Random Q. Hacker asks: "Alt-SysReq has saved me from filesystem damage and runaway processes more than once. Unfortunately, several of the machines I admin are thousands of miles away in data centers, and it takes 15 minutes for data center personnel to go to our cage, hook up a monitor to the right system, and call back for interactive troubleshooting. I have played with snmpd, but it's a userspace daemon, and most of its functionality involves executing external programs and accessing files. Sometimes a system gets hung so bad (say, on root becoming unavailable, or memory becoming completely full) that the only thing still working is the kernel itself. Is there a kernel backdoor (as in a patch) that could let me have (secure, authenticated) SysReq functionality through the network?"

An Anonymous Coward asks: "After reading the article detailing Microsoft's gripes about Linux, one gripe that wasn't specifically mentioned came to mind, "When will Linux have *real* threads?" Many of the developers I work with, including myself, prefer Solaris as an enterpise platform over NT/2K as well as Linux and *BSD because it offers truly lightweight threading and better thread scheduling than the others. Linux does have thread libraries available but they all map threads to Linux kernel processes. Also, all of the thread synchronization and scheduling tweaks that you can do in a program on Solaris don't seem to work as expected/desired on Linux. Are there any projects out there that are trying to put true threading in the Linux kernel and libs?"

tired.cranky writes: "An article on LinuxDevices.com sez that Transmeta is about to ship a quasi-distro slash embedded development toolkit featuring Linus' new super-efficient cramfs and ramfs filesystems. Apparently, a reasonably normal Linux system can be shoehorned into 8MB of storage, with zlib decompression-on-demand and such. It sounds like it could push a fair few hobbyists and embedded developers in Transmeta's general direction, too... and reads nicely next to a Register piece on Transmeta's leaked server initiative. Does one end of Transmeta know where the other is pointed?"

vukicevic writes "Hewlett-Packard and Ximian have partnered to make Ximian GNOME the default desktop on all HP-UX workstations later this year. HP will also be offering Ximian GNOME on its Linux workstations. The press release has more information."

We've been at LinuxWorld for the last couple days, and some interesting stuff has been going on: The SAMBA folks won the $25,000 IDG/Linus Torvalds award, and SGI announced the availability of RH7-based distro using XFS ^[?] . In other news, our BOF went well with many questions about Slashcode - and the Perl Monks booth has been doing great in donations. Update: 02/01 05:18 PM by CT : The highlight for me so far was judging the "Coveted" Golden Penguin Awards w/ Don. Actually, I seriously did covet the award, beautiful hand blown glass penguin made me wish I was a contestant. We judged that Linus got the definition of BogoMIPS wrong. Fortunately his still won, but it was truly joyous seeing the surprise on his face.

Cranky Spice (and everyone, and everyone's brother) writes: "Get it here: ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/beta/fisher They've moved to mainstream the 2.4 kernel (surprise), there's an IA64 set of .iso files, the installer can wizard you up a basic firewall config, all the usual minor tweaks and enhancements. Though they say PCMCIA support is still flaky, meaning my VAIO Z505 slimline might not be running Fisher anytime soon. :/" The flood will only increase now -- even PocketLinux was demonstrating 2.4 on their iPAQs today at LinuxWorld.

villoks writes "Doug Miller, Microsoft's group product manager for competitive strategies is trying desperately to find arguments against Linux." Many really good points, and many other equally bad ones.

An unnamed correspondent writes: "Looks like Linuxgruven has been making offers that if you pay them a few grand for them to train and Sair certify you, they will hire you on for a $45,000/yr entry level position. Besides that fact that this smells like a scam, it seems that Sair is now in legal proceedings against Linuxgruven. Here is a link to an e-mail from Sair [Director of Courseware & Instruction Ross E. Brunson] posted on a users group mailing list." (Read more, because it gets more complicated.)

alexhmit01 writes "One of the better articles that I've read covering Linux in real deployments, eWeek has an article entitled, The state of Linux: Live free or die?, gives coverage of where Linux has improved in 2.4 and what it needs. It covers Linux's success as a web server, where it comes up short against other Unices, etc. It's a good read for the non-programmers in the Open Source Movement... for it focuses upon market adoption, not just technical capacity." Nothing exciting and new here, but its a nice little article, especially talking about whats new and wacky in the 2.4 kernel.

Hey, you can read the headline. Read the Changelog, or just start downloading.

Traverser asks: "I'm looking for a solution that allows Windows and Apple users to share a file store. Samba works great for the Windows systems. Netatalk works great for the Apple users. But each solution has its own style of file locking on the server: which means that if the same file were opened under Netatalk and Samba at the same time, there is a chance the file would become corrupt and unusable. Putting Dave on the Macintosh provided further layers of troubles. The WindowsNT AppleTalk driver doesn't seem to like Netatalk. WebDAV seems like a good alternative, except the tools are not mature enough on the Macintosh side to put in a production enviorment. NFS seems like a better solution, except the price per client suggests moving towards a commercial solution. Novell has moved support of the Netware Macintosh client to ProSoft Engineering. The current Novell client is still buggy and there is no visible development for a new client. I hate to say it but I'm back to the Microsoft solution. I really hope I'm missing something..."

_ZorKa_ writes "Yahoo.Com is running an article about the latest partnership of Red Hat and Eazel. The future versions of Red Hat will include Eazel's Nautilus software package. The idea is to use the software as a desktop interface which also automatically updates Linux."

starseeker writes: "It looks like the financial picture is not good for Applix - "the company intends to report VistaSource as a discontinued operation in its audited financial statements." The financial report is online. What happens to Applixware Office now?" For the backstory: Vistasource is the division of Applix - we've talked about this before. Still with the various K* options, the G* options, and OpenOffice the competition is tough - not to mention Abiword and all the others.

urbanjunkie asks: "I want to ensure my web site/database farm/whatever is as available as possible, so I checked out many HA (High Availability) packages for Linux. It seems that they -all- seem to want me to use shared storage. I don't want to use shared storage since it moves the point of failure to the disk array. I know that the disk array can be RAIDed etc, but what about a fire, power loss and any of the other things that can go wrong? I'd prefer to have something that replicated changes made to one disk to another disk located in a separate PC that may well be in a location 100 metres away. Is there anything open sourced that can do this?"

An Anonymous Coward writes: "So has the news that Stormix has filed for bankruptcy been covered? I was surprised to get a form letter in the mail today from Deloitte & Touche saying they filed for bankruptcy on Jan. 17. And they owe me $20." The Stormix users mailing list has some information, and Newsforge has a summary. I'm typing this on a Stormix system right now, so I hope someone picks it up and maintains the distro.

halbritt writes: "An article over at TechWeb asks the question, 'Is Linus Killing Linux?' The story outlines an interesting perspective with regard to Linus having complete control over the kernel and how that may not be in the best interests of the $2 billion industry looking to exploit Linux for fun and profit. It goes on to describe how a non-profit, industry funded organization should take control of kernel development so that kernel development would better suit the interests of said $2 billion industry." Actually this story amused me, since its essentially the same story that some genius journalist writes every few months. Linus is killing Linux just as horribly as I'm killing Slashdot.

Pheno writes: "This looks like a fun LUG project. A simple setup for a Linux cluster called OSCAR from the Open Cluster Group. The people behind it are Oak Ridge National Labs and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and some private companies. According to this Newsforge (part of the Keiretsu) story their 'Supercomputer on a CD' software is supposed to make it so easy to put a Beowulf cluster together a high school student or MCSE can do it in a few hours."

lamanite asks: "I work for a large manufacturing company and we're looking to upgrade some of our older DOS-based systems to something more modern, specifically to support TCP/IP. However, we still need time-critical control over interrupts and low-level I/O. We're looking at VxWorks, but their licensing terms are pretty hefty. Are there any Linux distributions that would be applicable to our needs while still supporting common hardware platforms (x86 and 3Com/Intel network adapters)?"

Several people wrote in to point out that SuSE appears to be the first big Linux vendor to have announced a distro to be shipped with the still-cute 2.4 Linux kernel as default. Here's their announcment in English, and in German. Since they'll also be including a 2.2 kernel "in parallel," this isn't totally earthshaking (some other distros have been shipping 2.2 stock and 2.4 optional for a little while), but it certainly is welcome news that SuSE is willing to reverse that order. Update: 01/26 05:04 PM by T : SuSE's Lenz Grimmer wrote to correct this, saying "Even though we ship with the 2.4 kernel, it is _not_ the default kernel, the user has to explicitly select the kernel during the installation." Thanks for the correction, Lenz.

LWN has an interview with Jason Haas where he talks about LinuxPPC and going non-profit. He raises some good points and says some interesting things. Good luck to ya Jason! Someday I shall acquire a titanium powerbook, I shall bask in the glory of your toil. I hope LinuxPPC stays around for a long time.