troc writes: Here's the "info on this year's Linux Beer Hike sponsored by SuSE (and others). It's a European event, where Linux users wander around a nice hilly area, drink beer and exercise their minds of an evening doing Linuxy stuff. " I wanted to go last year, but my flabby ass probably shouldn't be goin' on ye old hacker hike ;)

We've heard rumors that Linuxcare's upcoming IPO has been shelved for now, and that Linuxcare's CEO and CIO have been removed. This comes right after the roadshow was delayed, which now appears to be cancelled. At this time, I haven't heard back from Linuxcare, so haven't heard their side of the story. However, several reliable sources have said that there've been "irregularities" in revenue recognition, something that the linked article also touches on.Update: 04/07 11:22 by H :I've talked with Art Tyde, Founder of LinuxCare. He confirms that the IPO has been delayed - but that they believe an IPO is in their future. He also did confirm that the CEO, Ferdinand Sarrat, has parted ways with Linuxcare, but that the CIO has remained onboard, and that the management team remains committed to the values of the community and what the company was founded on.

Ruediger Biernat asks: "I recently came across an old OS/2-partition with plenty of documents (written in Describe) on it. Are there any import-filters for this nice program ... perhaps for StarOffice? Perhaps it's already Open-Source?"

EngrBohn writes "Joe Pranevich has posted the latest & greatest Wonderful World of Linux 2.4 at LinuxToday. 'In the beginning, there was Linus and his 386 ... Several years and many thousands of lines of code later, Linux 2.2 was released ... Linus (and company) continued to hack away at the Linux OS and the 2.4 release of the Linux kernel is nearing completion. Submitted for your approval, this document describes some of the new features in Linux 2.4.'" Helps sort out rumors, half-truths and innuendo. I hope Joe's estimate is conservative on getting CDs shipping with point-four; usually it seems like the distro houses are pretty swift to incorporate.

dpinckard asks: "Recently, I read an article on the Web (may have been on /.) that the configuration of the newer kernel releases is getting very unwieldy. The section that interested me the most was that there still isn't a good application for configuring the kernel that works from release to release. I'd like to make a suggestion: create a directory in the source tree and each code maintainer put their config info there as an XML file. I foresee this as easing the requirements of rewriting the config app when major module rewrites happen or even when new modules appear. The app just reads all of the XML files and builds the menus." Is this a good idea or not? What do you think?"

Ellen Spertus writes, "La storia del museo del calcolatore Center, situato al campo di Moffett nel Mountain View, è patrocinare serie di ingranaggi del PC di Beowulf-Class denominate colloquio: Un Perpective Storico' serie di ingranaggi del PC di Beowulf-Class denominate colloquio: Uno storico Perpective' dato da Thomas Sterling, che ha condotto la squadra della NASA che ha sviluppato le prime serie di ingranaggi del PC del Beowulf-codice categoria ed è il co-author How per costruire un Beowulf. Il colloquio avverrà la sera di giovedì, il 13 aprile. RSVP entro 10 aprile. Tutto il centro di storia del calcolatore lo comunica ha dovuto essere grande."

Hotaine writes "Lernout & Hauspie is working on a Linux PDA with speech regognition built-in. " It can do things like read (and record) emails, find weather, do stock quotes or whatever. Of course, you can't go out and simply buy the vaporware yet, but it has potential.

ken_i_m writes "VMware has signed an OEM deal with Microsoft to offer various flavors of Windows pre-installed with their product. Here is VMware's news release." Don't get too angry about this; if you're using VMware, you're probably loading up a version of Windows anyway.

Gael Duval, one of the Mandrake developers, dropped me a line to say that "Linux-Mandrake 7.0 for UltraSPARC is finally available. Although it's a complete port (graphical installation included) of Linux-Mandrake 7.0/final, it could still have some bugs, so please consider the current UltraSPARC version as beta-software. You can download the ISO image from our Web site."

steelwraith asks: "I'm a contractor working for a DoD agency, and there has been an on-going firefight over whether to allow Linux to be used withing the agency, with a possibility of this spilling over into DoD as a whole. Does anyone know of a project to create or port auditing into any of the Linux distributions? This is a major hurdle to the widespread adoption of Linux in the government; while it has a toe hold in places already, I fear it could be cut off before it has a chance to show its worth."

noxious420 asks: "I need to crank out a large number of very basic Slackware based Linux boxes. I am familiar with the "canned" distribution sets that FreeBSD uses and I want to use a set similar to the "Minimal" - "The smallest configuration possible" set. In Slackware's Expert install mode, I have been able to boil it down to the very bare essentials that it needs to run, but there are some unused and leftover directories that I had to manually delete. I don't want to clean up these directories every time. Is there some way to get a true "minimal" Slackware install? "

Colm@TCD asks: "This is something I've run up against, and I'm sure that anyone else who's trying to bring Linux and Open Source software into 'enterprise' systems has encountered the same problem: Are there any OSS 'enterprise-quality' RDBMSs out there? Many (most) business setups require a fast, solid database engine to run back-end stuff. Fast SQL support isn't enough, though -- these systems need to be able to fail-over automatically to a backup machine in the event of the main system falling over. What are the best of the available systems? Are there ways of taking the existing systems like PostgreSQL and making them failover-able?"

Sun Tzu writes, "There are several reasons for the non-issue of the Linux virus. Most of those reasons a Linux user would already be familiar with, but there is one, all important, reason that a student of evolution or zoology would also appreciate ... The article is at sitereview.org. "

Brian Ginter writes "I noticed on www.redhat.com today that 6.2 is officially released. It'll be shipping April 10. "

It seems that Redhat 6.2 will be out Real Soon Now - the mirrors (at least at metalab) are starting to get it. The main Redhat FTP doesn't have it yet - but it should be there in the next few hours... I think that the beta idea was a really good one (and I know lots of problems have been fixed since the beta was out - look at the rawhide directory in their FTP server). I hope other Linux distributions will follow RedHat with a public beta test before releasing a new version. (Thanks Udi for the info).

Has anyone else noticed the proliferation of little Linux appliances? The latest couple that have been submitted are the PIA (which runs on a Celeron and looks to be available for $300). The other is from Indrema which is still vapor, but with things like a wireless keyboard and an SVHS port, it looks like a cool game box. Rumored release for it is November with a sub $500 price tag. These guys are getting close to what the NetWinders wanted to be a year ago ... What else does the Linux appliance future hold?

Matt Lupfer writes, "According to CNET, MaxSpeed, a California-based networked cash register manufacturer used at places such as Little Caesars, Goodyear Tire, CVS Drugstores and Harley-Davidson, will begin moving its product line to Linux-based systems. [MaxSpeed CEO Wie Ching] says, 'Linux is the wave of the future. And you can't beat the price.'"

Anonymous Coward asks: "I 've been reading a lot about XML, I know Slashdot uses it for some features, but I haven't found a site or tutorials that give clear and good examples about it. There are a lot of software for Windows to develop XML aplications. However, I have only seen XML parsers for Linux (no applications). Much of the tutorials found on the Web about XML are not that good. It's all abstract. I am looking for good examples..." This may be FAQ, but I too would like to see the "Layman's Description of XML and Why It is Cool."

kTag sent us a page of daily updates from the wife of Jason Haas, LinuxPPC developer. For those who hadn't heard, Jason was in a bad car accident a bit over a week ago. Keep Jason in your thoughts. Any e-mail addressed to him will be forwarded.

LinuxNews.com Editor writes, "A new talking distribution makes Linux easy for visually impaired users to install." An amazing hybrid of a compact Slackware distro and a Linux speech synthesizer, this is an effort that deserves kudos not only because it helps blind and visually impaired users, but because it sounds like it could teach the big boys a few things about appropriate user interfaces. As a bonus, it's small and can run on relatively low-end hardware (though it requires a compatible speech synthesizer), and doesn't even require repartioning.