BlueVelvet writes "The crack.linuxppc.org contest is over. Due to a waste of bandwith, illegal activities, and other reasons." Get the full story here. Seems some people were trying to crack other machines on their ISP. The folks at LinuxPPC say that if you send in a workable method to get into one configured like theirs, you can still win, but please stop eating up their ISP's bandwidth with crack attempts now, okay?

Just a fast note: if you're one of the Linux developers who got left out of the "give back to the community" chance to get in on Red Hat's IPO yesterday, you have a second chance. We have heard, and I have called E*Trade and confirmed, that you now have until 3 p.m. EDT tomorrow (Friday) to get in on the deal. Clarification - From an E*Trade VP who called me at 6:10 p.m. EDT: You must have already met the offer requirements, and have already submitted your conditional offer if you're still going to get in on the deal. If you have, please call 650-331-5856 to reconfirm by the Friday 3 p.m. deadline. I personally believe everyone's heart is and was always in the right place on this whole thing, but, as they like to say in government, "mistakes were made." Update: Red Hat CEO Robert Young is now worth $472 million, according to this Globe & Mail story.

Daniel Stone writes "Linux Mandrake won the best product of the year award at LinuxWorld. It's bound to be a contentious discussion about what deserves the awards-but Nick Petrely's comments speak for themselves.

Most small company IPOs have at least a little disorganization and hype surrounding them, but Red Hat's was over the edge. We're not even going to try to sort out the claims and counter-claims, the complaints and counter-complaints, and all the rest, just point you to a selection of stories on the subject, not all of which agree 100% about exactly what happened, when it happened -- or to whom.

After digging through three horrible voice-mail menus I finally got through to an E*Trade customer service representative named Jehnon Johnson who gave me the latest official skinny on the Red Hat IPO (as of 10:45 a.m. EDT) for "affinity" customers. If that's you, please read on. Update: 08/11 05:22 (5:22 p.m. PDT) by H : It's up and running-it's around 45$ per share, a three+ fold increase.

Lotus Domino R5 was finally released by Lotus. It's a "sneak preview" version-so be prepared to deal with bugs methinks. But it's cool to see that they done what they said they'd do.

saurus wrote in to tell us that an announcement has appearedon E*trade proclaiming that the IPO share price for Red Hat will now be $12-$14. Everyone's getting really anxious to see what happens. Brace yourself. Update: 08/11 12:32 by H : It looks like the info was pulled-anyone have more details? Post below.

Anonymous Coward writes "I've heard that Linus will grace the cover of the next Upside. Their site posted the interview today. It's one of those huge, future-speak filled, all-encompassing pieces. Pretty good stuff." This may be the *longest* Linus interview ever posted online. But there's enough new information in it (besides the sushi comment; I didn't make that up) that it's probably worth reading.

kuro5hin writes "Yet another in the stable 2.2 series, linux 2.2.11 is out and on the mirrors. Download, patch, compile, repeat as necessary. " Seems Alan has blessed us with a present for LinuxWorld. Please use a mirror to download it.

alterity asks: "I want to roll my own root/boot rescue disk. So far so good - I have created a root/boot disk that works with the latest stable kernel and glibc(2.1). I have saved space using busybox and asmutils. But the biggest dead-weight of space is the the size of the glibc library - a touch over one meg. I notice that the Debian distribution has a much reduced glibc library under 400k in size. Does anyone know how they do it and what can be excised from glibc for this purpose?" Shrinking critical libraries is always good thing.

Quite a number of people have written in with the news that Dell is going to be expanding their Linux support. Beginning in October, they will be offering installation of Linux on their hugely popular Dimension Line of PCs-before this, it had only been offered on servers. Will this mean more competition for the VAs and Penguins?

Will in Seattle writes "Catch the LinuxWorld hype and try not to gripe about why you aren't there. San Jose, here I come! " Good article stating some of known stuff coming out-and that's some interesting stuff still coming out.

Larry Augustin was the subject of a recent news.com interview. Larry touches on issues like hiring important developers, the importance of linux.com, and various other things. He also mentions briefly that the IA-64 port has picked up the pace, and that VA plans to go public in the "near term rather than long term".

Pilchie asks: "I recently bought a new hard drive for my box at home that is much larger and faster than my old one. For those reasons, I would like to have Linux installed on it instead of leaving it on my old disk. The problem is that I have spent a lot of time and effort tweaking my box, and I don't want to go through it again. So far, all I have tried is using: "dd if=/dev/hdc1 of=/dev/hda1 bs=2048k" While this seems to work (can boot and everthing), once it has booted if I run df, it reports the size as the same as the original partition, even though fdisk reports the size correctly. Anyone have any ideas?" For file moving, I've always preferred the tar approach, but moving the files isn't the only thing you have to worry about: there are some system configurations you will HAVE to changem, /etc/lilo.conf being the one particular one that stands out in my mind. I'm sure there are others.

Jim asks: "I'm having severe problems with my Linux file system. I have a 6gb HD with a 1gb fat partition containing Windoze 95, a 2.5gb NTFS partition with NT workstation, and a 2.5gb partition containing Linux. I use NT's boot loader. I used the directions in the HOWTO docs to create a file from the Linux boot sector so I can load that with NT's boot loader. The problem is, as I switch back and forth between NT and Linux, I encounter severe file system corruption in Linux, and minor corruption in NT. I've already run a surface scan on the drive and no physical defects were detected. I was told by a colleague that Windows NT does not respect partition boundaries as well as it should and is corrupting the Linux partition. Does anyone know if this is true? If so, does anyone have a solution? Does anyone have an alternate explanation, or better yet: a solution?"

Anonymous Coward writes "I've just opened up FezBox, a site which will build you your very own, customized Red Hat boot disks. It makes installing Red Hat 6.0 a breeze, and once you've got a boot disk created, you can typically do an installation in 5-10 minutes..." This ought to be especially interesting for low-volume clone builders who want a production-speed method of installing RH Linux but don't have a lot of time to invest in coming up with their own "custom" installs.

malacai sent us another article in a long stream about Red Hat's Impending IPO. This one talks a bit about Be's IPO, as well as assorted other stuff related to it. It's a good piece (and one that for a change is about the actual IPO and its implications and not the E*Trade/SEC fiasco)

MikeDartt writes "According to C|Net news, Oracle is devoting an entire division to creating a line of products for Linux. As the article notes, this isn't surprising, given Ellison's antipathy towards MS. Yet another announcement for LWE, eh? " Will this lead to even more enterprise credibility?

Kypeli asks: "I just got the TrueType fonts working on my X (finally!!). Now that I can use these wonderful TrueType fonts, I have been wondering why can't TrueType fonts be included as default in the Linux distributions? At least in my opinion Postscript fonts suck deeply." A large number of TrueType fonts are not free, but I'm sure there are some out there. Why /aren't/ TrueType fonts included in distributions these days, especially now that Linux has support for them?

Takashi Oe writes "I just came across these pictures (one and two] of Aquarium Computer's small Linux box. Its size, 4x8x6.3 in inches, isn't that small, but it certainly looks pretty cool. " But I gotta ask, why do all these trendy new boxes have crazy lights on 'em? Is there a purpose or is it just wacky design?