Querty wrote in to tell us that ZDNet's AnchorDesk page (home of everyone's favorite person: Jesse Berst) is doing a whole big Linux Thing today. Articles Include "Take the Linux Plunge", "Resellers Key to Linux Success", "Essential Linux Tips" and "Jon's Linux Toolkit", and a (ahem) poll. It looks like Linux is mainstream now.

Caballero writes " Not only is 2.2 pre 9 available. The version number in the Makefile is listed as 2.2.0-final! It also includes support for the new SGI visual workstation." We're almost there now kids. Chill the wine (or just get out the shot glasses)

haaz writes "Applix Inc. has formally announced Applixware Office for LinuxPPC, and a bundling deal with LinuxPPC Inc. The product was shown during the Macworld Expo in San Francisco, and met a very warm reception. Cheers! "

L2000 writes "Here is the draft of the press release for the upcoming linux kernel 2.2.0. It seems like we might get the offical 2.2 kernel before the end of this month." We're getting closer to the big day. And there shall be great rejoicing throughout the land.

AFUL, the french Free Software user group, held a half day conference touting the benefits of free software to a government panel in the French Prime-Minister's building. The government panel (MTIC) is responsible for introducing new technologies to different ministries. A french customs official described the easy introduction to their intranet of a Linux web server which has shown itself to be very reliable. Another presentation discussed the commercial need to force customers into an update cycle. It compared Windows 3.11's reliability to that of women's stockings which are designed to break quickly. The french city of Lille's computer department also enjoyed Linux' ease of use, scalability and efficiency on older hardware. Finally, Bernard Lang's presentation did not pull its punches. He discussed the dangers for the French economy of relying on foreign black-box software: proprietary software reduces local employment, tends to concentrate power monopolistically, while free software increases local employment (since most software jobs are in the service industry), guarantees originality, competition, conformity to open standards, and a free choice of service provider. The website referred to is the French Prime Minister's Governmental website, so we can be hopeful things will start happening. Links courtesy of Nouvelles Neuves Linux, and Translation services available from Babelfish.

Harris Vaegan-Lloyd writes "Cobalt networks have just released the Qube2, with a whole lot of new features to make everyone's lives easier, so why would you want a netwinder now huh? New features are modem control, scheduled backup to remote servers, DHCP server, better email alias handling & better mailing lists and too much to type here.. Hardware is now 2 ethernet ports, a serial card and a new 250Mhz mips chip (Qunatum Effects Dynamic.). And a new power connector to replace the old one that kept falling out! Yay! ;). " An anonymous reader also sent us a link to a review of this new toy.

PsycoDoc writes "Sales growth for Intel-based servers slowed down in 1998, although sales of operating systems for these machines grew faster because of the growing popularity of Linux."

Bert de Bruijn writes "As Red Hat prepares all RawHide packages for RedHat 6.0 (codename "BlueSky"), support is being added for the ARM architecture. Obviously, Red Hat Software plans to release the next version of their distribution for the ARM architecture (Corel Netwinder & co.)" I dunno if this is proof but it looks hopeful.

Josh Beck submitted this interesting question:"Hello. We're currently using a Mylex PG card and a pile of disks to run a 120 GB RAID5 under Linux. After some minor firmware issues with the Mylex (which their tech support acknowledged and fixed right away!) , we've got a very stable filesystem with a good amount of storage. My question, though, is how far will Linux and e2fs go before something breaks? Is anyone currently using e2fs and Linux to run a 500+ GB filesystem? "

cronio asks "I was wondering if there is a way to get X to work with the Diamond Fusion 2D/3D card using the Voodoo Banshee chipset. So far I haven't been able to get it to work and was wondering if anyone has. Any suggestions?" C :Just a word of note - Diamond is notorious for viciously guarding its Hardware Specs and APIs, and unless a deal has been made (and NDAs signed) by some other party to explicitly make drivers for X, it will be unlikely to see higher end Diamond cards unless one is willing to use a commercial X server. Hopefully, this is not the case in this situation. Answers, anyone?

Fict asks "I was wondering if anyone has successfully gotten the Diamond Monster Sound MX200 to work, as a stand alone card, to work under linux. If this isn't possible, can I at least use it as a pass thru card?"

Markus Reimer asks: "Is it possible to ARP address a Linux box in the same way you can ARP address som printservers and similar 'network boxes'? The thing I want to accomplish is setting an ip-address on a Linux box, remotely, when the box is first set up. (preinstalled Linuxsystem). On several print-server boxes you do this by using arp (e.g. arp -s 192.168.17.42 ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff) If I could do this it would be great! "

Robert Wagoner writes "Today's News and Observer had yet another Red Hat article in the business section. This is one of the more clueful items we've seen in the local press coverage. " It's a longish article with a few pictures and various interesting quotes. And there's raster again in that suit. Yikes. I don't even wear pants.

Charles Bronson wrote in to tell us that Slackware now has its own domain name. Shockingly enough, its Slackware.com. The distribution that so many of us learned to love Linux on now has a happy home on the web. If there's one thing for certain, its that Slackware users are definitely attached to their distribution. Dave says its because of Slack's advanced packaging system *grin*.

emptybody was the first of you to write in with this PC Week story that Compaq is about to ship RedHat 5.2 bundled on some of its servers, and provide 24-by-7 support for them. This apparently will save time for them, since they currently pre-load Linux by hand. If this is becoming a problem, it suggests demand for Linux Servers is increasing. Gateway also expects to deliver such servers by the end of the year. Kim Brown, an analyst at Dataquest Inc, says this means Compaq is walking away from SCO, and that Linux is starting to be acknowledged as the low-end Unix alternative.

Jean-Paul Smets has opened his new site Freepatents.org (mostly in English), which encourages Europe to maintain its no-software patents law. This law is apparently under threat. He's also well known for this study of the economics of free software (in french only at the moment, contact me if you can translate it, but you can use babelfish in the meantime). The new site contains the text of a resolution adopted by the french ISOC at its Autrans meeting, which requests that before Europe introduces any patent law a detailed study be conducted to determine the impact of patents on innovation, competition and free software, and that provisions are added to ensure large corporations cannot use patents as a legal manoeuvre to block innovation, competition and free software. The League of Programming cites example of patent misuse and reasons to be against software patents.

Courtesy Linux Weekly News. Samba 2.0 has been released. Samba is a fully Y2K-compliant and supported "file and print server suite" for Linux, and an often cited free software success story (it is GPL). 2.0 adds the ability to "integrate seamlessly into an existing Windows NT domain". See the press release (with an amazing benchmark relult at the head), or the Samba project home page for more info.

CsJmn writes "I came across this short article on Linux in the January issue online edition of Healthcare Informatics magazine (a healthcare computing industry trade magazine). The story is about half way down this page ." The story is about the sucessful introduction of Linux to Huntsville Hospital in Alabama. Apparently, John Carpenter, Microsoft's worldwide healthcare industry Marketing manager is worried "It will certainly drive us to put new stuff into our products."

rdsmith writes "This week's Info World has a short article on Linux and its growth over the past few years. It makes a couple of mentions of ESR and the Halloween document. Although the article bases Linux's growth on numbers provided by Redhat, it's still good press for Linux. "

Ryan wrote in to say "Apparently Creative Labs is looking to hire someone full-time to develop and write Linux kernel drivers for their audio products, as this posting to the linux-kernel mailing list shows. Specifically meantioned is the role of this person to grow a team of engineers to support Linux. I'm unsure if this team is in the OSS community, or internal to Creative. There is also meantion of ALSA, my favorite Linux sound system. Assuming the resulting drivers are available for free (even if only in binary format), everyone with a Creative sound card will win big."