Idmat writes "Tim's latest opus, "The Strange Case of the Disappearing Open Source Vendors," starts with Sherlock Holmes ruminating on "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time" and winds up explaining why open source is good for businesses even if it isn't always good for software vendors."

dirkmuon asks: "The streaming video shootout on Network Computing and the subsequent Slashdot discussion touched upon the process of creating and streaming live content on Linux. The article mentioned one method that required $1000 worth of hardware, not including the camera or the Windows 2000 box. Has anyone devised a simple, specific mix of Linux software and hardware for serving up a live video feed, particularly a method that costs less than $1000? RealSystem Producer Basic and Server Basic with a capture card would cost less, obviously, but are there other solutions? For example, is there a Linux way to broadcast *live* video with the Darwin Streaming Server?" This topic was discussed over a year ago, and the answers weren't very encouraging: Real is expensive; Darwin is great but you can't watch the movies in Linux; and Microsoft Media for Linux is vaporware (and likely to stay that way). Has that year improved the outlook?

pinqkandi writes "Yesterday, TerraSoft Solutions announced its next generation of its PowerPC Linux, Yellow Dog 2.3. New in this version is Kernel 2.4.19, KDE 3.0.1, CUPS printing, and OpenOffice 1.0, among other updates of included applications. It is available immediately from TerraSoft's online store for $30, or $60 if you want personal support for 60 days."

millisa asks: "I've been looking into options for inexpensive web based load balancing services for both Apache and IIS based web servers. There are plenty of commercial products out there that claim to do the job, but they are often too pricey, offer too many features, or are unreliable. I have lost the small amount of confidence I had in the MS based NLB services and do not like the idea of running multiple services on the same system anyways. I would like to build one (or more) simple front end load balancing Linux (or BSD) servers to direct traffic to the back-end systems if possible. I have seen mention of implementations based off of the Linux Router Project or the global load balancing oriented Eddie. What approaches are other geeks out there using for their LAN load balancing needs? I am especially interested in implementations that can maintain state (ie, handle sessions) as well as do some form of request inspection (so as to redirect those pesky web spiders to their own playground so a live user has the best web experience)." It's been long enough since the last time this came up, so lets revisit this question and touch upon the new solutions that have come up since 1999.

Glykoriza writes "Lots of talk lately about the future of Linux in the desktop. Red Hat wants to have a piece of the pie, while Lindows seems to do well too. Lycoris seems to do great as well, they released their latest beta a few days ago, and they have already made deals with retailers, like Fry's. OSNews hosts an interview with Lycoris' CTO and founder, Joseph Cheek."

Dejected @Work writes "A senior IBM developer has come out with a series of articles on high performance Linux programming techniques using pipes, sockets, threads, and processes. The series has been running for a while and juxtaposes these high performance technique with Linux and Windows. Guess who wins?"

TunkeyMicket writes "It appears MSNBC is reporting that Linux has failed as an operating system. By citing the large Linux hype as reason for Linux to be dominating the market, they draw the conclusion that the "open source" alternative has flopped as an operating system. They briefly mention the success of Linux in the server community, but really the article gives Linux as little credit as possible."

Jonathan Corbet at LWN has posted a terrific summary of the first Day of the Ottawa Kernel Summit, and you should expect the second day soon. In it he relates the greatest hits of the first day's talks, including the AMD Hammer Port, Block I/O, Modules, and more. For mp3s or oggs of this event, check out the Kernel Summit MP3 Repository on SourceForge. The big news is the desire to feature freeze 2.5 within 4 or 5 months. Halloween. I've posted a very small gallery of the group pictures from the summit on my site.

Jeremy Andrews writes "KernelTrap has spoken with Marc-Christian Petersen, who originated the WOLK project in March of 2002. WOLK is the Working Overloaded Linux Kernel, a large set of nearly 450 useful patches applied against the current stable 2.4 Linux kernel tree. The project has recently expanded to offer a second 'secure' patchset, this one against the older stable 2.2 tree. In this interview, Marc-Christian Petersen tells the history behind WOLK and discusses many of the patches included."

Harry asks: "Last week I had a laps in judgement and subscribed to the Lindows Insider program. After playing with Lindows for a few days, I decided that Lindows was not worth my trouble and un-subscribed from the program. When I did so, I mentioned my disappointments and requested that they take a survey on Slashdot to see what Linux users really thought of their product. They stated they did and received 'great results and mostly positive feedback.' After having a chance to play with Lindows, I can not believe this to be true. So, my question is: What do Linux users really think of Lindows and will they support it?" I'm not aware of any such poll (maybe I missed it) and I don't remember many glowing reviews from our previous stories on Lindows. So maybe it's time to get the answer straight from the horses' mouth. Do you think Lindows is worth it?

Jaws writes: "BSI (the German equivalent of NIST) has announced a project proposal for planning and implementation of partial migration of certain federal government offices to free/open source products. Three sites in two cities, servers and desktops, each site with a few dozen/several hundred seats. They are asking for a full-service, detailed plan including infrastructure, installation, documentation, support, and education. Looks like a reasonable pilot project. (The original in German; Fish-English version)"

Anonymous Coward writes "This article at LinuxDevices.com, which includes an Interview with Red Hat CTO Michael Tiemann, probes Red Hat's dissolution of its eCos project team and the reasoning behind Red Hat's newly adjusted embedded linux strategy. Tiemann says his company is still in the embedded business, but considers embedded to be an aspect of a broader 'platform OS' strategy."

We posted your questions for Ransom Love, Caldera's CEO, on June 10. Here are his answers, which ought to clear up a few things about what UnitedLinux is doing, along with some discussion of Linux advances and how to (hopefully) make money selling Linux services and support. This is one of the best "CEO interviews" we've ever posted, with lots of straight answers and hardly any buzzwords or marketspeak. Lots of good insight about the "business of Linux" here.

Pivot writes: "With the release of Xine v0.9.11a, it is now possible to play back Quicktime movies encoded with the Sorenson SVQ1 encoding natively. There are still some minor issues with sound, and still no support for SVQ3 encoding, but overall this is a major achievement. Downloads are at xine.sf.net. I wonder what apple will do about this." Note: you may have to cut and paste that "movies" link into a new tab or browser.

An unknown reader points us to the Windependence Day contest sponsored by DesktopLinux. Cute idea, and I'm sure some people have exciting stories of battling the talking paperclip...

surfimp writes "Here's a story from NewsForge: 'MandrakeSoft CEO Jacques Le Marois confirms the news this morning, and company spokeswoman Margaret Waters says, while a contract with Microtel has not been finalized, the company is working on getting Mandrake certified to run like clockwork on the Microtel systems. Waters is hopeful that the dotted line will be signed and PCs up for sale by the end of next week.'" Update: 06/20 17:21 GMT by T : Ooops! The Mandrake spokeswoman's name is Margaret Waples, not Waters. Apologies, and thanks to Todd Lyons of Mandrakesoft for the correction.

jukal writes: "As seen originally at newsforge: On Friday we reported the appearance of Microtel PCs with LindowsOS pre-installed at Walmart.com. Then, Walmart.com and Lindows were claiming that LindowsOS 'delivers the stability of UNIX with the ease of Windows and the ability to run most Microsoft programs.' Today, that last phrase has gone missing and there is no more talk of running any programs designed for Windows, let alone Microsoft products"

MrSnivvel writes: "Slackware 8.1 has been released. Highlights of this release include KDE 3.0.1, GNOME 1.4.1 (with new additions like Evolution), the long-awaited Mozilla 1.0 browser, support for many new filesystems like ext3, ReiserFS, JFS, and XFS, and support for several new SCSI and ATA RAID controllers. Remember to buy your copies at http://store.slackware.com. List of download mirrors here. Public releases of Mozilla AND Slackware in the same month, I'm so happy I've soiled myself."

peng1can asks: "I'm searching for a way to print ID cards in a an LDAP and preferably open source environment. We use LDAP heavily, and ideally we want to be able to pull user information and photos from LDAP and print onto ID Cards. Thus far, I've come up against two roadblocks: 1) Trying to make the ID station work under linux would be great, especially if I can script gphoto. But, I can't find an ID-card printer that doesn't supply windows-only drivers. The closest thing I can find is that Eltron provides a programming manual for their printers, but I have no knowledge of how to write a CUPS/LPRng printer driver. 2) If we had to resort to a Win-based workstation, I can find no method for accessing LDAP in a way that would work with an ID card system without spending thousands of dollars per station on an LDAP/ODBC gateway. I could try to write something in PERL for Win32, but can't find a way to control a digital camera that way. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated."

MrOutlander writes "Gentoo Linux releases version 1.2 of their cutting edge distribution with many updates including KDE 3.0.1 (20020604) and GNOME 2 (beta, 20020607) support. I love emerge :)"