Mr. Spock writes "BlackRhino Linux has been released for the PlayStation 2. It's developed independently by xRhino, a middleware developer. Check out the details and download instructions on the official website. A Playstation 2 Linux kit is required to use BlackRhino."

Jonathan Andrews asks: "I remember back in the old days reading about a filesystem/device driver that had alomost no seeks of the physical disk. It worked by scanning the heads of the disk from track 0 to the end then back again in a constant motion. Disk reads and writes where cached so that they got written to disk only when the heads where on that part of the platter. My question is simple, now that disks are IDE, have lots of heads and even worse differing Heads/Cylander/Sector translation scemes is this type of system even possible? Would you have to fight the disk cache on the drive? I seem to recall it giving real throughput advantages, if the cache was large enough to hold 'one sweep times worth of data' then the cache almost never blocked and disk writes/reads sustained at the max throughput all the time. Best of all it gets rid of that blased seeking, chewing, seeking noise!"

An anonymous reader asks: "Sun and other UNIX vendors are always claiming that Linux lacks features that their UNIX provides. I've seen many Slashdot readers claim the same thing. Can someone provide a list of these features and on what timeline they might be implemented in Linux?"

Tzaquiel asks: "I've recently gotten involved with a local computer recycling operation. We see quite a variety of machines pass through our hands, from the foolish corporate Pentium III discards to individual donations of Ataris and 286s. Some do end up scrapped for recycling, but most of the machines are tested, refurbished, and given (OS-less, for now) to various charities who find homes for them. I've shown off Linux in-shop on various machines, and the reaction has been positive. But we move a lot of boxes, some very old. Installing Debian on every one of these is not possible (due to time constraints, and end-user confusion) and neither is imaging the hard drive with a properly tweaked distro (hardware variance). Does there exist a distro on 3-7 floppies that would be suitable for use by the unwashed masses? Proponents of Linux speak often of its being able to draw usability blood from a 386 stone - does there exist a distro that can do this without a massive time commitment for every machine involved? Every distribution I've examined thus far has assumed you either have fairly decent hardware or the time to fool around with things if you don't. What I need is a quick-and-dirty, minimal-expendability, floppy-based graphical word-processing-and-web-browsing affair that is right at home on machines that probably should just be left to die. For all the talk of 'Linux and old hardware will be a blessing upon the third world', I would think something like this wouldn't be so hard to find. Surely, if Microsoft did it with DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 a decade ago, it can be done better in Linux now?"

MiniDVfanatic writes "Last year I read an article in Slashdot about using MiniDV as a backup medium. Now I've found a recent article about the same topic in bulmalug.net. It's in Spanish, and it just talks about dvbackup, the same tool recommended in some old Slashdot posts, but it adds some interesting ideas such as data compression and interleaved Reed Solomon for error detection and correction, using a tool called rsbep. According to the author's tests, this should let you backup 13GB in a cheap MiniDV tape in a safe manner, and restore it all later. Example commands provided, with simple workarounds for slow machines which cannot feed the tape at 3.6MB per second." You can fish the translation, for those who need - I was able to get by with my high school Spanish. Pretty cool stuff.

trialsboy writes "A news.com article announces that ODSL has released a set of workloads and test frameworks which conform to the TPC benchmark specifications." (Slashdot parent company VA Software is one of the OSDL sponsors.)

YOU ARE SO FIRED! writes "It seems that the Swiss Robert Kennedy College (with the aptly named website) has released CollegeLinux, a Linux distribution based off of Slackware, to the public. If only my employees could've used this in school - I wouldn't have to fire them so much! See the interview with the dean of the school for more information."

Matey-O writes "I just purchased a Linksys firewall/switch router (WAP54g) and two of their 802.11g cards for home use. Like MANY things linux, I found out after the fact that Linksys' 54g products use a different chipset (broadcom) rather than the intersil Prism chipsets of their linux supported 11b products. So my _main_ question is: does anybody know if/when the broadcom chipset will be supported? Google wasn't very helpful, it came up with an online petition to another Broadcom product, but neither Broadcom, not Linksys plan support for linux soon. My secondary question is: Just where does one go to get info on 'cutting edge' linux development? I've used Linux off and on for years, but never needed to see what was going on this deep into the kernel, nor do I know where to look to see if any development is occurring for this chipset. (meanwhile, RH8 is dormant on the laptop as the XP support is adequate.)"

jkastner writes "In 2001 Boeing was chosen to be the lead system integrator for the Army's Future Combat System. The bumper sticker description of this project is 'see first, understand first, act first and finish decisively,' and while Boeing's official FCS site doesn't have a lot of technical details, but you can find some good information at Global Security. To quote their page, "FCS is envisioned as a networked 'system of systems" that will include robotic reconnaissance vehicles and sensors; tactical mobile robots; mobile command, control and communications platforms; networked fires from futuristic ground and air platforms; and advanced three-dimensional targeting systems operating on land and in the air.' The Phase 2 request for proposals just appeared and the estimated price is $26 billion through fiscal year 2009. The fact that the Army is spending billions of dollars on a project isn't anything new, but a little known fact is that the OS for FCS will be Linux (FAQ 4 here.)"

gmuslera points to this article at KernelTrap comparing available benchmarks for schedulers available for the 2.5 kernel, with the 2.4's scheduler as a reference poin. "In some cases, the new Anticipatory Scheduler performs several times better than the others, doing a task in a few seconds instead minutes like the others."

drew_92123 asks: "I've got a friend who does a LOT of video editing but is on a limited budget. He is currently using a raid array and while quite large, it's not as fast as he had hoped. I had an idea and wanted to know if there is a way to make it a reality, so of course I though of all the brilliant minds here. I have about a dozen Pentium II computers with 1GB of RAM. I would like to upgrade them to 2GB and throw in some gigabit NICs and create a 1.9GB RAMdisk on each one. Then I want to use one of the computers to RAID the RAMdisks together to be shared via Samba most likely. They are all 1U systems, with no HDD's, just a 64MB IDE flash disk. Any ideas out there?" Has anyone successfully put together such a system? How well did it work for you and are there any caveats that you would like to share with others who would do the same?

An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices.com reports that the former Japanese subsidiary of Embedix Inc. announced today that it has been purchased in a management buyout and has changed its name from "Lineo Japan, Inc." to "Lineo uSolutions, Inc." Additionally, the newly independent Japanese embedded Linux supplier is getting set to announce its own embedded Linux and cross-development environment products, including a product aimed at consumer electronics manufacturers, as early as March 2003."

bloodeu writes "Mandrake Linux has been beaten down by linux experts alike, but this new release of Mandrake may hold many promising Linux users what they have been waiting for, like NTFS resizing(which is a first), Automatic Network config(zeroconf), Supermount, and many more. You can download the Mandrake 9.1 RC1 Here"

ballpoint writes "Business Week is featuring a list of articles under the header 'The Linux Uprising' including topics like 'Red Flags for Red Hat' and 'A Bad, Sad Hollywood Ending?' touching everything dear to the Slashdot community. A good read to align yourself with what mainstream businesspeople are fed."

An anonymous reader writes "The Embedded Linux Consortium (ELC) formally announced its release of the ELC Platform Specification (ELCPS) version 1.0 this week. This LinuxDevices.com Special Report includes the full text of the ELC's announcement, a whitepaper about the ELCPS standard, a newly updated "frequently asked questions" document, a roundup of news coverage, a poll, a discussion thread, and the spec itself."

EAJoe asks: "I have small problem with one Celeron 2GHz machine. Linux kernel 2.4.18-24.7 doesn't seem to switch L2 cache on! This CPU apparently _has_ 128K of L2. There is nothing about L2 in the logs, and /proc/cpuinfo shows an L1D size of 8K instead. Of course I have enabled L2 in BIOS settings (the motherboard is an ASUS P4S533-E, by the way). The CPU overclocks easily up to 3.5 GHz, running stable at 3 - it seems that cache is really switched off. At 3 GHz g++ compilation times are similar to Athlon XP 1800+ machine. I don't have windows on this computer to check this out, but Intel DOS utility shows a Celeron 2000 w/128k L2, also there is '128K' written on the CPU's die. Any suggestions?"

ganns.com writes "Reasoning, which sells automated software inspection services, scrutinized part of the code of Linux and five other operating systems, comparing the number and rate of programming defects. Specifically, Reasoning examined the TCP/IP stack and found fewer errors in Linux. 'The open-source implementation of TCP/IP in the Linux kernel clearly exhibits a higher code quality than commercial implementations in general-purpose operating systems,' the company said in a report released last week. Reasoning also compared the code with that used in two special-purpose networking products and found it superior to one of them."

silvaran writes "We've had several Microsoft posts, and here's another, from CNet News. The team behind the XBox port of Linux is seeking a digital signature from Microsoft to approve the XBox Linux project. This would allow it to run on an unmodified XBox. According to the article, "Microsoft will be eligible to apply for an award under this scheme if they approve Xbox Linux as a normal Xbox program."

metamatic asks: "I'm planning to buy a notebook computer in the near future. Currently I'm looking at an iBook; however, they're a bit larger and heavier than I'd like. PC users are always telling me that PCs are faster and cheaper, and I'd be happy enough running Linux for what I want the notebook for. So: I'm looking for PC notebook computers that outperform the iBook. Must have USB and Firewire, built-in ethernet, and 802.11b support somehow (via a PC card slot is OK). Small is important, lightweight is important, long battery life is important. I don't care about screen size so long as it can do 800x600. Performance isn't a major concern, as I'm not going to be playing 3D games on it. Sounds easy? Here's the catch: I will not purchase Windows!" After all that this industry has gone through in recent years? Does one still have to pay the Microsoft tax when purchasing a laptop?

Robin Rowe of the Film Gimp project has a piece running on NewsForge (also part of OSDN) that says "Film Gimp has recently been adopted by ComputerCafe, the fourth motion picture studio to use it in making feature films." Check out this recent post about Film Gimp to see some great screenshots of behind-the-scenes use. (And Rowe is also hoping you can get to the Linux Movies Track at Creative Cow West 2003, starting Tuesday in Los Angeles.) Update: 02/17 04:04 GMT by T : Brain rebooted, so I added the missing link.