Anonymous Coward writes "Check the current tree changelog and you'll notice that Slackware 7.0.0-pre1 beta is out. Seems it won't be too long before the next major release; now completely based on glibc2."

Chuck Milam writes "CNN is reporting that Debian will soon be available via retail outlets. According to the article: 'The companies say they will donate all profits from the sale of the retail GNU/Linux package to Software in the Public Interest, a nonprofit organization for open source projects.' " I've seen the boxes. They're super sweet. Saw them shipping with a Myth 2 CD.

Kurt has returned, continuing his reviews of Linux IDE ^[?] environments. After reviewing Code Fusion, he's reviewed Metrowerks CodeWarrior (for Suse). The full text of the review is below.

The Li18nux effort is now underway. The group seems to have ambitious goals and plenty of members (not to mention a multi-lingual press release). The effort is supposed to lead to documentation, components, etc. in many many languages, including languages with different character sets. Japan and many other nations seem to be fairly represented.

Chris Beard of The Puffin Group wrote in to say that the birds are partying again. Throughout the week, anyone at ALS will have the opportunity to hack on, or talk to someone hacking on the PA-RISC port of Linux (which is rumoured to boot sash now). The Puffins also sponsored two BOFs today - anyone have a report to give?

chris writes "The Linux Weekly News, in conjunction with the Atlanta Linux Showcase are producing an onsite, web based daily showguide. It is running on the showfloor. See what is happening at ALS. Roving LWN volunteers will be covering the show and the conference sessions. " Well, the show's just started to get underway, and I'm about to be trampled by attendes flooding through the gates. That's my update.

slaker writes "Salon.com has a review of Bob Young's new book "Under the Radar", as well as some commentary on the spectacle of developers versus business-types." Several interesting comments on the article. Hafta add the book to my TODO queue (course since its behind Snow Crash and The Diamond Age it might be awhile, what with my hours and hours of freetime)

Porag_Spliffing sent us a choice quote from this well researched Gartner group piece which says "The lack of standards in the Linux community, coupled with a lack of key productivity applications and with Unix complexity, will continue to make Linux a poor choice for the mainstream business productivity user."

Richard Becke asks: " I am planning to set up a Linux box as an ISDN-based dialin server for my company network. I have not been able to find any information about using multiple ISDN cards with Linux. We need to serve at least 6 simultaneous connections. Any ideas or tips would be most welcome. The question can be rephrased like this: How do i set up a Linux-based ISP solution?"

rips asks: "I've been a moderately skilled Linux user for several years now but my problem solving skills on this one have got me stumped. I have compiled many kernels before but when compiling a recent kernel (2.2.11 or 2.2.12) the compilation will run without a hitch, lilo (v20) will accept the changes but after a reboot the system will crash at: 'Uncompressing Linux... Ok'. I have tried compiling the 2.2.12 kernel on 3 different machines with 2 different distributions (RedHat 6.0 and Slackware 3.2.0) and for different target processors and kernel options but nothing seems to work. I've even tried running off a boot disk incase it was LILO but to no avail. This has really got me stumped. Has anyone else figured out the cause/solution to this?"

Jason Perlow noted a story that popped up at ZD Net talking about a new investor at LinuxMall. Sco has entered the Linux World with an investment in the web store. Its interesting to note that they talk about doing this as publicity.

maan asks: "I recently started using smbclient under Linux. I know that many test results have showed that Samba as a server gives more throughput than an NT server. However, I have found that smbclient is much slower with than Windows when accessing the localhost. Anyone knows if the Samba client needs more work?" That's rather odd. Can someone verify this behavior? Does anyone have any possible explanations?

Banraeth writes "This week's PC Week contains a story about the results from their hackpcweek.com security test site. They explain the object of the test, how many attempts they got, the structure of the attempts and the way someone finally got in. The article reads really well and very clearly explains the anatomy of a break-in for those of us who aren't Linux security gurus. "

Eugene writes "I am working on a project to create an expansive network monitoring and all encompassing database solution. With archival and ageing of all data we are looking at a database that grows by 40Gb a year, with some tables being well over the 2Gb file limit in Linux/x86. We have narrowed ourselves down to Oracle 8i (for it's stalwart referencial integrity checking, and PL/SQL for tracing across aged route information) and PostgreSQL (for it's object polymorphism and CIDR data types for IP addresses). We are concerned with the robustness of Postgres compared to "grown up" Oracle, as well as file size limitations. Can anyone give us any advice on these issues? "

Gekko and Webslacker were the first of many to tell us about the stir over at ZDNet, which is reporting on the arrival of sub $200 PCs due Q1 2000. These new desktops from Taiwan's Tatung come in eye-catching candy colors a la Apple's iMac. Tatung has opted for Rise and Cyrix K6 chips instead of Intel Pentiums, and a CD-ROM drive is an option. One wonders with the increase in the cost of DRAM how this will impact the price?

Anonymous Coward writes "According to this News.com article. VA Linux Systems, O'Reilly and Associates, and SGI. Will be co-sponsoring a retail box version of Debian GNU/Linux. In addition VA will be helping to setup toll free technical support for Debian."

OUSpirit writes "I saw this over at Netscape's Technews site. Evidently, Intel (and some other companies) just invested some major bucks in TurboLinux to put them on more equal footing with RedHat. They plan to use the money to expand management and development staff. "

An Anonymous Coward wrote to inform us of a new Chinese Linux distro, Blue Point Linux 1.0RC, which includes support for Chinese characters. The bad news is the developers, who have based their effort on Red Hat's are alleged to have forgotten to include the modified kernel source. Coward asks: "Don't they violate the GPL?". Some people over at the BP Forum apparently have some thoughts. What do you think: is this against the terms of the GPL? (Can someone translate this?)

S7 writes "Opera Software has indicated that it is currently diversifying its browser to accomodate a wider flavour of Linux distributions, not just RedHat and its derivatives. Hope they finish soon!" Yeah, I know Mozilla is going to have wonderful features like instant messenger and changeable themes and I don't know what-all else if and when it ever gets end user-usable, but Opera is a plenty good enough browser for the likes of me; it's fast, compact, simple, and reliable, all of which are software qualities I admire immensely. In fact, the only two things I really miss from Windows are Opera and NoteTab, which is IMO the worlds's finest text processing tool for online journalists. Now that Opera's on its way to Linux, all I need is a Linux version of NoteTab or something like it and I'll be in PC heaven!

Yet Another Anonymous Coward asks: "How easy is it to set up Linux boxes as thin clients? My boss wants to use some old 486 boxes as X terminals, networked to a largish server where all applications are run. Has anyone tried this? What is the minimum software that needs to be installed on the X terminal systems? My boss likes open source software because it saves money; Is this another way he can save money?" Obviously the use of older machines is going to ease the costs of putting PCs on employee's desks, but are there other advantages (or disadvantages) to a setup like this?