Chris Farris writes "Online Registration for the 1998 Atlanta Linux Showcase is opened. Showprices are $60/day regular and $35/day student during pre-Registration. Prices go up at the door so register now. ALS '98 will be held right after Networld+Interop on Friday October 23rd and Sat Oct 24th. Speaker and vendor lists can also be found on the web page. This year will be even bigger than last year. "

Reid Rivenburgh writes "InfoWorld has an article explaining how the major database companies don't think linux is big enough to warrant ports of their database software."

Simon_Jester sent us a link to the latest Spencer Katt Column where you can read rumours that Caldera and Red Hat could be merging. Now that would be a significant event.

sasha e. writes "Wired.com has a nice story on Avalon, making interesting points about Beowulf as the future of supercomputing. Nice bit of pro-Linux in there as well.. "

Jason Y. Sproul writes "Eric Kidd has started a mailing list for people interested in hacking robots based on Linux. Send mail to majordomo@randomhacks.com with the body "subscribe linux-robotics". "

Greg Hayes wrote in to say "A call went out for support of a port of the popular demo loader iXalance for linux." You can go to the TBL homepage if you think you might be interesting in such a project. Some of the demos are pretty cool, a port certainly would be quite excellent for showing off, say, GGI or something *grin*.

Rodger Donaldson sent us a story that's on Linux Weekly News right now. Apparently we've got vendors now selling PPC Linux boxes. Now you don't need to handle that messy Apple overhead for your butt kicking super machine. Check it out over Microux.com for the details.

Johan was the first to warn us that 2.1.108 has hit the wire. Those Linux users who live on the bleeding edge are probably already downloading it though...

P.J. Hinton wrote in to tell us that John Dodge has collapsed under the tidal wave of email from Linux Users in response to his column from few weeks ago. He's decided to throw Linux on an older box and try it out so he can speak more fairly in future columns. I for one am glad to hear it.

Andy Bakun writes " This link Contains photos from the "linux revolt" held outside Fry's and CompUSA. I wish I coulda been there. Gotta love the pic of the balloon penguin... made by MS publicity folk. " I saw a photo of somebody wearing one of my T-shirts too. I gotta move to california.

Johan Van Gompel writes ""Have you ever heard of Linux?" he asked, producing a gold cigarette case and pulling out a sardine. "Of course. It's a free version of Unix." "Someone's preventing it from gaining mass acceptance. I want you to find out who it is. We believe his initials are B. G."" Excerpt from The Maltese Penguin.

Mark Pearlstein writes "I just received a message from the GNHLUG mail list that papers and presentations from the 98 Linux Expo have been posted to extremelinux.org."

Jerkweed wrote in to tell us that things seem to be cool once again on the Beowulf thing. The Official site is back, and they've got the extreme linux cd available as well. Very Cool. Glad to see things are back where they should be.

Eric Harlow writes "Looks like I'll be writing a book for the next few months on gnu development using Linux. I've convinced a publisher that it's necessary and that there's a market for it - and they're going to take a chance on it. I want to gear the book towards the growing number of ex-windows programmers as well as up and coming list of Linux application developers. The book is going to focus on database and gui development with Postgresql and GTK+. I was wondering if there were other topics that people wanted covering or thought it would be a good idea to cover. I also was going to talk about PHP, CGI, CORBA, and maybe threading - but I don't want to write a low-level book. I think that Linux needs application developers and I want to write this as a starting point to help people write some serious applications for Linux, primarily GUI and internet. Suggestions on topics appreciated since I have to give the publisher a finalized table of contents soon when I hand in my first chapter. -Eric "

Michael Stutz wrote in to plug his Linux Bumper Stickers. Normally I wouldn't post it, but, well, they're Linux95 stickers, the demand is fading, so he's offering them 25 for $10 to interested Slashdot readers, so what the heck. Now no more product plugs for a few days people *grin*.

Another development kernel has seen the light. You can grab the patch at ftp.kernel.org and the usual mirrors. Most important update seems to be a new console driver by Geert Uytterhoeven.

Sam Ockman writes " the 500 members or os of SVLUG, are going to have a big rally tonight at the largest/most prestigious computer store in Silicon Valley, Fry's, when they stay open until 1am to distribute Windows 98. We're going to hand out Linux CDs and stuff like that as well. We'd like to have more people at the rally then go to buy Windows 98. " You can check out the details here.

Andy Tai writes "This Red Hat press release announces that Adaptec will support the Linux community by providing technical information for driver development on Adaptec products.

The Economic Times have an in-depth look at Linux, first throughout the world, and then in India. The articles are full of interesting tidbits, for instance that the largest UK ISP runs Linux, or that Suse is 40% of the German market. One less certain fact is their statement that Intel will help port Linux to Merced.

Redhat has posted a Datapro Survey showing that Linux does better than any other real OS on Overall Satisfaction, Interoperability, Cost of ownership, Price, Internet Readiness, Flexibility (tie), Availability (tie).

NT beats Linux on Percentage Growth (blame the suits for that), Solaris on Java Support (well... they did invent it), and Digital Unix on Product Functionality (anyone know why?) and Performance. Surprisingly NT does rather better than I would expect having used it, which makes me wonder how they built their survey.