Eugene Sotirescu writes "If anyone doubted that Linux is poised to break into the limelight, here's proof: a Newsweek article by Steve Levy, with all the right names, saying the right things, about the right system. "

Alan writes "The Linux booth was an absolute smash at the Comdex in Vancouver today. This was it's first day, but the booth stayed packed from when the doors opened to about an hour before they closed. And when I say packed, I mean PACKED. People were overflowing into the aisles to talk to the volunteers that were there. We quickly ran out of the Caldera CDs and Linux Journals that were donated. Even people who weren't part of the booth but used linux were stopping to talk to people about it and help to show them all about linux. We were literally the most busy booth there. There was even a tv crew from BCTV (www.tvforbc.com, no story though) who came out and put us on the news! In short, Linux was the toast of the show :)"

Matt Welsh (who is probably not coincidentally program chair...) wrote in with a call for papers for the upcoming O'Reilly Linux Conference. It looks like a cool conference, almost a Linux Expo of the west (in August): two days of tutorials, followed by two days of a multi-track conference. They also will have evening "breakaway sessions" for special interest groups (sorta like BOFs, it seems). I actually may submit a paper...

Linuxberg from the people who make TUCOWS has opened, and is offering a copy of WordPerfect 8 to win. The website seems to me much more geared towards newbies than Freshmeat, providing a somewhat different service. It also appears less comprehensive than SAL. Interestingly, this Ext2 interview of the president of TUCOWS shows his company's been using Linux for quite some time.

Plutor writes "Applix has ported their office suite to LinuxPPC, and CNN has an article about it. It's always a nice thing to see main-stream press attention-I'd like my next box to be PPC. "

Chad Miller was the first to tell us that pre6 is out. Remember that the new kernel.org mirrors are up and running- you can hit ftp.<country code>.kernel.org for a mirror near you. Help ensure that everyone can download it faster so we can hammer this thing smooth for the 2.2 final.

Mike asks: "I was wondering if anyone knows where I could buy a linux plate logo (to fit in that 1" x 1" square in my computer case). I have been searching around, but I cannot seem to find one."

Jonathan wants to know your thoughts on this issue: "I'm thinking of purchasing a magneto optical juke box (in particular an HP 80ex), I was wondering if anyone has had any sucess running them under linux, or just an experience with them in general."

alank asks: "I am investigating a network upgrade for a school. The core Servers are Linux based, but most workstations are currently Macs or PC's and the plan is to move these over to Linux at some later date. Currently the issues on managing large numbers of WinXX programs means that considerable tech support time is wasted on fixing them. I remembered the kiosk article where someone mentioned using Assimilator for the Macintosh to keep images of the hard disks on the servers so it could be replaced, I could not find anything comprehensive on the Windows side to do the same. Should I be looking at dual booting, and somehow using linux on the clients to re-image the drives? How would you do this?

An anonymous reader wrote in to say that "Unix World is running a series of tutorials on configuring services on Linux. This is part 4, but there are links to the previous secitons. Topics include: HTTP, FTP, Telnet, inetd, Firewalling, Mail services and more. find it here "

Ryano writes " TechWeb has a story about LinuxPPC's strong debut at MacWorld. I was interested to read the bit about Linux tapping into Mac extensions to use features it doesn't yet support itself. Additionally, there is also some stuff on the future of LinuxPPC. "

Jeroen writes "USAToday features a nice mainstream article about Linus Torvalds, with mentions his grandfather and contains quotes from his father." The article calls him the next Bill Gates, albeit tongue in cheek.

Panu Hällfors writes "The first one installfest ever in Finland takes place in Ulvila from 16. to 17. January. I'm expecting something like 60 to 70 new installs and of course about as much experienced users to drop by to lend a hand to new users. We'll probably install mainly the new RedHat derivate SOT-Linux which is translated to Finnish. More info can be found on the Internet site of the event, "> here (In Finnish and *only accesible from Finland*) "

Linus released 2.2.0pr.5 this afternoon. Hopefully, enough mirrors will have synced by now. People need to test these babies so the real 2.2.0 is as close to bug-free as possible.

A friend of mine had asked me this question: "it seems that if I want to run a full "Radio station" on Linux only, I can't, since the streamer needs Windows. Is there a way to do it using Linux Only from top to bottom? and what hardware is needed? What software?" I'm sure many others would like to know also how..

Josh Baugher wrote in to tell us that the January 1999 Issue of the Linux Gazette is now out. Articles on Samba, booting Linux with the NT Boot Loader, printing and more.

Lars Larsen writes "Linux Weekly News has a nice Linux timeline for 1998. " The best comment is the little block of Jesse Berst quotes his opinions changing from 'Linux Will Never go Mainstream' to 'I've always said that Linux could be a serious Challanger'

Quite a few submissions have come in about parallel port scanners, but Quicker was the first to ask a question generic post (others were about specific scanners, but they neglected to include models and manufacturers) : "I'm looking for a scanner for my Linux box, and the only support I see is for various SCSI scanners, namely HP, which is fine, but they are expensive. I see all these less expensive (but lower quality) parallel port scanners and would like to get one, since they are good enough for what I do. Anyone working on support for these devices?" SANE supports Plustek Parallel Port scanners, but I don't know if there are any other parallel port drivers in that project. Can anyone shed more light on this subject?

Mark Bickford writes "There's a nice column in Information Week titled "Linux Takes Shot at Making History." Refreshingly FUD-free, and the author is the Executive Editor of the magazine. Maybe a sign of some pro-Linux spin in '99? "

haaz writes "Linux has a big role behind the scenes at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco: the entire OC-3 Internet backbone runs on Linux. All the DNS, IP management, security, etc., is running on Linux. LinuxPPC Inc. is exhibiting, marking their debut as the first Linux exhibitors at a Macworld Expo."