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Linux News Issue 11
L i n u x N e w s
A summary of the goings-on in the Linux community
Issue #11 Jan 10 to Jan 17
Mottomme: "Hackeroida ja Auttaa"
***** For ASCII Readers
This ASCII version of Linux News was produced by running the TeX
version through detex.el. I'm sorry if it seems a little rough...
I put all my efforts into the typeset copy! I have a couple of ideas to
improve this .... I think I'll do the ASCII first and paste it into
the TeX wrapper. I tried dvi2tty but I think it may have become
confused by the double column stuff: it wasn't as good as the detex
method. Lastly, the best idea may be to write a good awk filter, but I
must find time to learn awk. Any suggestions are welcome of course.
***** My Two Cents
Well it's here and it's cool it's the TeX LiNuX NEWS!
As Linus said about the "Loading...." display incorporated in the
0.12 kernel, "Run, don't walk to see this". I've been playing around
with TeX for a little while and now with Linux News I have a
wonderful excuse to really dig in and learn it. The two column format
and lots of great macros are all from Hunter Goatley's sample newsletr.tex
file and the sample newssamp.tex which is included in the
/usr/TeX/lib/tex/inputs directory of the distribution. These
formatting macros and examples make it simple to produce a pretty nice
looking newsletter without really knowing TeX. My other reference
is Michael Doob's Gentle Introduction to TeX, which is just
great for getting started and, very importantly, it's free. I
recommend using emacs and Kresto Thorup's auc-tex elisp package from
the elisp archive at Ohio State. If you use X then you can use xdvi to
preview documents and voil'a.... typeset quality hardcopy.
TeX is one of those things that people like to get religeous about it
seems; they either love it or they hate it. I love it. Non-programmers
may gasp when they see the source to a document but I don't
think it's any more bewildering than any of the large wysiwyg
packages. Of course, I admit to having a marked aversion to word
processors in general, when I was a MS-Dos user I did all my
work with a nice little editor called Qedit and a bunch of add--in
macros. The point I'm making (Ah hah!) is this: if you
are new to text manipulation under *nix, go ahead and try TeX, it's
really not all that hard to get started, despite what you may have heard.
Be careful to use 's flexibility and fonts with moderation
though or you'll end up sounding like Haley Mills on a capucino bender.
***** Announcements
- January 7 Overlooked last issue was Anthony Rumble's
announcement of a new modem server which sports modem initialization,
binary lock files, locked speed connection or follow connect speed,
etc.
FTP:sunsite.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/
Incoming/mdm.2.05.sh.Z
- January 10 -- Muhammad Saggaf announced Seyon 1.74 today, a
BETA version which supports speeds up to 115200 bps.
FTP:sipb.mit.edu:/pub/seyon/new-beta
- January 10 -- Mika Liljeberg has uploaded binaries and diffs
for tcsh-6.03, the enhanced C type shell for Linux. A patch is
included to help with problems with POSIX job control. Compiled with
gcc2.3.3
FTP:nic.funet.fi, tsx-11.mit.edu and sunsite.unc.edu
- January 10 The new net FAQ is now available. Phil says he
will revise to include setup for standalone sans network card.
FTP:sunsite.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/Incoming/
faq-net-0.99.2
- January 11 -- Rik Faith has uploaded new manpages to tsx-11
including fdisk.8, login.1, rdev.8, shutdown.8, update.8, and others.
FTP:tsx-11.mit.edu: rik-man.tar.Z
- January 11 Peter MacDonald announced a new SLS 99pl2 which will
completeley upgrade parts 'a', 'b' and 'c' of the distribution. Peter
remarks that this is a massive upgrade which includes gcc2.3.3 and
libc 4.2. Lpr, fixed Minicom, system V init, emacs info, and shadow
passwd are also there.The kernel includes the selection patches to
enable mouse cut and paste in virtual consoles and also the ipcbeta
patches for interprocess communication and shared memory. X11 will not
be upgraded until Xfree86 1.2 is ready.
FTP:tsx-11.mit.edu:/pub/linux/SLS
- January 12 -- Mike Jagdis has uploaded bootsys3.taz, a SYSV
boot environement and init which supports run levels, ctrl-alt-del
trapping, and more. Needs libc 4.2. Docs, manpages and the all
important example scripts are provided!
FTP:tsx-11.mit.edu, nic.funet.fi, sunsite.unc.edu:
bootsys3.taz
- January 12 Lars Wirzenius reminds us one last time that the
crossposting of articles from comp.os.linux.announce to comp.os.linux
will cease ``around thursday (in some unspcified timezone)''. If you
don't have news access and can't improve the situation, join the
ANNOUNCE channel on linux-activists. C.o.l.a is gatewayed to Fidonet
as the LNXMANAGE area.
- January 12 Nigel Gamble announced that he has written an
interrupt-- driven printer driver.
FTP:tsx-11.mit.edu:/pub/linux/ALPHA
/lpirq.1.tar.Z
- January 12 Muhammad Saggaf has released Seyon 1.8 which
incorporates a revised transfer, protocol window, dialing directory,
fallback resources (no app-defaults file needed), complete and updated
man page and speed support for 56700 and 115200 bps. Many other
improvements!
FTP:sipb.mit.edu:/pub/seyon
- January 13 Rick Sladkey has uploaded a new mount package for
Linux. Doug Quale's mount/umount supports NFS and understands how to
deal with non-device mounts like the /proc fs. An NFS man page is also
included.
FTP:sunsite.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/Incoming/
mount-0.99.2.tar.Z
tsx-11.mit.edu:/pub/linux/ALPHA/NFS/
mount-0.99.2.tar.Z
- January 13 Tommy Frandson has released version 1.1 of VGAlib - the VGA
graphics library for Linux. Supports 16 and 256 color modes,
alternates between text and graphics mode, text mode restorationn,
tseng et4000 color modes and monochrome 640x480 mode. Note: the
included { runx/} program may be used by those who have text mode
restoration problems after X is quit.
FTP:sunsite.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/Incoming/(???)
January 13 Thomas Dunbar announced hp2xx binary and docs:
``The `hp2xx' program is a versatile tool to convert vector-oriented
graphics data given in Hewlett-Packard's HP-GL plotter language into a
variety of popular both vector- and raster-oriented graphics formats.
The various supported output formats include Encapsulated PostScript
(EPS), MetaFont, PCX, IMG, and several formats intended to facilitate the
generation of graphics within TeX documents. In addition, `hp2xx'
output is printable on the HP Laserjet/Deskjet printer series, and it
may be used as a HP-GL previewer on many platforms, e.g. X11.''
FTP:tsx-11.mit.edu:/pub/linux/packages/TeX/
hp2xx.taz
- January 13 Linus sent 0.99 patchlevel 3 to nic.funet.fi:
"Still no 1.0 - I have had a couple of reports of problems, so I'll make
yet another 0.99 release. The diffs (against 0.99.2) and complete
source can be found at nic.funet.fi: pub/OS/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus as usual,
and will probably show up at the other sites pretty soon.
0.99.3 contains no real new features, but the diffs are pretty big
anyway (100kB+ compressed): various things have moved around a bit and
there are a lot of minor changes. The changes include (but are not
limited to):
- the math emulator code now also understands the unofficial codes (in
case somebody followed the ML math emulator thread). I'd be
interested to hear whether ML now works with the emulator.
- various SCSI driver changes
- some re-organization of the tty open/close code to remove a few race
conditions.
- interrupt handling rewrites (two-level interrupt code cleanups)
- the serial drivers are tytso's alpha-drivers: they aren't quite
completed, but as they need the interrupt handling patches to get
ready, this is probably the least traumatic way of doing it.
- some more minor keyboard driver changes (mostly taking advantage of
the two-level interrupts)
+ a lot of other minor changes. I once more hope people will try it
out, and report any problems or successes to me.
Known problems:
- there seems to be something weird going on in the ST-0x driver with
some scsi disks.
- tcp/ip is reportedly still not quite stable, and I can't even test it
out.
NOTE! The DMA functions have changed for the high DMA channels - all DMA
functions now take their arguments as the number of bytes instead of the
old way of using bytes for ch 0-3 and words for ch 5-7. This might lead
to problems with the SoundBlaster driver, which may need editing. ''
- Ed Carp has uploaded a patch to Mailpak-1.4 that fixes a
problem with { cu/} not setting the ports correctly with the
``--e'' or ``--o'' switches.
FTP:sunsite.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/Incoming/
/mailpak-1.4/uucp.patch.1
- January 14 Kenneth Osterberg has a new XView port ready which
are compiled with gcc2.3.3 and libc4.2. The Open Look Virtual Window
Manager is also now included (!!!) and DIRMENU and WINMENU are now
fixed. UIT, the tool/class library for C++ programmers is there also.
FTP:tsx-11.mit.edu:/pub/linux/binaries/
/usr.bin/usr.bin.X11/xview3L3.tar.Z
- January 16 Bradley E. Smith has uploaded SUIT 2.3 to sunsite.
It is an interface toolkit for X.
FTP:sunsite.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/Incoming
***** Bye
I'm amazed at the popularity of Linux News... thanks to
all who sent mail, motto translations and even postcards. I spent so
much time on this I wasn't able to answer everyone and there are some
missing articles in this issue. All in all though, I think it turned
out positively swimmingley! As usual, comments, submissions,
suggestions etc. to:
{tree@cs.jhu.edu}
{tree@midget.towson.edu}
{{--- { Happy Hacking} ---}
{to everyone!}}
