kernelInit.D asks: "I love Linux, but there is no way I am going to get the DBA's excited about having to recompile the kernel to install Oracle. Why can't Linux have something like Solaris's /etc/system file, where I can tune the OS without going through the hassle of hunting through source to make performance changes?" This is a good point, there are several parameters in the Linux config which could be moved to a file which the kernel consults at boot time. Are there technical or design limitations that have prevented its implementation?

mirko writes "After some time with almost no news about it, Doctor Dobb's journal finally choosed to break the silence and to deliver quite a comprehensive article (also available here) about the forthcoming Debian Hurd ^[?] operating system."

pmccallick writes: "Wired is reporting that Red Hat just closed its SF office. The article goes beyond stating the facts to suggest that RH's business model is flawed." To be fair, the article also quotes an analyst who points out that Red Hat "has $320 million in cash on hand, that it consistently meets quarterly revenue expectations, and that its gross margins are improving."

A reader writes: "This editorial has been just published on freshmeat: 'After full integration of the RPM ^[?] patches into APT ^[?] , it will have the potential to become the standard package management frontend for Linux, shortening the gap between distributions and reducing incompatibility across distributions for at least one important system administration tool. (...) The temporarily-forked version of APT is already fully functional and actually works. Conectiva Linux 6.0 -- the first RPM-based distribution to support APT -- currently ships with it, and has some repositories that are available for use with APT.' It can be downloaded here."

Xeno noted a story making the rounds about a Pro Linux Virus. Well, they're calling it a vrisu, but its a trojan. Its a flash thingee embedded in emails. It mails itself, and then renames zips and jpegs to have have a Pro-Linux message. Very bad advocacy, but when I turn off Dad Mode, I gotta laugh about it.

The folks at Newsforge have got a story up regarding Applix exiting the Linux desktop market. Applix has been making ApplixWare for the desktop market, but has found the competition from the free office products to be too rough -- but they are continuing to work on the server-side versions. I've been contacted by VistaSource, the company that is owned by Applix, doing Applixware - they want to make it clear that while they are focusing on serverware, they are not doing away with the desktop completly - but that development will continue on both desktop and server versions.

Keith Whitsitt wrote in to say that Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, is writing his autobiography. Published by HarperCollins, co-authored by David Diamond, entitled "Just for Fun:The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary". The article is pretty funny, talking about how it will reflect Torvalds "Quirky irreverent personality" as well as how it will be about business, Linus, and Linux. Hell I'll read it, but isn't Linus a bit young for the autobiography? I keep pitching my epic space opera about alien robots who infest our planet and live off celebrities dryer lint to various publishers, but nobody wants to publish a book written by a leader of mexican food, and starring a hero named Litmus VanCenturfuge and his sidekick Pipet Jerks. I keep telling them my parents would buy copies. I bet Linus will sell copies to people besides his parents.

Stef Hoesli writes: "Adobe, who gave us a smoothly working beta version for Linux of their fine word processor, will not release FrameMaker commercially on Linux. They sent out an e-mail to beta testers with the sad news. "

Mayank points to this interview at FreeOS.com with Red Hat CTO Michael Tiemann, in which Tiemann discusses why the Hat shipped a development kernel with their 7.0 distribution, journaling filesystems, the openness of ecos, and the competition (no, not that competition). It's a good read, though it would be cool to see the same questions addressed at even greater length. Guess everyone has a time limit, though;) [Updated by timothy:] I flubbed, that should read "development snapshot of gcc," of course, not "development kernel." Stop hitting me.

InfoSec asks: "We run a great deal (read all) of our current business on Linux, and we have found that tape backup is far too unreliable for our purposes. We have used Quantum DLT 7000s (two of which died), and we have two VXA drives (11 hours to restore three tarballs). Is there a better solution?"

srl sends in this query: "I'm on a project team for Reefknot, which is building an open-source/free shared calendar server. This is not a replacement for Evolution; this is a server that any iCal-capable client can talk to, to do group scheduling and event planning. It may also include project-management features. In short, we want people to have a free alternative to MS Exchange's calendaring features. We are in the pre-alpha design stages, and we want input from end users of calendar software. This might be you, it's definitely your boss. So, we want to know: What does your enterprise calendaring software do that you like? What do you hate about it? Why? What features should we implement to be competitive with existing commercial software?" We've recently talked about Exchange, and calendaring functionality is one of the reasons that it keeps finding its way into the enterprise. If you've ever wanted an alternative, now is your chance to speak up.

BigWhale asks: "I used to follow things that were happening on the Old School demo scenes a few years ago, then after a failed hard disk, I moved on and lost track. So, for old times sake I started poking around a little bit. What's happening with the scene, is it still alive? Indeed it is. Coding style is much different with DirectX, and hardware accelerated demos, but I'm 100% Linux oriented right now and I want to start a Linux Demo project. SDL by Loki Games is pretty neat, but is this the only thing that one could use to write a demo, what about ClanLib? How is with the sound support, I know about Midas and MikMod, is there anything else? I checked www.scene.org and there is one link there regarding Linux, but it's not working. So my question to /. is where would an old school demo coder, that wants to work with Linux, look for resources or scene hangouts?" I've watched demos ^[?] (small multimedia shorts) on just about everything from the Amiga Desktop to DOS and now Windows, does Linux have a similar subculture?

Sitting at your average Linux box is becoming simpler by the day, but the complexity and volume of information that that machine is likely to transmit and recieve is only getting greater. Reader Martin Barry contributed this review of Linux Routers. This book promises to unravel that complexity for the reader willing to trade some time and effort for a custom solution to their own routing requirements.

discovercomics sent us a nifty report from MSNBC telling the tale of the Embedded Linux Devices that were present at COMDEX. They talk about the IPAQ, The Yopy, the Axis 2100 network camera (which is cool, but expensive), and more.

Foredecker writes: "Many, many Internet appliances are being built with non-x86 processors such as Mips, ARM and PowerPC. Supposedly, one of the barriers to using such processors in Internet appliances is the notion that x86 has, by far, the advantage that many popular browser plug-ins are only available for x86. If they are available for non-x86 systems, then they are either available late (x86 first) or their are inferior to their x86 brethren. Is this a problem? Is it true? If it is true, is this going to make it harder for non-x86 based Internet appliances to win acceptance in the market?" Earlier this year, we talked about how the Web is now flooded with non-HTML content. Now I don't mind enhancing one's Web experience, but it would be nice if the folks who make these plug-ins realize that the Web is not only for those folks running Wintel or Macintosh systems. When will plug-in makers realize that there is a larger market out there who may also be interested in their product?

lemox writes: "DebianHELP is a slash-style site that seeks to allay some of the problems new users face with Debian. There's not much there now, as they seemed to have launched only a few days ago, but it seems like it has a lot of potential. They need Debian-specific write-ups on many problems faced by new users, so here is your chance to make a contribution."

Nailer asks: "With kernel 2.4 in the final stages of bug hunting, and on track for a December release, I thought it might be pertinent to discuss the future of Linux. What now? ReiserFS will apparently be in 2.4.1, but there's very little information about the mid to long term available. Where do you think Linux [the OS, as well as the kernel] will head in the future? Personally, I'd really like to see POSIX ACLs as the default permission system [allowing the fine grained access control that many apps try and implement themselves]. What do you think?"

Smitty825 writes: "On Tuesday, LinuxPPC released a beta of their next product, while SuSE has announced that they will be shipping SuSE 7.0 for PowerPC on November 20! Both distros come with XFree 4.01 and KDE2, as well as the MacOnLinux emulator product."

Corvidae asks: "I recently acquired several (a dozen or so) Solbourne single-processor KAP boxes, sans OS. Unfortunately, in order to use them, I'd need to license OS/MP from Grumman, which costs $800 US per license. I know enough to realize when I'm being screwed, so went looking for a Linux-based OS to run on them. However, the only references I was able to find all indicate that Solbourne support is "on its way" and are all several years old. Does anyone know of a distro that's been tested somewhat recently (even a SWAG would do) to work on Solbourne KAP machines? They're great boxes and I'd hate to see them go to waste for lack of an OS..."

You asked, they answer. Jon Lasser and Jay Beale decided to kick their answers back and forth a few times in the style of Crossfire -- at least if Crossfire guests were security-obsessed, literate hackers with a knack for finding gaps in Linux and Unix security. And don't forget the book creds: Jon wrote the excellent Think Unix (want to buy it, huh?), and Jay is plugging away at (and just plain plugging) his upcoming tome from Addison-Wesley,Securing Linux the Bastille Way.