Stop the Presses
Linux Grows Up
by Phil Hughes
Each month we allocate a page for this column.
The space is reserved past the regular deadline to give us an extra week to find the right
earth-shattering event to report--which sometimes doesn't happen. This month we missed the initial deadline and were left with about a day to find some earth-shattering news and
write the column.
Back in the early days of Linux there was a new kernel almost every day,
which produced a continuous stream of new topics.
Linux has grown up--it's too stable, reliable and routine.
Or is it?
I went to the comp.os.linux.announce newsgroup hoping to find an
exciting event.
I didn't.
I read it again.
Still no exciting event.
Then, I realized I was so busy looking for one thing
that I had missed an event of more significance than any single post.
Linux is being recognized as a serious OS with real commercial
potential.
It's not that we haven't had anything commercial posted before, it is that
there were so many posted in the last week and the type of information
posted.
Here is a sample:
- Process credit cards on your computer:
Credit Card Verification System (CCVS) from HKS, Inc. is a package that
gives you a command line interface and GUI to do credit card processing as
well as libraries to call from programs.
- WebMagick Image Web Generator 1.29:
WebMagick is a package which makes putting images on the Web as easy as
magic.
Or, more specifically, WebMagick builds HTML pages and image maps from a
set of image files.
Thus, rather than manually building a page using thumbnails and
writing HTML so the thumbnails are clickable, WebMagick builds maps
consisting of the thumbnails and writes the HTML.
Besides saving you time, WebMagick improves performance by decreasing
the number of individual files that make up a clickable page.
- Linux nominated for a European Software Excellence Award:
These awards are sponsored by Ziff-Davis,
Europe's largest computer magazine publisher.
The three finalists for the Desktop Environment Award were Microsoft, IBM
and Red Hat Software. They said: ``... Linux has grown up from being a
programming freak's playground to a stable and easy to install operating
system. ...''
- Web-based application development platform:
TalentSoft Web+ 3.0 is a premier web-based application development
platform for Unix and Windows.
The article states ``Web+ is extremely scalable, having been
tested successfully on a web site with an average of 2,000,000 hits/day,
40% of which are hits to the Web+ server.''
Now, the posting didn't say it was a Linux box that handled the 2,000,000
hits per day, but the product is available for Linux--the limitation is the hardware, not the software.
- VBVM--A Visual Basic 5 Virtual Machine:
This product from Softworks Limited is a portable version of the MS
Visual Basic 5 virtual machine.
It enables you to take VB5 executables and run them, unmodified, on other
platforms.
While not an application, it will make it possible for lots of existing
applications to run on Linux.
- Rent-a-dedicated-server for $250:
Vipex Internet Presence rents Linux servers including DNS and an unlimited
number of domains for $250/month.
- Qbib-1.1 bibliography management system:
Herrin Software Development, Inc.
had built a bibliography management system based on qddb.
It features all sorts of import and export options plus searching and
report generation.
- Motif Interface Builder VDX 1.1:
VDX from Bredex GmbH is a GUI-based interactive tool that generates C and
C++ source code.
- Regulus 1.1:
Regulus is a package to manage customer accounts for ISPs and includes
customer activity logs and a web interface to access those logs.
This is enough of a sample of what's out there to give you the idea.
Being an old Unix hacker, I see this influx of postings as the tool box
getting filled with new, fancy tools.
For example, using Regulus and CCVS, you can quickly put together an ISP
with automated credit-card billing.
Use Web+, WebMagick and a Vipex server to build a web site.
Tie all of this together with a post about an article on Linux in the
June 1997 issue of Business Computer World that concludes that ``Linux is
very solid, widely used, and a real potential threat to Microsoft.''
It also states ``Linux is behind in the availability of applications,
but is catching up.''
Maybe some day STP will cover NT being replaced with Linux.
Phil Hughes is the publisher of Linux Journal and can be reached via
e-mail at phil@ssc.com.