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Linux News Issue 01
L i n u x N e w s
A summary of the goings-on of the Linux community
Issue #1, October 5 through 10, 1992
Proudly reporting on Linux since 1992!
**** Editorial
Linux News is an attempt at a weekly news service about what happens
in the Linux community. Most of the material will probably be
announcements of new programs or versions of programs, but I will also
cover things like new ftp sites, Linux articles in the trade press,
and other things that Linux users should in my opinion be aware of. I
won't summarize individual problems and their solutions, unless they
are severe and widespread. I will also try to restrict announcements
to things that are actually on the ftp sites, and meant for public
use; testing releases will not be included (most people who are
probable beta testers will follow comp.os.linux closely anyway).
I hope that Linux News will be useful for people who want to follow
what is happening around Linux, but don't have the time or energy to
wade through the high volume of comp.os.linux. Linux News will always
have a subject like that includes "Linux News" in it, so it should be
easy to find it. Also, if there is enough interest, I might create a
channel on the linux-activists mailing list, so that interested
parties could get it via mail.
The contents of Linux News will be based mainly on postings in
comp.os.linux. I won't include announcements on mailing lists, since
those are usually only intended for the testers who read the lists.
If there is something you want me to include, send it to me via mail.
Feedback via mail is also greatly appreciated, I would especially like
to know whether there are people who appreciate this kind of thing (if
there are none, I will just drop this project).
Note: This is only a summary, if you want more information about a
given subject, please see the source that is referenced at the end of
each note (for Usnet articles, the reference is the Message-ID of the
article). I try to include all the relevant information, including
ftp sites and filenames, as given in the announcements (I probably
won't have the time or energy to check these things, or to find
pointers to other ftp sites).
For this first issue, I have picked announcements (mainly based on the
subject lines) from the past few days. I have probably missed
several.
**** News items begin here.
October 5. David Wexelblat announced Xfree86 version 1.1, the
free X server for 386 Unices, including Linux.
FTP: tsx-11.mit.edu:/pub/linux/packages/X11.
(Source: <1992Oct5.125823.16113@cbnewsj.cb.att.com>)
October 5. H.J. Lu released a bootable rootdisk. This is not the
same rootdisk that Jim Winstead maintains, but Jim and hlu are
considering ways to merge the two disks.
The disk is based on kernel version 0.98. It only contains a few
of the basic binaries. Hlu's announcement gave this partial list:
bash, gnu tar, compress, elvis, doshell, chmod, chown, cp, ls, mv, rm,
ln, mount, umount, swapon, more, ps, free, mkfs, mkswap, fsck, fdisk.
There should be enough software to install Linux on a computer, but
there is little or no documentation. Because of this lack of
documentation, this rootdisk is may not a good idea unless you are an
experienced Linux user/installer. Inexperienced users are encouraged
to try out the MCC and SLS releases.
FTP: tsx-11.mit.edu:pub/linux/GCC/rootdisk.
(Source: <1992Oct5.201521.9644@serval.net.wsu.edu>)
October 5. H.J. Lu released the Linux Base System, a set of three
disk images of floppies with the Minix filesystem that contain a lot
of software. They are intended to be used with hlu's bootable
rootdisk (see above), and require the 4.1 jump table shared libraries,
since these disks don't contain the shared library images (good,
because it saves space, bad because you need to get them from
elsewhere).
Disk 1 contains /bin, /dev and /etc (but ps and friends are on the
bootable root disk, since they are kernel dependent). The software on
this disk includes fileutils 3.3, shellutils 1.7, textutils 1.3, tar
1.10, bash 1.12 (all of these are GNU packages), ldd 1.1, compress
4.2.3, zsh 2.20, doshell, fdisk 0.93, admutil 1.3, poeigl 1.6, LILO
0.5, and setfdprm
Disk 2 contains /usr, including diff 1.15, find 3.7, grep 1.6,
fgrep 1.1, make 3.62, gawk 2.13.2, flex 2.3.7, bison 1.18, patch
2.0.12u7, sed 1.09, elvis 1.6, minicom 1.3.2, rzsz, more, setterm, od,
strings, and uuencode/uudecode.
Disk 3 is a development disk without compiler and library. It has
crt0.o/gcrt0.o, gdb 4.6, as, ar, gprof, ld, nm, objdump, ranlib, size,
and strip.
FTP: tsx-11.mit.edu:pub/linux/GCC/basedisk.
(Source: <1992Oct5.201812.9714@serval.net.wsu.edu>)
October 6. H.J. Lu told that gcc 2.3 should be released by Richard
Stallman in a couple of weeks, and that it has Linux support built in.
(Source: <1992Oct6.162001.23488@serval.net.wsu.edu>)
October 6. Rick Sladkey released a new version of his port of GNU
Emacs for Linux. The new version is 8 bit clean, which is useful for
many Europeans whose alphabet includes letters that are encoded with
the top bit set. It also has XMenu support for the X11 version. It
is compiled with libc-4.1 and lixX11-2.1.
Changes from the early 4.1 jump table release include TCP/IP
support with open-network-stream, larger sharable code segment,
compiled with jump-table library, emacsclient and server work
correctly, full Berkeley /etc/termcap included.
Rick says that if you don't need the new version unless you need
eight bit I/O, or want the X11 version.
FTP: tsx-11.mit.edu, nic.funet.fi, and sunsite.unc.edu (directory
names not given in announcement, but probably the usual directories
for binaries). Files: emacs-4.1.tar.Z (README and diffs),
emacs-etc-4.1.tar.Z (support programs), emacs-shared-4.1.tar.Z (non-X
version and its DOC file), x11emacs-shared-4.1.tar.Z (X11 version and
its DOC file).
(Source: <JRS.92Oct6000657@lepton.world.std.com>)
October 7. After a longish pause of three months, a new version of
the FAQ was released by Marc Corsini. It was both posted to the
newsgroup, and sent to FTP sites. The FAQ maintenance has been
divided among several people, with the hope of making it possible to
release new versions more often.
FTP: tsx-11.mit.edu:/pub/linux/doc/FAQ_10_05
(Source: <1992Oct7.175825.1127@athena.mit.edu>)
October 7. H.J. Lu released a port of ispell 3.09 for Linux. Ispell
is a spelling checker modelled after the ITS spelling checker. It can
run both interactively, in batch mode (similar to Unix spell), and
under GNU Emacs. Hlu distributes his port as a disk image.
FTP: tsx-11.mit.edu:pub/linux/GCC/basedisk/ispell309.Z
(Source: <1992Oct7.165002.11433@serval.net.wsu.edu>)
October 8. Peter MacDonald announced that the new version of the SLS
release (based on the 0.98 kernel) has been uploaded to tsx-11, and
that a proper announcement will be made shortly, after a few people
have tested it.
(Source: <1992Oct8.223711.496@athena.mit.edu>)
October 9. H.J. Lu released gccdisk, a repackaged gcc 2.2.2d7. This
is not a new version: there are no changes to the compiler or
libraries, it is only intended as an easier way to install things.
Gccdisk is meant to be used with the Linux C library disk (see earlier
note), because gccdisk does not include any shared library images that
are necessary to run the programs (they use jump table 4.1).
There are two disk images of Minix filesystem floppies. The first
one includes gcc, cpp, cc1, and crt0.o/gcrt0.o, and some header files
for /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i386-linux/2.2.2d/include. The second disk has
cc1plus.
FTP: tsx-11.mit.edu:pub/linux/GCC/gccdisk
(Source: <1992Oct9.040521.7441@serval.net.wsu.edu>)
October 9. H.J. Lu released a Linux C library disk, with version 4.1
of the library. Like the gccdisk, this is only a repackage, not a new
version.
Libdisk consists of two disk images of Minix filesystem floppies.
The first disk contains the shared library images and a few libraries,
the second one has the header files and the rest of the libraries. To
get all the required header files, you also need Linux kernel source
(0.97 pl 6 or above), since some of the header files contain kernel
version specific information (so those headers are part of the kernel
sources of the version that they belong to).
FTP: tsx-11.mit.edu:pub/linux/GCC/libdisk
(Source: <1992Oct9.040653.7509@serval.net.wsu.edu>)
October 9. David Johnson told that he had hacked gnuplot 3.2 for X11
under Linux, and had sent the source code to tsx-11; he did not
provide binaries due to an old compiler and slow upload connections.
Leon Dent reported that the patches for 3.1 with VGA also worked
for him with 3.2.
(Source: <1992Oct9.053806.29092@ns1.cc.lehigh.edu>)
October 9. H.J. Lu released a new version of his bootable rootdisk.
This version is based on kernel version 0.98 pl 1, and also updates
compress to 4.2.4.
There were some problems with corrupt versions on tsx-11, but they
should be corrected by now. If you downloaded before this date, and
are having problems, you might want to try downloading again.
FTP: tsx-11.mit.edu:pub/linux/GCC/rootdisk
(Sources: <1992Oct9.062632.10646@serval.net.wsu.edu>,
<1992Oct9.184533.18763@serval.net.wsu.edu>)
October 9. Bruno Haible announced that CLISP, a Common Lisp
implementation, is available for Linux. He says it is mostly CLtL1
compliant.
The files are packed with LHA, so you need a copy of that to
unpack them.
FTP: tsx-11.mit.edu:/pub/linux/packages/lisp, and
ma2s2.mathematik.uni-karlsruhe.de [129.13.115.2]:/pub/lisp/clisp/linux
(this latter one is will always contain the newest version).
(Source: <1992Oct9.230722.27309@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de>)
October 10. Bruno Haible announced a port of MAXIMA for Linux. It is
an implementation of Macsyma in Lisp by Bill Schelter, and requires
CLISP (see above).
FTP: tsx-11.mit.edu:/pub/linux/packages/lisp
(Source: <1992Oct10.010541.22905@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de>)
