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                        LINUX NEWS
            Resources & Links From CramSession.com
                 Thursday, April 18, 2002
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
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1) Sean's Notes

2) Linux News

	Linux Making It Into Financial Institutions
	Review of Gentoo 1.0
	Top 8 Microsoft Anti-Unix Slogans
	More on the Anti-Trust Remedies

3) Linux Resources

	Tune Those Databases!
	Intro to PostgreSQL
	Active Directory and Linux?
	Rooted? Maybe Not
	Getting a Good Foundation

4) App o' the Week


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1) Sean's Notes
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I'm not that old, but I can remember a time before Internet
Explorer.  I remember XMosaic, and Netscape 1.0, web pages
without tables, backgrounds, or animated GIFs.  (Unfortunately,
I still remember the BLINK tag though.)  Yes, folks, the web
was really that boring at one point.

Then Internet Explorer came about.  Version 1.0 really sucked.
This isn't me speaking as a Linux user, either.  It was quite
awful, bordering on useless.  Netscape laughed "we're not
scared".  And why should they have been?  Microsoft made
operating systems and office suites, not Internet products.

After that, each release of Internet Explorer would add some
features to HTML, and the same with Netscape (boy, would I
have hated to be on the HTML standards committee at that time).
By trying to force web developers to target a particular
browser, each hoped to cut out the other.  But that wasn't
working.  A couple of years passed.

By this time, I have to admit, Internet Explorer and Netscape
were both quite similar in terms of functionality.  Kudos to
Microsoft for coming back from behind and building a decent
product.

But that wasn't enough.  If you can't force the web developers
to prefer your browser, then assert your dominance on the
desktop and make sure that people have to go out of the way to
use the competition.  Move the updated common controls into the
web browser so that people have to keep up with updates in order
to use their other software.  Integrate the browser with the OS
so that you get more speed.  Make it so the developers will
naturally choose your product if they want web integration in
their applications.  Make it so that the users don't have a choice.

Netscape's on the ropes.  What can they do?

January 22, 1998.  Netscape announces they are placing
Navigator under the GPL.  Mozilla is born.

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT5&STORY=/www/stor
y/1-22-98/399575&EDATE

I remember that the first thing I thought was "this is just
a desperate ploy to get free labour".  The "source only"
releases didn't help my getting into the project; after one
attempt at a compilation I gave up.

In November of that year, AOL announced that it's going to buy
Netscape.  What's going to happen to the flagship browser?

The staunch Netscape fan I was, I continued to use Navigator,
convinced that it would all work out.

I don't know when it was, maybe a year ago, a friend told me
"You have got to try Mozilla!".  So, I gave it a shot. It's
not too bad, but I stuck with Netscape.

Six months ago, I pulled back the latest version, and I was
amazed.  A lot of the things I've decided to live with in
Netscape, such as poor font support, are done very well in
Mozilla.  Tabbed panes get me down to two or three windows
instead of a dozen.  The bookmark navigator starts to make
this newsletter a lot easier.  And it's fast!  And stable!
Plugins for Netscape work just fine, but don't tend to hang
the machine.  But most of all, it just works.  I really
notice a difference at home, where I run Mozilla, and work,
where I'm forced into Explorer.  My machine doesn't grind, it
seems to use fewer resources -- I'm just plain happier using
Mozilla.

Any time now, over four years after the releasing of the
source, we can expect the release of Mozilla 1.0 within weeks.
The project has been slammed by prestigious people who worked
on the project.  It's survived the AOL takeover, the dot
bombs, and most of all, Microsoft.  Mozilla 1.0 isn't so much
an initial release as it is a triumph for Open Source.

It's one thing to build an OS that can kick the pants off of
NT, but it's quite another to build a product that could
conceivably become the benchmark by which others are measured.
Mom may never use Linux, but she could feel right at home in
Mozilla.  It's intuitive, it's fast, it's stable, it's free of
restrictions.  All this without having to embed yourself into
the OS, or rely on underhanded tactics.

Open Source means higher quality products, and better access
to them.  Mozilla runs on everything from AIX, through Linux,
OpenVMS, OS/2, and on to Windows.  Its goals aren't set
according to profits, they're set according to what needs to
be done to make a great product.  More eyes on the code mean
fewer bugs.  More access to the code means other projects can
benefit.

If you've never been involved with an Open Source project,
now is the time.

http://www.mozilla.org/get-involved.html

You'll notice that most of the calls for help aren't for people
to code (though that's always nice), but for documentation and
bug reports.  Find a page that doesn't render properly?  Try
to figure out what causes it, and submit a bug report.

With all that's going on with Microsoft and the Anti-Trust
lawsuits, it's vital that a high visibility project like
Mozilla succeeds.  No longer am I confident that Netscape/AOL
are the ones that are going to fight IE in the browser wars,
my money is on Mozilla.

Long live the Penguin, and more importantly, the Dragon,

Sean
mailto:swalberg@cramsession.com

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2) Linux News
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Linux Making It Into Financial Institutions
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"When the loss of about 1,000 computer servers in the World
Trade Center attacks put Lehman Brothers in the market to
buy millions of dollars of systems, it looked at a slightly
unorthodox option: Linux, an operating system that is as
noteworthy for its speed as for the fact that its source
code is free."

http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/article.html?id040300306
4

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Review of Gentoo 1.0
--------------------
Along with an odd sounding name, this distribution has an
odd feature... It's all source. Yep. The installation process
involves downloading and compiling everything, including the
kernel. The benefit is that everything on your system can be
compiled for your particular processor. The author claims it's
noticeably faster... I wonder if he included the hours taken
to download and compile everything?

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id“7&page=all

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Top 8 Microsoft Anti-Unix Slogans
---------------------------------
With their "We have the way out" campaign, Microsoft is going
to need some good anti-UNIX slogans. Here are 8 beauties! My
favorite is #4, but I'll let you be the judge.

http://topica.com/lists/Top5Internet/read/message.html?mid06707057


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More on the Anti-Trust Remedies
-------------------------------
Though most of this article is somewhat against the broader
sanctions against Microsoft, it does point out cases where
Microsoft has hired an economics professor to publish
supposedly objective papers defending their position.

http://www.idg.net/ic_849284_1773_1-3921.html

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3) Linux Resources
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Tune Those Databases!
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The more I play with PostgreSQL, the more I like it. It's
powerful and fast. Speed in a SQL database doesn't only come
from the software you install, though, there are a lot of
things you as a programmer or DBA can do to help. Here are a
few.

http://techdocs.postgresql.org/techdocs/pgsqldbtuning.php

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Intro to PostgreSQL
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Just what is PostgreSQL anyway, and why should you even look
at it? This article gives a brief look at what this database
can do, and why you want to keep it in mind.

http://www.brw.net/php/whitepapers.php?t=1&wpid=9

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Active Directory and Linux?
---------------------------
One great thing about the way that UNIX, and Linux in
particular, is put together is its modularity. This
approach lets you integrate your Linux box into almost any
environment. In this case, authenticating against an Active
Directory server.

http://online.securityfocus.com/infocus/1563

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Rooted?  Maybe Not
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I was running a root kit detector on some machines the other
day, and one came up as having a possible Linux Kernel Module
(LKM)-based rootkit on it. Since all other tests came up
clean, I was suspicious of the result. This explanation set
my mind at ease.

http://www.der-keiler.de/Newsgroups/comp.os.linux.security/2002-02/
0451.html

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Getting a Good Foundation
-------------------------
In a rush to get to the good stuff, people sometimes ignore
the basics. Though there are a couple of higher end Linux
certifications, some of the hardware skills from A+ are still
valuable. This article talks about the benefits of A+. Though
it specifically references the Microsoft certifications,
there's no reason it can't apply to the Linux world.

http://infocenter.cramsession.com/TechLibrary/GetHtml.asp?ID98


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4) App o' the week
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Many of you are probably familiar with Ghost, which lets you
clone Windows systems for quicker rollouts or recovery.
Searching for a Linux equivalent, I found PartImage. It
supports network based imaging, too.

http://www.partimage.org/

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