Now chromatic has stepped through another couple of books, in addition to the nine in the previous parts of this series on books for the Linux newbie-to-semi-newbie. Actually, the selections this time go on the assumption that you've taken a few weeks (or some very intense days) to absorb the information you need to accomplish some basic tasks, and they take on the challenge of going beyond the basics. Note: here are links to part one, part two, and part three of this series.

Sam "Criswell" Hart asks: "I have been using Red Hat on my machines since RH4.2. The reasons were largely due to bandwidth issues and the fact that I could always get the latest RH ISOs for free. However, since 6.2 I have been disappointed with RH, and 7.0 with its not-quite compatible GCC would be very bad for my free-software projects. I have been thinking of switching to Caldera or possibly to Mandrake. However, I am spoiled by the fact that I can just pop in a new RH CD and upgrade my existing system quite painlessly. Because there are so many other RPM-based Linux distros out there, and they have update options, are there any (esp. Mandrake or Caldera) which can relatively easily update systems based on other distros? For example, anyone have any success or troubles trying to upgrade a RH6.2 system with Mandrake 7.2? Is it possible, or is there something significant blocking such a thing?" While updating a system with software intended for another distribution isn't necessarily good idea, are there utilities out there that can perform the necessary operations needed to convert an existing system from one flavor of Linux to another?

C0sm1c asks: "I administer a Linux box on my company's LAN that provides all Internet connectivity to staff using Linux IP Masquerading (as well as squid, named etc...). What I need now is a means to report on the Internet usage of machines being masqueraded, and provide reports in both real time and periodic summaries of network usage. These reports will be available for anyone to view, to reduce the misuse of the Internet connection at work as well as usage stats. I've looked at MRTG but it doesn't appear to know about Masqueraded traffic, or provide a means to show the top ten users of the Internet etc... and a breakdown of the protocols used (like amount of ftp, telnet, ICQ traffic). This seems to me to be a fairly common ask, is there an open source package that can provide all this with HTML based reporting?"

smcavoy asks: "Hello, I am working on a growing network (30+ now, more added daily!). We do a lot of development on Linux (Redhat/Debian) and use Remote X a lot. Currently the network is all static IPs, each server has a /etc/hosts file, containing all name/ip mappings. I am looking to use DHCP to make it easier to add systems quickly, but we use many scripts that use system names for remote displays (xterm -display [systemname]:0). So I need to integrate name resolution with DHCP. Any Ideas?"

cmickelson asks: "I've been running SuSE Linux 6.x on my laptop for over a year now and everytime I would compile something I would have to run make several times because of errors during compiling. Now my laptop is very unstable, Windows is unusable because of constant crashes, but Linux generally runs well except for Netscape core dumps, and the compiling problems. Anyway I just assumed the errors were due the system's instablility. However, I recently assembled a new desktop computer and installed SuSE 6.4 on that and the same thing happened when I tried to compile Samba. I had to run make five times before the whole source tree was completed. Is this typical? I find it hard to believe that gcc/gpp could be that unstable, but why else would this happen with two different systems? Is this due to the AMD K6-2 processors (which both laptops have), or is SuSE the problem?"

Russell Pavlicek, Linux and Open Source evangelist, has written an impassioned little book that purports to explain to the non-geek world in particular why they should care about the Open Source movement and the success of OS systems like Linux and FreeBSD. Know what? He delivers.

Netsnipe writes: "Shortly after the release of Progeny Debian Beta 1, I wrote an article on DebianPlanet called "Blurring the Line Between Pure Debian and its Commercial Variants" questioning the standing of commercial variants of Debian among the many purists to Debian's non-commercial principles who would find it hard-pressed to stray from mainstream Debian. The article's accompanying poll illustrated that an overwhelming 58% of respondents would not use a commercial variant of Debian as opposed to 32% who would. Ian Murdock, a former founding member of Debian GNU/Linux and now the founder and CEO of Progeny Linux Systems has written an interesting reply to my article where he defends Progeny despite its commercial leanings and explains how he feels it stands within the Debian scene. "

Lothsahn was the first to write to us about the latest statement from Linus regarding the Linux 2.4 Kernel release date. His statement says that he knows of no major showstoppers, and that he's asking the major devel houses to deploy the test kernels internally and start bug testing. Early December, hopefully, for a release.

cybermage asks: "I'm in the process of researching a dense storage system to provide storage for a web farm. I've found some cool boxes that provide 584GB in 2Us but am a bit puzzled about getting Linux to talk to them. After looking at this past article from July, I'm wondering if any new advances in with Linux and Fibre Channel SAN solutions and whether anyone out there has some practical advice/limitations on sharing a large SAN amongst several Linux servers?"

Sam "Criswell" Hart writes "Just checked out the Indrema Developer's Network website and saw they have a lot of new content. You can now get the IESDK here (which is of course a bunch of things already available like OpenAL and Mesa3D, and includes the Linux kernel 2.4-pre10). You can check out what's "Under The Hood" of the L600 (which is really just information that's been available for a little while now). While it does look very kewl, and I am stoked to try my hand at coding for the thing, I am wondering why the IESDK doesn't include any 2D graphic libraries (such as SDL)... since not all games are 3D ;)"

syn1 asks: "There has been a proliferation of Linux distros over the last couple years. Many are specialized for specific tasks or needs. In terms of Beowulf Clusters, there are a growing number of distros specialized for these clusters. Although the old favorite among specialized Beowulf distros is Extreme Linux, other distros such as Syclid Linux and Scali Linux are catching up in terms of user share. Additionally, more people are using conventional distros (Red Hat, Debian, Mandrake, SuSE, etc..) and adding Beowulf support. I am just wondering what fellow Slashdotters think about these various distros when it comes to Beowulf Clusters and which ones they think are best."

NetJunkie asks: "We currently run several Web servers on Sun Ultra 5 workstations. We're interested in moving to Linux since there are some things we want to do which are expensive to do with Solaris. Are there any good benchmarks of Linux on Sparc against Solaris? We're rolling out PC hardware now, but we'd like to keep using our existing Sun boxes and good benchmarks will make this a much easier sell."

sammy!! writes "Debian unstable now has XFree86 4.0, so use apt-get or dselect and start downloading the new packages!" There are still a ton of issues with it, but I've been using the XF86 debs for several months on my desktop, with no significant problems.

sighup asks: "My company is in the need of a distributed file system for WAN use. I've looked around. CODA and InterMezzo aren't there yet. NFS is not going to work well in our instance. So, I went looking at AFS (having used it in college). I found that IBM had announced that they were opensourcing AFS. We were willing to pay for it, but this is soooo much better. The original announcement said that IBM would be releasing the source code in September. September has come and gone and October is almost gone. They've posted the docs, but nothing else. I've even mailed DeveloperWorks and got no response. So, when's OpenAFS -actually- going to be out?"

Robert Karlsson writes "3Dwm, the Three-dimensional window manager, an open source project at Chalmers Medialab, has just released a new, extensive release of 3Dwm, release 0.2.2 - VNC support, 3D scene graph, big texture splitting, client connection, framework, 3D materials support, testsuite added." miles away from a real desktop, but a great testbed for those ideas that are way ahead of their time.

You've got to give Linux-Mandrake publisher Mandrakesoft credit; their distribution deal with MacMillan Software is spreading their latest release to places Linux has never gone before, including Wal-Mart and other major retail chain stores.

Icebox writes: "Cnet is offering up this bit from GartnerGroup that includes their predictions for the next few years in the OS market. Their predictions are aimed stricly at the business side of this but it is interesting to see how their ideas stack up against what Slashdot's readership expects. Pay particular attention to Factor #9."

debreuil writes: "A Reuters article reports a leading Japanese convenience store chain will install more than 15,000 IBM computers running Linux to allow for Web access in stores, in the largest commercial use of Linux to date. Great onigiri there too..." IBM, who sold the machines, is happy as can be, of course.

You've heard about Bastille Linux 'round these parts before (on July 17 of this year) -- it's a set of scripts bundled to create (in combination with a base install of a distribution like Red Hat) a much more secure box than would be the default. The basic philosophy behind Bastille seems to be "It shouldn't be difficult to lock down your Linux box." Now, here's your chance to ask Bastille gurus Jon Lasser and Jay Beale about the project.You'll want to check out the project's main page, first, and also some of the security articles Jay's written as well as the additional information on his personal page. (And if that Lasser fellow's name is familiar, it should be -- he's also the author of the excellent Think Unix reviewed a few weeks ago.) So post your questions below, and Jay and Jon will soon respond in depth.

Yes, Mandrake 7.2 is ready for download. It hasn't been officially announced or spread to all the usual mirrors yet, but word crept out yesterday on mandrakeforum.com. Be patient if you can't get through at first; you know how these things go; and keep an eye on the official Mandrake site for further news. This release is nice advance over Mandrake 7.1 or 7.0, worth downloading and installing (if you're a Mandrake user) for KDE 2 and KDE Office alone, both of which are incorporated into it. I got a small head start and played with 7.2 a bit last night, and found both some neat stuff and a few small but interesting usability gaps.