Oracle will announce today Oracle 8i for Linux. It will be available within 60 days. They are also giving away 20,000 copies of an "early access CD" for the people who will register. RedHat will be showing a new portal this week (it's not available yet) which will include "everything that a Linux user need". Netscape will announce today the delivery of preview releases of Directory and Messanger servers for Linux.

At 00:00:00AM UTC, (7PM EST, and 4PM PST for you lucky bastards at LWCE) Debian will release Debian 2.1, codenamed "Slink". Slink has been frozen for four months, and was almost skipped. Right now, we are celebrating the release on irc.openprojects.net, #debian. Last time we had over 300 people in one channel, and had an incredible amount of fun. Order CDs and check out the party HQ at netgod.net. Be there or be square! Update: 03/02 06:47 by J : Looks as though the release has been delayed another week. An announcement should be on the web site soon.

Yuri Kiryanov writes "Elbrus, the maker of the E2K processor, has released details from their recent Press Conference. The highlights are that they have a Native Linux Kernel 2.0.34 running on a multilevel simulation model (including Verilog level RTL). Their native compiler achieves 8.5 FPU instructions per cycle. The E2K has SMP Built-in, should have Merced compatibility and only loses 20-30% speed when compiling foreign instruction sets with respect to the E2K's native performance." Note: the site is pretty slow so be patient. It's now in English and will soon post more E2K info.

kernel was the first to tell us that Linux.com has some content. You can also read a Press Release. The most notable piece of information is that the site will be managed by Trae McCombs (Slashdot author, Themes.org guy, and VA Employee). He will be slave to a board of directors that will hopefully help make sure that Linux.com does in fact fulfill what it should: support the community). The board of directors includes me, scoop, mandrake, Chris DiBona, Nick Petreley, and representatives from Oracle and SGI.

The Mosix people are now looking into the Linux GPL issue. Since it was Linus and the other core kernel developers who gave the binary module dispensation (binary modules may be inserted into the kernel as long as they do not require kernel modifications of their own) it seems odd they are talking to the FSF about this. But at least this is a move in the right direction.

Sean kennedy sent us a link to an article over at CNN which is a brief Preview of LinuxWorld. Talks a bit about (and LinuxPPC porting) as well as Corel and Oracle.

Ransom Love from Caldera has published a positional paper about Linux Standard Base and what he thinks about if the Linux community won't adopt it. I think it's a "must read" (thanks to Linux Weekly News). Update: 03/01 03:23 by S : Seems like that LSB needs a boost: now Intel is talking of setting up a new initiative... (see half way down the page)

Mithrandir sent us a link to a new.com article which hits on the Intel investment, but also reveals that VA Research has acquired the Linux.com domain.

Fionn tells us that German computer magazine c't is reporting that Altavista's German Server (in Germany) runs Red Hat Linux instead of Digital Unix as the US front-end server does. Netcraft confirms the story.

Peter Neves writes " There is a Linux story on the very front page of the MSNBC Technology Section, "the front slide" as they call it, on why Linux should be the OS running your server. While the story gives a technical overview on the features and performance of several distributions in comparison to NT, the summary says that Linux is not capable of "Competing with the 800 pound Gorilla" of the MS Marketing and distribtution channels. "

Glen Raphael submitted this odd question a while ago: "Suppose I have a test tool running under Linux in an environment where the power is expected to die often and for long periods of time without any warning (and buying a UPS isn't an option). How can I make it safe to just turn off the power to the PC running Linux without properly shutting down?" So what is one to do when they want to run a Linux box and they can't trust their outlet?

Miguel de Icaza writes "The people that did the MOSIX cluster system have now made a port for Linux. But they do not provide all the source code of their work. They only provide a binary kernel module which allows the user to run only a cluster of six machines(they show a picture of their 100 cluster node). The binary module requires kernel modifications. (Thus breaking the Linus permission for binary modules). I think we should stand up against this blatant violation of the GPL. " Update: 02/27 11:34 by S : In related news, xose points out other license violations: Linux Network Drivers states "Several drivers have been distributed that are little more than renamed versions of my drivers. Some have my name, the copyright notice or the Gnu GPL license notice removed. The less flagrant violations merely fail to note that the driver has been modified from the original version. (The GPL requires such a note.)"

levanti writes "Looks like Dell will outsource support of their Linux servers to LinuxCare. Article can be found here. "

Jean-Paul Smets wrote in to tell us that Fujistu has released its first Linux software: AVS5 is a visualization and computer graphics program that includes advanced features such as volume rendering. Apparently Fujitsu has a strong Linux tradition, with Linux already running on its AP1000/AP3000 series of parallel computers. Update: 02/25 11:22 by S : Can someone who reads Japanese confirm this story because...

iKON writes "Moreton Bay has ported linux to Motorola's ColdFire processer. " You can visit the porting projects page here for more information too.

Yesterday we totally nuked the Linux Counter by linking it on these pages. Steve sent us a link to a detailed page on the Slashdot Experience contains logs and the like, documenting the server going crunch. I'm reposting it because yesterday the server spent several hours down and I'd like more people to have a chance to register their Linux box. Drop on in, fill out the form and let the world know that you run Linux. When you can't track sales to determine an OSs market share, things get tricky. Update: 02/25 11:47 by CT : That didn't take long. Guess you guys have more work to do over there (sigh).

Gihadrah writes "Pacific Hi-Tech will next week preview a new version of its Linux distribution that lets system operators tie together as many Linux machines as they want in order to achieve faster and more reliable Web servers. "

jeff sent us a link to the transcripts from the CNN Fortune special that was on wed. evening on Open Source, Linux, Red Hat, Linus, Microsoft, Operating Systems, and more. It was a pretty standard fluff piece, but hey, it was 10 minutes of CNN which never hurts.

Thank my mom for this one: tonight on CNN's CNN/Fortune program, there will be a story about Linux. You can read about the show here. For those of us on the east coast, it will air at 10PM. Don't know about other time zones. From the promo, it looks as though the piece will be positive, and possibly oriented a tad towards the (potential) investor.

ninjaz writes "LWN is reporting an announcement by LinuxPPC Inc. that it will be showing off their quad-cpu 400mhz powerpc boxes at LinuxWorld. " Drool drool drool.