From July 19th through 22nd, the Ottawa Linux Symposium 2000 provided hardcore technical seminars, conferences and demonstrations to a crowd of over five hundred. Like last year, there were no booth babes, no tradeshow floor with T-shirt giveaways and hype. OLS is all about the tech, and made no apologies.

Thorkild writes: "The subject says it all. They just opened up the directories on the mirror sites." If you can't find it without me telling you where it is, then you shouldn't be running a Beta Red Hat 7.0 ;)

Here are the answers to the questions we asked Ian Murdock, original Debian instigator and current President/CEO of Progeny Linx Systems.

Several Debian Developers have submitted this, and I'm sorry for the delay. I just didn't want to rush something like this: Joel Klecker has passed on. I never knew his real name, but as Espy, he answered lots of dumb questions for me on IRC over the years. The Internet makes connections between people from around the world, but from opposite sides of a dozen routers, many things... like Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy aren't readily apparent. I've attached a more complete comment about this from SquadBoy if you follow through. The Debian 2.2 release will be dedicated to Espy. The dedication also is attached.

EMR asks: "From a previous e-mail I sent to intervideo, I was told that LinDVD should be out in "Early June". Well, it's mid july and they just have the press release from March on their web site. Yesterday I e-mailed them again with their status and got this in Response. 'LinDVD has been released to certain OEMs in the market. If you are interested in obtaining a version of LinDVD, you will need to contact your favorite OEMs and see if a version of LinDVD is currently available.' Does anyone know of any OEMs that might have this? and how to contact them?"

Frank Carlos writes: "IBM released Linux-based applications technology based on the Bluetooth specification called BlueDrekar, which is a reference implementation of and a set of interfaces for the Bluetooth protocol stack. You can get the Transport Drivers for BlueDrekar(TM) Middleware at the developerWorks Open Source Zone."

CaptainZapp asks: "A customer of mine runs a ~30 GB data warehouse on a Sybase SQL Server Database. Now their business requires a mirror of this database in a different location. An offer by a reputed U/X vendor for the hardware turns out to be about five times as expensive as when you get a reasonable x86 box, with the necessary amount of disk space and, say, 1 gig of memory. What does the esteemed Slashdot community think: Is Unix capable of handling a database of this size and what other terrible pitfalls do you foresee?" He's not worried about "mission-critical" here, he's just wondering if it's possible.

_EternaL_ writes: "What could be more fun then hitting the eject button on your floppy drive, and swapping out your root file system? You say you don't wanna partition your hard drive to play with Linux? That's no excuse, install to your superdisk! Now there's a solution for anyone interested in getting a feel for Linux that doesn't have the space or time to install Linux on a hard drive, but has a Superdisk drive! Folks out there might be interested in knowing that installation to an internal ls120 (ie: SuperDisk) is possible. It took a bit of work, but thanks to moomonk it's fairly easy. You might wanna check out the basic howto over at electricgod.net. If that's not working out for you, you can also try over at dokks.com!"

FWMiller writes: "Theres a bunch of new screenshots up on Samsung's new PDA, the YOPY. This thing looks really slick, emulating the Windows CE user interface quite closely." The images are in a tgz, and they look real. They demo an addressbook, and MP3 player and other apps that apparently would ship with the nifty Linux based PDA. I still haven't seen a ship date (or an english version of the software for that matter ;) so I'm not holding my breath too hard. Although after playing with Kurt The Pope's Jornada, I'm dying to see what they can do.

qbasicprogrammer writes: "Security Portal has a review on the security of Red Hat, SuSE, TurboLinux, and Caldera Linux distributions." Debian and Slackware are absent, but its a decent piece.

Daniel Quinlan writes: "The Free Standards Group is publishing a beta release of the Linux Development Platform Specification (LDPS) which tells third-party software providers how to best achieve binary-compatibility across different Linux distributions (well, at least until the Linux Standard Base is done). It's important to note that third-party software providers include not just the large vendors like Oracle and IBM, but also anyone who creates a binary package for use on more than one version of a single distribution."

Gark writes: "There's an interesting article at Upside Today that talks about the Bayonne project, which has the potential to change the telecommunications industry the same way that Free Software has changed computing. It's interesting that the project got its start when a proprietary software developer was going out of business, and decided to GPL their source code, thereby creating new business opportunitites." The article talks a lot about Open Source and the Net, compared to the Telco industry and its history of proprietary systems. It's a good read.

Fawking DSL writes "``NetBSD can be intimidating from a Linux user's perspective. However, as the Linux user base grows, more people are finding their needs aren't being met by traditional Linux distributions. NetBSD is ready to step up to fill this niche. While Linux and NetBSD share many characteristics, there are some key differences.'' Check out this article at BSD Today."

How secure do you feel? Occams Razor points to "A great interview with [Jay Beale,] the Lead developer, about the Linux Bastille project." Beale talks about the direction that Bastille has taken, and seems fairly pragmatic about the Linux security model and computer security in general. A nugget: "... to fully secure a system, you really have to grind it into dust, scatter the pieces to the wind, and hope that Entropy does [its] part. Since you can't do this, you make tradeoffs."

David Hume writes: "Upside Today has an article entitled Penguin Payola which also does a good job of surrounding the recent complaining by Tucows and ZD-Net that Linux reviews are bought instead of earned. Upside Today reaches the same concusion as Penguinista regarding Reality On The "Purchased" Linux Reviews."

Jeff Kwiatkowski asks: "We are looking to roll out Linux to over 2500 desktops and could use any advice that we can get. We need security info, implementation suggestions and any other advice that you would care to offer. We are currently evaluating Debian, Caldera and Red Hat. I also want a minimalist desktop, so I have been leaning toward WindowMaker as the window manager. In addition, we currently have machines with 32 meg of RAM (fast processors, though) and would like to keep the upgrade to 64 meg, only, if possible. Lastly, do any of you have any thoughts on Word Perfect vs. Applixware?" For those of you who think that the claim 'Linux is not ready for the desktop' is a falsehood, then this story is for you. As you can see, people are looking at deploying Linux on the desktop, and suggestions from you guys could make this process a lot easier.

infodragon pointed us to a Penguinista article which does a very good job of addressing the issue surrounding the recent complaining by Tucows and ZD-Net that Linux reviews are bought instead of earned. It says pretty much exactly what I feel about the whole thing.

Chicken can run writes: "Kaydara announced Thursday in a press release the port of FilmBox to Red Hat Linux V6.2. FilmBox is a real-time character animation and motion capture system and was the software behind the groovy slow-motion camera fx in The Matrix. What is interesting is that it is the first such system to be available on Red Hat Linux, opening further the door to major 3D production oportunities on the OS."

David Hume writes: "Following up on a Tucows article asserting Linux Reviews Are Bought Rather Than Earned, ZDNET asserts writers fire off glowing reviews for free software and asks Are Linux Reviews Fixed? Is this a real problem? Are reviewers induced to write good reviews by the implied promise of future free software? If so, what do we do about it? Who do we trust? Do we trust Slashdot? :)" I don't think my family even trusts me. Course the only software I've bought in the last 6 months was Diablo2 (Which I beat thank you ;).

BJH writes: "This hit the newspapers in Japan this morning - Sony, Toshiba, NEC, Fujitsu, Hitachi and Mitsubishi (basically the entire electronics industry in Japan, with the notable exception of Matsushita) will be setting up the "Japan Embedded Linux Consortium" in cooperation with TurboLinux and a whole bunch of other groups to produce a version of Linux suitable for use as an embedded OS for home electronics, mobile phones, cars, industrial machinery - in fact, just about anything with a CPU. Here's a Nikkei article in Japanese (no login needed) and another one here in English (you'll need to log in for this one). This looks like it's going to be big - hold onto your hats, guys..." If anyone has found an English URL that doesn't require a login, please post it below.