jjaimon writes "There is a document on different package formats used in Linux/Unix systems. Worth reading." Another reader sends in this guide to creating Debian packages which seems apropos here.

Vicegrip writes "Apparently Sun not only bought extra licenses from SCO, but also obtained the option to buy a nice stake in the company: 'The pact, signed earlier this year, expanded the rights Sun acquired in 1994 to use Unix in its Solaris operating system. But there's more to the relationship: SCO also granted Sun a warrant to buy as many as 210,000 shares of SCO stock at $1.83 per share as part of the licensing deal, according to a regulatory document filed Tuesday.'" A reader points out Ransom Love's 2000 Linuxworld keynote speech.

Kourino writes "Today on LKML, Linus released 2.5.75, which he said will be "the last 2.5.x kernel from me", and that he and Andrew Morton are going to start a 2.6-pre series soon. While this certainly does mean things could get interesting soon, don't hold your breath about seeing the actual 2.6 for a while; there are still many areas that need work. This essentially means that the development branch is going into maintenance mode, and new features probably won't get in after this point. Changes of note in 2.5.75 include a merge of the anticipatory scheduler from Andrew Morton's -mm tree and updates from several architectures."

viewstyle writes "Just when you had heard enough, the ongoing controversy about SCO vs. Linux has popped up over at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). According to Eweek's story, the panelists agreed that SCO is targeting companies like IBM in an attempt to raise cash. Most importantly: "if a company is not after money, suing is not the way to go.""

webmaven writes "Mitch Kapor's Open Source Application Foundation just released a 34 page report on the Desktop Linux market, written by Bart Decrem, who has discussed desktop Linux previously. The OSAF is working on Chandler, which the press have generally described as an 'Outlook Killer', but it's really intended to be in a completely new application category, more similar to Lotus Agenda in some ways than what currently consider a PIM (email + contacts + appointments). The report goes into some detail about the current state of desktop Linux, trends, and various limiting factors, and concludes that while a revolution is not immediately in the wings, a trend can definitely already be discerned, and they expect adoption of desktop Linux to increase over the next few years, and identifies leverage points to accelerate the process."

vaderhelmet writes "Wired has a cool story about how the American Museum of Natural History, funded by the National Science Foundation is using Linux to "construct a pattern of relationships that biologists believe links all of Earth's present and past species -- from the smallest microbe to the largest vertebrate that existed during Earth's 4 billion-year history." They're using their very own homemade supercomputer which ranks in at 107 on the Top 500 supercomputers list. Quote from article: "Linux makes it so easy to create a supercomputer.""

wilfie writes "3DLabs have released linux drivers for their for Wildcat III and Wildcat 4 Graphics accelerators. Being closed source they'll taint your kernel, but what the heck. Press release with penguin-friendly quotes available too." DataSquid has a note about ATI's Linux support: "While on the job hunt, I came across this posting at ATI seeking a project team lead. Last on the list of key responsibilities is "Act as a leader to improve the overall quality of Linux support at ATI." Good news? Certainly better news than what was suggested before."

gaurab writes "A survey on Internetweek says 'SCO's Linux lawsuit and threats seem to be having little affect on IT managers except to make them angry. Fully 91 percent of people responding to an InternetWeek Reader Question said they will not change their Linux deployment plans as a result of SCO's actions.' The article is also available at Yahoo!"

strannik writes "Yahoo/Reuters is reporting that the The Japanese Government will use Linux for it's payroll system. Fujitsu LTD, IBM Japan LTD and OKI Electronic Industry Co. will develop the system by March of 2004. The new system is expected to halve operating costs (to about 350 Billion Yen a year)."

Officially, the theme of this year's Open Source Software Convention (OSCON) 2003 is "Embracing and Extending Proprietary Software," and to that end approximately 1,500 attendees (and companies including Apple, Active State, online book-seller Powells.com and MySQL) are sharing space in three floors of Portland's downtown Marriott, and will until the conference's close on Friday. (Representatives from Microsoft are along for the ride, too. Lunch on Wednesday is Microsoft's treat.) An unoffical theme of ubiquitious connectivity and creative collaborative in much in evidence as well: besides the conference-furnished wireless access points throughout the classroom area, numerous other base stations (like the one I'm connected to right now) have popped up. What do you expect with more than a thousand laptop-toting programmers in one hotel? There's also a "semi-unofficial" wiki (applauded by Tim O'Reilly), an ongoing web log of the conference, and an irc channel filled with conference attendees. Read on for more.

hexidec writes "Haven't seen this here yet, though I may have missed it. Anyway... A group of Australian techies have put together an analysis matrix of the likelyhood of each SCO Unix claim being true, and what outcome would most likely result if so. Puts a lot of the various recent suppositions in one handy place."

Oak Ridge National Lab has purchased from SGI an Altix 3000 (flash movie). This article claims that: SGI Altix 3000 is recognized as the first Linux cluster that scales up to 64 processors within each node and the first cluster ever to allow global shared memory access across nodes. There is more here, here, and here.

levin writes "EETimes is carrying a new story about our good friend Darl McBride, CEO of SCO. His latest escapades include a trip to Japan in response to the CE Linux Forum initiative undertaken by several big-name Japanese tech firms such as Sony and Toshiba. He's putting his famous tainted code dog-and-pony show on parade, trying to influence some of the major CELF founders."

strmcrw writes " San Jose Mercury News has an interview with Linus. He talks about about SCO vs IBM and gives his opinion on Microsoft. He also shed light on his decision to leave chip maker Transmeta for a Linux corporate software consortium, the Open Source Development Lab."

Mauro Tortonesi writes "The Deep Space 6 initiative publishes the first of the new IPv6 Status Pages: Current Status of IPv6 Support for Networking Applications. The IPv6 Status Pages are a survey of the current status of IPv6 support for the Linux networking stack, system libraries and networking applications. At the moment there is only one page concerning the IPv6 support of Linux networking applications, but we are planning to publish more pages soon and to extend our target to other important UNIX-derived OSes (e.g. *BSD) too."

gomoX writes "As seen on C|Net , Linus has announced that the pre-2.6 series will be starting in early July. Despite not having been able to meet the release goal for 2.6 in June 2003, the next stable version is not as far away as you may think. You can take your guess based on the fact there was a 9 month period between first test version of 2.4 and the official release of 2.4.0 on January 2001."

An anonymous reader writes "Free-X have released an exploit for the Xbox that will let you get Linux on the machine without any hardware mods at all... Microsoft is already threatening them with legal action. Here's the Free-X statement. Free-X say they had been trying to contact MS for a month but were ignored, which is why they've released the exploit. Should be interesting to watch this one."

theoddball writes "HP just announced a new PC model (HP Compaq d220) that's available preloaded with Windows or Mandrake 9.1. The machine appears to be targeted to business users, although it's on the lower-end of the scale - specs are here. Mandrake also has a press release announcing the deal, which will grow to include four other HP models. Is this a sign that top tier manufacturers are taking Linux more seriously, or at least seeing a profitable niche?" We commented on MandrakeSoft's status update yesterday.

joestar writes "MandrakeSoft today posted an update letter from its CEO about the company's health. Among other things, it's interesting to learn that the company seems to be on the good track to go out of the "chapter-11 protection" before the end of the year, that it's taking part to several publicly-funded research projects, and that Mandrake 9.1 is having a good success. They also thank for the warm support they received from the community. Worth a read for all Mandrake fans, like myself. Viva la Mandrake!"

Adam Wern writes "Matsushita Electric Industrial, Sony Corporation, Hitachi, NEC Corporation, Royal Philips Electronics, Samsung Electronics, Sharp Corporation, and Toshiba Corporation, today announced the establishment of the CE Linux Forum. CELF will discuss and formalize requirements for extensions to Linux to meet the needs of CE products such as audio/visual products and cellular phones, etc. CELF will publish such requirements and will accept and evaluate open source solutions that support to meet the published requirements. CELF will also promote broad usage of Linux for CE products. IBM, an industry leader in Linux solutions and supporter of open standards ecosystems, is pursuing membership and plans to be an active participant in the CELF."