from a skip as companies 'upgrade' to PCs. As many goverments now want to prevent computers from ending up in landfill one solution is for us geeks to recycle. How? Installing Debian of course. Debian Planet has a great article on installing Debian on vintage Alphas."

evil_one writes: "The end is finally here for Corel, who released a Debian based linux distro a couple years ago (now owned by Xandros) Has announced that they are shutting down their Open Source Development web site as of March 1st. As many readers already know, Corel has helped the community on a huge scale, providing the Linux world with versions of Corel Draw and Corel WordPerfect. It's sad to see this, especially with the amount of work that Corel has put into Wine and their other projects, which include add-ons to KDE." Guess I can retire this topic icon ;)

willybur submits word of this Debian Planet story on the upcoming release of its next stable version. The article says: "According to Anthony Towns (our beloved Release Manager), woody is nearing release. All but three RC base bugs are fixed now, and the bugsquashing party is working through the RC bugs in standard. It's not all good news though. The bad news is that this means we're probably releasing soon, and that of the hundreds of less important packages with RC bugs (eg, bugzilla, craft, crossfire-{client,server}, epic4, fvwm95, gmc, gnome-admin, intuitively, kdepim, moon-lander, tkdesk, wine, and xosview) will be getting randomly ripped out of testing ... Check the stuff that's important to you and get it fixed before it's too late." Says willybur: "See the announcement on debian-devel-announce."

Dare Obasanjo contributed this followup to an article entitled The Myth of Open Source Security Revisited that appeared on the website kuro5hin. He writes: "The original article tackled the common misconception amongst users of Open Source Software(OSS) that OSS is a panacea when it comes to creating secure software. The article presented anecdotal evidence taken from an article written by John Viega, the original author of GNU Mailman, to illustrate its point. This article follows up the anecdotal evidence presented in the original paper by providing an analysis of similar software applications, their development methodology and the frequency of the discovery of security vulnerabilities." Read on below for his detailed analysis, especially relevant with the currency of security initiatives in the worlds of both open- and closed-source software.

polymath69 asks: "Living on the edge of Debian unstable means that updates sometimes break stuff, occasionally to an extent that is difficult to recover from. This got me thinking about treating the entire set of mounted filesystems as a transactional database. Mark state, try something which might be dangerous, test, and approve (commit) or panic (rollback). Obviously some filesystem support would be required, but with ext3 and reiserfs available, maybe the potential is already there. And such a system would need lots of disk space, but these days that's a demand easily granted. There's lots out there on process-level checkpointing, and even some stuff about system-level checkpointing, but all I've found on that was in the context of saving and restoring processes for a system freeze and restore. But I couldn't find anything on Google or SourceForge about doing this sort of temporary branching in the filesystem. Is this idea feasible? Is anyone working on it?"

moyix writes: "There's an article over at perl.com that describes how to use a perl module called Quantum::Entanglement. Using this module, one can simulate programming for a quantum computer. Developers looking to keep their skills current well into the next decade should check this out ;) Debian folks can grab libquantum-entanglement-perl and libquantum-superpositions-perl."

tal256 writes: "As a proud employee of Libranet, I'm pleased to announce that Libranet has started taking pre-orders for Libranet GNU/Linux 2.0. I feel I should note, of all the vaunted Debian based commercial distributions (Stormix, Corel, Progeny) Libranet is the only one left. We got started before they did and here we still are. Libranet has proven that to stay in the race what you need is a good product rather than millions of dollars behind you; but that's what the world of Free/Open software is all about, isn't it? - Tal" I love Debian, but have never tried Libranet. (The machine I'm typing on was installed with a Stormix CD; my laptop started as a Progeny machine...) Since we seem to be running out of other Debian-based distros, looks like Libranet is my next choice. :)

loopkin noted that the dot is running a bit about the KDE 3 Release. Here's the release schedule, and as you can see, the upcoming weeks will be interesting. I guess I should figure out why my truetype fonts all broke on a recent update to debian unstable so that I can actually enjoy the new releases :)

prospective_user asks: "I am a heavy user of Unix, spend most of my time running Linux and am considering getting myself an iBook, after seeing a considerable amount of exposure Macs/Apple have in both Slashdot and the O'Reilly Network. Given that MacOS X is based on FreeBSD/Mach, I suppose that the usual Unix libraries and environments (like ncurses and tcl/tk) are available in MacOS X (which I hope is true, for text-based applications). In fact, I'm concerned about the Unix side of MacOS X and also plan on running Debian/PPC on it, but I plan to primarily use MacOS X. So, before having an (uncertain) investment in a new platform, it would be reasonable to have a bit more of background on it and thus, the questions: how well does MacOS X support traditional Unix applications? For instance, how do the following applications run under MacOS X (which I use the most): teTeX, GNU Emacs, mutt and fetchmail?" Note that the submittor isn't asking if OSX is or is not a Unix; we've fielded that question already. No, the question here is where does OSX differ from the other unicies.

bXTr writes "Interesting project over at SourceForge. Quoting from the website, 'Debian NetBSD is a port of the Debian Operating System to the NetBSD kernel. It is currently in an early stage of development and cannot currently be installed from scratch. Instead, a tarball of the current envionment is available and can be extracted into a handy directory on a NetBSD system.' Check out the reasons why they're doing it and some interesting commentary at DailyDaemonNews on this."

tfurrows asks: "If any of you have used or own a Jornada 525 you've probably noticed that it's not the lightest, smallest or most advanced PDA out there. But for only $189.00 (or check here) it's not really something to scoff at either; you get a nice piece of hardware at a reasonable price. I've had mine for several months now, I purchased it just after the price drop in November of 2001. I'm very please with it, especially with the hardware (being a Palm convert). My only problem is this: I purchased the unit thinking that many others would be interested in an inexpensive color PDA, and that various hacks and programs would be devised. I was especially looking forward to a Linux Port. How many people out there have one of these things? Is anyone interested in continuing development of hacks (namely loading Linux) for this somewhat outdated PDA (after all, Linux really makes the old stuff shine)? Or is this not such a good deal after all?"' Seeing as the Jornada is based on the Hitachi SH3 processor, it looks like these folks might be the ones that bear some watching. Anyone else with a Jornada 525 have their own Linux port experiences to share?

DJFelix writes: "I'm probably the billionth person to submit this story, but T.J. Duchene has posted a horrifying review of Borland's license for Kylix and JBuilder 5. The license requires giving Borland the right to enter your property, search your systems and records for license compliance. The license also requires the waiving of a jury trial by all parties for all suits including class action suits. This type of gestapo licensing will not be accepted by even the most hardcore anti open-source companies. Send an e-mail to pr@borland.com to voice your concern."

Debian potato has been updated to 2.2r5. See the press release for info on what has changed - mostly bugfixes, of course, since this is the stable distribution.

Craig Maloney writes with this review of The Linux Cookbook, a hope-inspiring entrant in the still too-small category of generalized, readable references for non-programmers, as well as the even-smaller category of books with a complete free version online. Craig's found some flaws as well as bright spots, but it still sounds like a good book to check out for users who aren't sure which FM to R, no matter what their level of experience.

Chao-Kuei Hung asks: "I will be teaching a freshman level math class next semester in which half of the course deal will deal with linear programming. I found a number of linear programming software packages from this website, but none of them seems to meet any of the FSF/OSI/Debian's definition of free/open source software, although some come with source code and some cost $0 for educational use. Does there exist truely free software for this topic? Are there LP modules/plug-ins for things like octave, rlab, or R?"

An anonymous submitter sends in: "The Debian GNU/Hurd team released a new Hurd CD Image. Snapshot images are produced at a four to eight week interval and the H2 images are the tenth of the series. The Hurd has grown from one CD image in August 2000 (A1) to four images in December 2001 (H2). These images are snapshots of a developing operating system, so suitable precautions must be taken when making an installation. Similar to other architectures, most important programs reside on CD 1, while the other ones contain less important packages. For the moment, Hurd doesn't support card sound and partition size is still limited to 1 GB. Hurd use the Debian packaging system (dpkg and apt as for Debian linux) , so it is simple to install and update packages."

It's not a contradiction: Free software costs money. (That's because server space, bandwidth, coffee, electricity, computers, and workspace all cost money.) Besides which, the time it takes to code new window managers, programming libraries (and languages), web browsers, and all the other goodies which make a modern computer useful may be spent as a labor of love, but it's time that competes with real-world jobs, family time, vacations in the Riviera and sleep. Besides the relative few who work at work on their Free software projects, the programmers, project managers, web-site maintainers, documentation jockeys and QA volunteers behind the programs we enjoy every day don't seem to be in it for the money, so much as the thrill of releasing new software, a desire to make their own world a little better, and for plain old fun. The staffers and volunteers who put long hours and dedication into organizations trying to safeguard online freedoms are also obviously interested in rewards that go way beyond salaries. This New Year's, consider giving them a little money anyhow. Here are a few ideas; you're invited to point out projects and organizations that I've left out.