truthsearch asks: "I've been a professional Visual Basic developer for 6 years, working on two and three tier systems and also web applications. Two years ago I tried Linux and went from being a fan of Windows to an aspiring developer of Linux (or at least Unix) applications. My company has just announced their complete acceptance of moving everyone to .NET and so I want to leave ASAP. I'm even willing to take a pay cut to leave Microsoft software development. So if I were to not contribute to OSS or take time off to get my masters (in CS of course), what's the best way to transition from professional Microsoft platform development to Linux? Are many companies hiring Microsoft developers with little Linux experience to assist in corporate migration? With online postings requiring 3-5 years Linux/C++/Java experience how's a Windows developer supposed to transition? Is my only solution to stick it out here while I contribute to OSS for the experience?"

toblak asks: "Everybody seems to say the Mandrake is a good distro for newbies and Gentoo, Debian, SUSE, etc, are for the Power Users. Other than different updating schemes, when you get 'under the hood' of the distribution isn't it basically the same? If I compile some source code on a Debian system don't I get the same functionality as I would if I compiled the same code on a Mandrake system? I've been using Mandrake for about a year and while I don't consider myself a newbie, I'm not a Power User either. Have I been 'missing out' on something by staying with Mandrake?"

ceebABC writes "Linus Torvalds talks about the upcoming Linux 2.6 kernel, in an interview with eWEEK. Linus discusses the scalability and memory management in the new kernel. They also have a story about what's supposed to be in Linux 3.0."

Ivan writes "LinuxBIOS coupled with BOCHS has replaced the PC BIOS. The union of these two cool open source projects completely replaces closed source BIOS, while retaining the ability to boot other operating systems like BSD and Windows. Here's the announcement."

jgbustos asks: "I'm the manager of a small software development company. For the last five years we've been managing a communications network consisting of several thousand PC terminals which connects to an NT server over the phone lines. The terminals run a console application on a light DOS. Everything is fine so far. So what's the problem, then? We have a hard time finding parts to maintain the network. Our client says that he's willing to invest in hardware upgrades, but we should move to a Windows-like environment, however he doesn't want to pay for more than 4000 Windows licenses. What's the best alternative for porting our app to Linux/? Please bear in mind that the terminals are small PC's having 16MB RAM, less than 2GB HD, less than i586 CPU, and a 33k modem. Thanks in advance"

pamri writes "In a pleasant and surprising move, the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, has opted to switch to Linux from Microsoft for its Gyandooth (intranet in Dhar district connecting rural cybercafes catering to the everyday needs of the masses) programme. What is more surprising is that the state's Chief Minister Digvijay Singh personally conveyed this to Bill Gates. A choice quote: 'For us it is not a question of Microsoft versus Linux. It is just a matter of choosing between a free software and a monopoly. We feel that when we are putting public information out in the open, then it should not be through a proprietary software.'"

An anonymous reader writes "The Embedded Linux Consortium's board of directors has started the clock on final review of version 1.0 of the ELC Platform Specification, according to an announcement sent to the ELC's members. The draft spec was completed by the platform spec working group in late October, triggering a 45-day review period that will culminate in a vote cycle authorizing public distribution of the world's first Embedded Linux standard."

An anonymous reader asks: "I've got an old 486 that isn't doing anything (it has RedHat 6.2 on it and even that barely works), and I have been considering installing an even older distribution to make it more usable. I'm looking for something I can download still, has a good bit of programs, has X, and is still a relatively reasonable download for a 56K modem. I would like to download the distro with my new computer, then burn a CD or do something like that to install it on my old computer. The computer is a 486 at 33Mhz with 16MB RAM and a 1.5GB HDD. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated."

telecaster asks: "My kids are aged 11, 7 and 3. All of them are computer savvy. They use the computer for basically three things: Games, writing papers and chatting with friends, as well as browsing sites that are frequented by children their age (Nick, Cartoon Network, How Things Work, Yahoo!Kids, and others). All of this is supervised and watched by my wife and I -- we don't use any parental filters since we've found they just don't work, and it's just better to keep a watchful eye anyway. I would like to move them off Windows XP and introduce them to something less expensive (free) and more reliable. I'm rebooting this machine probably four and five times a week, not to mention the forever problem of lockups and hangs which seem to happen during the times where the 3 year-old is using the machine. I know the crashes are mainly due to the older games that the kids play which are not totally compatible with XP, but hey, they USED to run just fine under Windows98."

An anonymous reader wrote to us about an interview with Klaus Knopper the author/creator of Knoppix. Knoppix is "a bootable CD with a collection of GNU/Linux software, automatic hardware detection, and support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices and other peripherals. KNOPPIX can be used as a Linux demo, educational CD, rescue system, or adapted and used as a platform for commercial software product demos. It is not necessary to install anything on a hard disk. "

GaelDesign writes "The legendary Red Hat Road Tour 2002 is nearly at an end, and a good time was had by all. One of the most successful stops on the tour was the presentation at the O'Reilly and Associates headquarters in Sebastopol, California. Because the Red Hat RV's arrival was delayed due to traffic conditions, Tim O'Reilly gave a rousing speech beforehand that was well received by the audience. Read a detailed report of the event at The Idea Basket."

cworley submitted - several times - this well-linked submission about a slightly boring topic - fast computers. "Top500.org has just released its latest list of the world's fastest supercomputers (updated twice yearly). For the first time, Linux Beowulf clusters have joined the teraFLOP club, with six new clusters breaking the teraFLOP barrier. Two Linux clusters now rank in the Top 10: Lawrence Livermore's "MCR" (built by Linux NetworX ) ranks #5 achieving 5.694 teraFLOP/s, and Forecast Systems Laboratory's "Jet" (built by HPTi) ranks #8 reaching 3.337 TeraFLOP/s. Other Linux clusters surpassing the teraFLOP/s barrier include: LSU's "SuperMike" at #17 (from Atipa ), the University at Buffalo at #22 and Sandia National Lab at #32 (both from Dell ), an Itanium cluster for British Petroleum Houston at #42 (from HP ), and Argonne National Labs at #46 (from Linux NetworX ) reached just over the one teraFLOP/s mark with 361 processors. In the previous Top500 list compiled last June, the fastest Intel based Netfinity 1024 processor clusters from IBM were sub-teraFLOP/s and the University of Heidelberg's AMD based "HELICS" cluster (built by Megware ) held the top tux rank at #35 with 825 GFLOP/s."

Sivar writes "Andrew Morton of EXT3 fame has posted benchmarks of Linux 2.5.47 prerelease compared with the latest from the current 2.4 series. With some tasks more than tripling in performance, the future looks very promising."

Gregory Perry writes "A South Florida company just released GENRIP, an open source (as in GPL) project for Linux that turns low cost serial line devices (such as 900 Mhz radios) into IP addressable nodes; right now the technology is being used by various robotics groups to replace existing wired tethers on robots with wireless radio links, but the important thing to mention is the ability to use cheap radios to create wireless lan segments without the power and cost requirements associated with 802.11 WLANS."

glamslam asks: "As the newly appointed technology director at a large restaurant chain, I've been given the task of evaluating and implementing a Point of Sale (POS) system. The main goal is to save costs on deployment across hundreds of restaurants. Another goal is to find a solution that is flexible enough to adapt to our unique operational model. Most of the vendors' products I have seen are based on Windows. I prefer the openness, flexibility, and cost-savings of Linux, yet I do not want to build the system from the ground up. Has anyone been involved in POS projects and managed to put Linux into the mix?" Are there any features that restaurants need that your traditional POS system may not include?

chrysrobyn asks: "Every write-up I see about journalling file systems under Linux discusses efficiency (embedded) or speed (desktop/server). Have any studies been done on reliability? I've used Linux since Slackware 96 (and kernel 2.0.0), and put it on 9 or 10 machines over the years (Slackware on x86 and Debian on PPC), but I've never strayed from ext2. Always, when the uptime gets high, 20-50 days, the filesystems start to get minor fsck errors. Not that I repair the system and expect it to stay live, I just use the fsck -n to help me decide when a repair is in order. Since the same thing has happened on a variety of hardware (386-PII and every interface in between and 601 and 750 processors with Apple hardware), I'm leaning on blaming the ext2 filesystem for these, the slightest of problems. I typically keep my servers up for as long as possible because 95% of my hardware problems have happened during resets and cold power-ups. It's time for my every-other-year rebuild of my personal server, with another on its way, so I was hoping to incite some anecdotal Slashdot conversation on the journalling file systems available for Linux. Personally, I'm most interested in hearing about the file systems supported under Debian stable for ease of administration for this machine which is a 5 hour drive away from home. I've been around the block a few times, so I'm not fearful of patching the kernel with better patches, but I'm respectful of the work the Debian assurance teams have done."

paskie writes "Martin J. Bligh of IBM announced launch of a Bugzilla bug tracking database for 2.5 linux kernel series - it's at bugme.osdl.org. Finally there will be some possibility to easily keep track of known bugs without being subscribed to thousand of mailing lists or googling to death. According to the relevant lkml thread, kernel developers will still prefer discussions to happen on the mailing lists, though. The Bugzilla server and connection is donated by OSDL and IBM folks administer the database."

Bil Simser asks: "I've been asked by upper management to look at the feasibility of replacing our current Windows IT infrastructure with Linux. Basically someone has said that Linux is free so now we're off to see how free that really means. A full replacement is probably impossible, but I can see some benefits coming from selective replacement of specific technologies (e.g. application servers, web servers) that might be feasible. This is both from a cost reduction standpoint and increasing productivity when it comes to system management. I've already looked at a few studies done on TCO reduction on this and they look good so now I'm turning to the Slashdot community to see if anyone has either practical experience or informative insight into a problem like this? The objective is to determine the TCO of deploying Linux as a core part of our operational environment so what does that mean in the sense of hardware, software, middleware and management impact?"

An anonymous reader asks: "Those who read e-books on PDAs may probably know that 'tomeraider' is a very popular format. After a few searches I've found Tomeraider for PDA's and Windows, and even utilities to convert from HTML to the tomeraider format on Linux. But I haven't seen anything that actually lets you VIEW tomeraider files on a Linux desktop. Does anyone know of an application that is open source and supports this format? What are the options and what works best?"

tengwar asks: "Under Windows I use a firewall (Zone Alarm) which can prevent individual applications from gaining Internet access, restricting them either to the local network or preventing any network access at all. This can be used to prevent Microsoft software and other trojans from calling home. I also restrict Outlook so that it can talk to my email server (which is on the local network), but can't pull remote content href'ed in a HTML email - helps with cutting the virus risk. I've also set it so that Internet Explorer has to ask for permission to access the Internet each time. I'm planning to move over to Linux as my main working environment, and I will probably want to use some Windows programs under Crossover - in particular I'll need Internet Explorer occasionally for getting to my banks, and I may need Outlook for work-related reasons. I'm not interested in iptables on the client (I think) as I've already got NAT and a hardware firewall guarding the network. Have you any suggestions on how to get the application-specific filtering that I get under Zone Alarm, for Linux?"