marshall writes "I was reading the Debian Weekly News and was happy to see that Jan 2 will be the no new packages freeze for potato and Jan 15-16 will be the final freeze date with any new packages going into a new dist called woody. Then after some test cycles it looks like they are planning for a release at the end of Feb. The e-mail is here "

China, in the news more recently for sentencing hackers to death, now looks set to encourage them. In this article from the South China Morning Post, Red Hat says it will establish a beach head in the rapidly industrialising sleeping giant to push Linux before Microsoft makes its move. We reported in November that Linux was to be China's official OS. I can see Red Hat stock jumping skyward if a billion communists suddenly decide Linux is their desktop and server platform of choice.

Shawn wrote in asking for suggestions on high-end Linux Workstation configurations for the US Army. Aparently, they are looking at replacing some SGIs with cheaper PCs, and this being Slashdot, I'm sure some of you might be able to make some improvements to their suggested configuration. I can't tell you how glad I am to see the US Army giving Linux a chance. The US Navy could probably learn a thing or two from this. Click below for the full text.

As head of Linux International, Jon Hall is one of the highest-profile people in the Linux community. He's also one of the nicest. He's wanted to do this interview for a long time, and we've wanted to have him as a guest for just as long. Finally we got the schedules to match. Yay! Suggested interview theme: "The next 100 years of Linux," but what you actually ask is up to you. One note to clear up a name misunderstanding that has been causing problems for Jon "maddog" Hall lately: Please do not confuse him with VA Linux Vice Presedent (and recent "on paper" mega-millionaire) John T. Hall. (Note the spelling difference!) They are not, repeat not, the same person! Anyway, usual interview rules - with one difference: we're going to post Jon's answers Saturday instead of Friday. Who could be better (and what topic could be better) to kick off the New Year?

neal writes "Fortune has an article that selects Linus as one of the'people' to watch in 2000! " Just another sign of the recognition that Linux and Open Source as a whole has garnered over the last eighteen months or so. Here's to 2000 being even better than 1999.

An anonymous reader noted that it appears that crack.linuxppc.org has been, well, cracked. There is a mirror of the defaced page at here being hosted by attrition.org. The actual box is down as of when I type this. On the upside, it sure took a long time for someone to get in there (I'm still amused that they posted the root password). Jason Haas from LinuxPPC said "The machine is going to Daniel Jacobowitz, who won it legitimately. The subsequent problems occured after Dan installed a backdoor, and have since been cleared up. The original problem was that proftpd-1.2.0pre4 was left running with a /incoming directory."

Dark Paladin writes "Cnn.com is reporting that Communication Intelligence Corp. and Middlesoft is working on Linux based handwriting software that will work in handhelds, Internet appliances, and have GTK and QT hooks. Now we can move from carpal-tunnel to writers cramp. " Now I'm curious, what matters more to people, handwriting or voice recognition?

three55ml writes "This is an editorial I wrote noting a few points about what Linux has to do before it moves totally mainstream. It talks about both the small and the large issues currently slowing the widespread use of Linux."

Wil Mahan writes "According to the LWN daily updates page, a beta version of the Opera browser has been released for Linux, and is available at Metalab (1.9 MB). Looks like Opera fufilled its promise of a full public beta before Christmas."

Sara Chan writes "An expert at the British government's computer security headquarters, CESG (Communications-Electronics Security Group) has endorsed Linux along with the open source model for software development as the most secure computer architecture available. CESG is the sister organisation of the GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), which is roughly the British equivalent of the American NSA (National Security Agency). There is also a warning against "a competing commercial product with hidden source code." For details, see the ZDNet UK story."

Just recently we had a piece commenting on how many people were wondering where MassLinux had gone. Emmett Plant, at LinuxToday, has got the story. In an interview, Emmett talks with MassLinux' Todd Lauder about the whole situation and how people can expect to get their information back from MassLinux.

nizo writes "A touchphone that sits on your desk running Linux! Has a builtin touchscreen for dialing a number, makeing notes, etc. Wonder if these are for sale in the U.S. ? " The website isn't english, but it looks pretty cool. Very nice design. Features an 8 inch touchscreen, and does email and faxing just for good measure. Runs what is described as a stripped down Red Hat 4.2 (there does seem to be some issue about them releasing the code as required by the GPL, but I'm sure they'll make good on their obligation in that dept should they ship the product). Good to see Linux running small appliance devices like this. I'm sure we'll see a lot more in the coming months.

Thanks to Gael Duval for letting me know that Mandrake 7 is up and ready for download. They sent over the press release, which I've posted below. Essentially, it's ready for "geeks and testers" and includes many new features.

demachina sent us an EE times article about the realtime Linux conference in Vienna. Attendees decided to endorse the Cygnus EL/IX API for Realtime Linux and to start work on kernel patches.

HeUnique was too busy to post, but pointed out LWN's Timeline of 1999 for Linux. Quite a ride over the last year - complete with lots of images and historical markers. It's broken into months or the whole year. This is version .8 - 1.0 will be out after the end of the year.

Fungai wrote with an update to the on-going HP/Puffin Group story. There'd been some confusion with the recent purchase of Puffin Group by Linuxcare, but HP has confirmed that they will port Linux to their 64 bit PA-RISC chips. HP will still be partnering with Puffin Group to do it, with results expected in the first half of 2000.

notsosilentbob writes " Philip's Tivo Linux changes are up on their website." I've been lusting over a tivo for quite some time now. Its super cool to see a big company make good on the GPL tho. Now I just got to buy one. (for those who don't know, the tivo is a digital VCR that runs linux and stores up to 30 hours of tv on an internal harddrive).

Stephen Hurrell asks: "I'm interested in getting feedback about how people and/or sites running Linux with all the usual applications like apache, samba, perl, php, jdk's, postgresql, oracle, X, etc. are handling the Y2K problem. Particularly how they are Y2K testing and communicating results in order to ease management's open source concerns. What do you do and what did you find? There may be a silver lining in Linux that in fact most applications may be using UNIX time structures and that the open source community may be able to respond quicker than Brand M for patches and fixes. Hopefully this may result in increased trust and usage of open source products. What do you think?"

bnagel asks: "I always properly halt my computer. Twice in the past month, when I have booted back into Linux, a number of files are corrupt, and I have to reformat and reinstall. The files get an invalid userid and date and when I try to execute one, bash says that it was not found. I'm using Caldera 2.3. I can't think of using another OS, but if this becomes a monthly ritual, I might have to. Can anyone explain this ext2 phenomenon?" An odd problem which I have not experienced before, and I'm less careful with my HDs. Does anyone have any helpful information?

twdorris asks: "I've been playing around with SCSI under Linux for a while now and I keep running into issues with things not working *quite* right (scanner not responding sometimes, having to retry operations for what appears to be no good reason, etc.). The SCSI subsystem under Linux is supposedly sub-par and is considered by those in the know to be a major hack, to put it nicely. See this little note from the cdrecord author for an example." (More)