Custom Knoppix, Linux for Small Business, BZFlag, and glibc Concerns
by chromaticLinux Newsletter for 11/24/2003
Good day, gentle readers. This is a short holiday week within the United States, with Thankgiving on Thursday and It's-Wise-Not-To-Shop day on Friday. That doesn't stop us from publishing our usual fare, though. Here's what's new in the world of Linux and open source, as seen in this week's articles:
Noel Davis started the week by discussing Trouble with glibc, his latest Security Alerts column. Remote exploits may be possible in other programs, including xinetd, hylafax, pServ, Quagga, and Zebra. Please check that you're running safe versions.
As the OS wars heat up (and Debian 3.0 approaches), there are ever more opportunities for people to "try out this Linux thing". It's much easier now than in, say, 1998 (when your editor had to scavenge an old PC at work just to put something together), especially with the advent of Knoppix, a Linux distribution that boots and runs off of a single CD-ROM. Robert Bernier's Using and Customizing Knoppix explores how to test Linux with Knoppix and how to create your own custom Knoppix CDs with the applications you want.
What's better than driving little tanks around with your friends? Driving little tanks around and shooting at your friends' tanks! Before dashing off to the hardware store to buy and build turret controls, take a look at Howard Wen's BZFlag article. This ten-year-old application has featured 3-D networked play from the beginning and keeps getting better.
Finally, with all the talk of Linux on the desktop in large companies, you may be wondering how Linux fits into small businesses. One place it makes sense is, as usual, a network server, especially as that affords low-cost and expandable Internet services. Alexander Prohorenko explains the whys and hows in Using Linux as a Small Business Internet Gateway (part one of a two-part article).
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This week's new weblogs feature Tim O'Reilly wondering if people are too quick to claim copyrights, Adam Trachtenberg reviewing ApacheCon 2003, Andy Oram explaining, yet again, that data-transmission mechanisms are different from data, William Grosso considering generics syntax in Java 1.5, and Steve Mallett announcing further open source project polls.
See you next Monday (for various time-zone-related values of "Monday"),
chromatic
chromatic@oreilly.com
Technical Editor
O'Reilly Network
ONLamp.com and Linux Devcenter Top Five Articles Last Week
Why Caldera Released Unix: A Brief History
In January, Caldera, the latest owners of the "official" Unix source code, released some of the older versions of Unix under an open source license. Ian Darwin gives the history behind this.The State of Home-Brew PVRs on Linux
A TiVo is basically a Linux box with some extra software (and a nice service). That's something a competent hacker could replicate. Joe Stump explores the state of the home-brew PVR (personal video recorder) community on Linux as of late 2003.Using and Customizing Knoppix
Several Linux distributions boot directly from CD-ROMs. How many are usable in that state? How many are customizable in that state? Klaus Knopper's Knoppix is perhaps the best known of these distributions. Robert Bernier explains how to use Knoppix and how to customize your own self-booting distribution CD.Using Linux as a Small Business Internet Gateway
Internet access is vital to many small businesses. Creating a reliable and worry-free connection used to be difficult. With good software such as the Linux kernel, wvdial, Squid, Postfix, and iptables, it's reasonably easy to set up Linux as an Internet gateway. Alexander Prohorenko explains how.Installing Oracle 9iR2 on Red Hat 9
While Oracle's understandably proud of their Linux support, Oracle 9i is unsupported on the latest and greatest Red Hat. That doesn't mean it doesn't work, just that you'll have to do a little tinkering. Roko Roic demonstrates how to install Oracle 91R2 on Red Hat 9.
