cd-w writes "Alan Cox has written a column for osOpinion regarding the risks of using closed source computing. A sample quote: 'No company now would commit to a closed hardware strategy. It would cost them more than using commodity components. Just as importantly, it would commit them to a single source for support and parts. Why then do they commit to a single software supplier? A closed source strategy exposes the company to serious business risk. As many telephony companies have discovered, your OS supplier might suddenly decide to be your competitor.' " As always, Alan writes well and explains why the commodization of information has critical bearing on the success of the open source movement.

randombit wrote in to say that Google has a new specialized Linux search. As an aside, I keep getting conspiracy emails about Google having banner ads. Never ceases to amaze me how worked up people can get about some things. Anyhoo, I did several searches with mixed success, but it seems to do a pretty good job of searching for Linux stuff.

Kelly McNeill writes "The media is nutso for bigness. All you hear about in the tech press these days is that Linux is attracting big partners like IBM, finding big users like Deja.com, and making big IPO money like RedHat. That's all good, and I'm sincerely grateful for anything that helps me make a living without using Visual Interdev -- but to me, small and raw is where it's all at." The quote's from the article, which is big and cooked - and full of graphical comparisons between NT and Linux as useful development environments for small Web businesses.

xipe asks: "Has anyone made a driver for the internal (pci) DSL modems that have come out in the last few months? (Cisco, Alcatel and others have started marketing them online.) I have used the external with great success ( with Linux BTW), but since I moved outside of Bellsouths ADSL service area, I have yet to get a good connection again. I noticed that these modems have drivers for MS and Mac, but no Linux-- is someone working on these or are they going to go the way of the winmodem? I certainly hope not..... " Neither do I.

David A. Madore asks: "Every once in a while, I decide to try out IPv6 (on my local PC network that isn't connected to the Internet). And every time I'm disappointed. Now that the kernel supports it, and libc (glibc 2.2.1) supports it, and that I've recompiled the net-tools with inet6 support (why doesn't RedHat do that by default, I'd like to know), I would expect to be able to type 'telnet ::1' and get a connection to localhost, prompto! Instead, I get '::1: Unknown host.' Isn't the whole point of' IPv6 support of the libc to make program support completely transparent? And isn't the whole point of dynamically linked libraries so that we get it without even having to recompile anything? Or am I being incomparably naïve here? Will we have to rewrite and recompile any network-aware program so as to get IPv6 support? By the way: How will X11 DISPLAY strings work with IPv6 ':0' is kindda confusing in relation with IPv6 addresses)? Can anyone clarify the matter?"

dooling asks: "How would one go about building a Linux cluster from the ground up? I read a lot about Linux clusters on /. and have been able to find some information on configuring the cluster, but have found little on how to assemble the hardware, i.e., what is necessary, how they should be connected, etc. So does anyone have reliable information on hardware assembly and configuration? Also, (if you've never done this before) is it worth building your own, or is it better to just buy one prebuilt and preconfigured? If you want specifics: 20-40 machines, Linux (probably RedHat 6.x), disk or diskless?, do not need video cards (but should we have them?), switch or hub (best way to hook them up). We will be doing pretty straightforward scientific computing (floating point number crunching). "

srl writes "Fast Company, a magazine that talks a lot about the "new world of work" and how the Net is changing business, has a long interview with ESR in this month's issue. The interview talks about how open-source is changing people's ideas about *why* we should work. " If you've been looking for a magazine to further educate your PHB ^[?] , grab this issue. They can read on dead trees about open-source and believe you, because it's in Fast Company, and everyone know dead trees don't lie. *sarcastic grin*

Mads-Martin was one of the many folks to point out that 2.2.13 has made the mirrors. The patch is also up on kernel.org. You know the routine - download, compile, etc.

blount writes "An interview with LSDVD developers Paul Volcko and Gad Berger is on moviebone. Paul and Gad discuss DVD crypto, patent and trade secret issues, and their plans for an application supporting hardware and software DVD playback."

debrain writes "Looks like LinuxToday was acquired by internet.com. " No numbers were specified - LinuxToday will be joining Internet.com's LinuxPlanet.

moonboy writes "I know Netcraft exposed this awhile back, but here is a new story. This quote says it all: "We'd been running Sun Solaris since 1994, it was coming to the end of the life cycle for early machines and direct replacements would have cost a lot of money. We'd been running Linux on Intel [computers with Intel processors] internally for testing and had been impressed with their reliability and you can't beat them in the bangs for your buck department. It blows Sun [computers] out of the water and, as a web server, Linux is great. So we did some load testing internally and managed to get some more than satisfactory results." 'Nuff said. Here is the Sunday Times (UK) story" The article also says the Queen is a "keen web surfer." Good for her! Do you suppose she reads Slashdot? ;)

Alowishus writes "ZDNet reports that MainSoft, a Microsoft Partner and Windows source licensee is working on a Linux version of MainWin - a product that makes the Win32 API available on Linux, thus enabling cross-platform development. A demo version is supposed to be available in a few weeks."

Weramona writes "The Times is running an article on the possibility of Balkanization of Linux, due to commercialization. To be fair, both sides are presented, and it isn't all that sensationalist. The article is aimed rather low ("Unix was created in 1969 by..."). What's funny to me is, a couple months ago, this was a favorite "Damn the Man" conspiracy theory on /. " Its the times so you need a free account to read the story, but its a pretty good piece so its worth it.

Chilli writes "I just stumbled over RMS Linux on RedHat's web site. It includes only free (as in freedom) software and at least $1 is donated to the FSF for every sold package. This is super cool, I think, and I probably have to buy one just because it is so cool. I think, this finally proves that - as far as this is possible for a company - RedHat cares about the community. (The URL is to RedHat's secure commerce server, I hope it manages the /. effect, but I didn't find another URL - so, this is maybe not really official yet, but what's on the Web, is on the Web.)"

Gaewyn L Knight writes "Our institution just set up a large disk array on a Linux server using Debian. After our elation at gettin quotas set up we realised that our Solaris boxes where reporting quota sizes and time limits wrong. ex. 15mb quota 7 day time limit showing up as 32mb quota with a 388 month limit. So my main question is who's fault is it and is there a patch?"

CPCA asks: "Yikes! Earlier today, while attempting to listen to a 'real media' webcast, I received the following error message: 'This beta version of RealPlayer G2 for Unix(tm) has expired. Please contact RealNetworks (www.real.com) for the latest version.' Well, I did that and they still haven't produced a version newer than the one they published on May 17, 1999. Just to be safe, I went ahead and downloaded the 4.3Mb "G2player-6.0-0.99051701.i386_rpm" file, renamed it to *.rpm and ran "rpm -Uvh --force G2player-6.0-0.99051701.i386.rpm". The package seemed to install just fine, so I located some other archived *.r?m files and assorted live webcast streams and ...no. I keep getting the same error message. Has anyone else experienced this? Have any of you come up with a workaround for it? "

The-Pheon asks "Ok. I've read the FAQs, scoured the Linux newsgroups searching for information about ipmasqadm and I still can't get simple port forwarding to work on RedHat6. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. The scenario: Standard Red Hat 6.0, Kernel 2.2.12, and ipchains-1.3.8. External is ip_aliased with a legal dns addresses, Internal is a single reserved address and network, IP masquerading is configured and working for intenal -> external connections. This seems like it should be simple. To forward a simple telnet I use: /sbin/modprobe ip_masq_portfw; /usr/sbin/ipmasqadm portfw -a -P tcp -L x.x.x.x 23 -R 192.168.1.12 23 The result: A telnet sessions to x.x.x.x (from a completely outside source) just hangs. Closer investigation shows that port forward is working -- sort of." More details are available if you hit the link.

Juniks[for dumminger asks: "O'Reilly's Linux Device Drivers states that: 'When the timer interrupt occurs, the jiffies values is incremented. jiffies is thus number of clock ticks since the operating system was booted; it is decleared in "linux/sched.h" as unsigned long volatile, and it will overflow in one and a third year of continuous operation.' So, will I lose my beloved uptime? I am almost there, and all my dignity will go down the drain if this is true. And not to mention my reputaition at work..." I might be mistaken, but I thought Linux took a time_t value during boot as reported by the RTC and used that for uptime computations. Can someone clarify?

BurnMage asks: "I run a small network at a company that does heavy web and graphic work, as well as digital video production. The DV stuff is absolutely wonderful, cutting edge really nice hardware that costs thousands of dollars... and is only supported on the Windows platform. My personal experience with the machines has really been a constant nightmare until recently; we have gotten things running relatively smoothly. We use the DVRex and RexFX from Canopus, beautiful stuff and great tech support... but a few small messages asking why not port to Linux had a couple people muttering that threads in Linux 'aren't properly implemented'. I have also heard the same about NT. What's the story? I want a clear answer to post on their site."

An anonymous reader sent us a bit where Rick Moen speaks about the recent Linux Myths thing that has raise MS once again to the top of everyone's "People We Love" list. Its a good summary piece that pretty much explains how valid the Gartner Report was.