Red Hat has made several changes in how they run their business, notably concentrating more (perhaps one might say "entirely") on enterprise-level Linux users. Some of Red Hat's moves have upset long-time users, and many people seem to have trouble understanding exactly where Fedora fits into all this. Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik has offered to answer your questions and clear things up, so ask away. Please don't ask questions he's answered in recent interviews and statements, and try -- hard though this may be for some -- to ask only one question per post. We'll forward 10 or 12 of the highest-moderated questions to Szulik tomorrow, and run his answers when he gets them back to us.

Psyke writes "The Australian Financial Review is reporting that 'IBM, Red Hat and a consortium of computer makers backed by the likes of Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Intel will push to move the Linux operating system out of the back office from next year.' and 'Meanwhile, the OSDL, which has largely worked on improving Linux's ability to run large servers, said it would work on improving Linux's performance on ordinary desktop computers.'" The article itself is a little off- those companies are working *through* the OSDL of which they are members - along with a number of additional companies as well.

There's a new article in First Monday entitled "The Open Code Market". Jordi Carrasco-Munoz, the author has some interesting comments about the article itself, which I've put below, but the overall direction of the piece is, in his words: "In short, The Open Code Market aims to become a Free Market for software, as well as a market for Free Software. The OCM introduces into the Free/Open Source movement an economic incentive, to help align the priorities of Free/Open Source developers with those of the end users. "

An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices.com reports that Sharp will introduce a new member in its Linux-based Zaurus PDA family in the Japanese market on Nov. 27, 2003. The SL-C860 appears to be a more powerful and feature-rich version of the much-reviewed SL-C750/760. The device boasts a 400MHz Intel PXA255 processor equipped with 128MB of Flash memory (65MB available for user programs) along with 64MB of SDRAM memory, has a 640x480 resolution full-VGA color display, and runs an embedded Linux operating system based on Metrowerks's OpenPDA handheld device software stack."

Bombcar asks: "Samba 3.0 is an excellent CIFS server, but there are some limitations. For one, you can get a networked mapped drive, but some programs (Oracle, Exchange) refuse to run on a mapped drive, but only on local drives. I know there are some closed source (read: expensive) drivers that allow a SMB share to appear to be a physical disk. Is there any equivalent in the OSS community? What I want to be able to do is mount a share from a Linux server under Windows 2000 and have it appear as if it were a local disk. This will allow many programs that refuse (for what ever reason) to use anything but physical drives to access the network." Might such software be seen as a 'circumvention device' as specified by the DMCA? The submittor mentions that there are companies in this market already, but that doesn't mean that it will remain safe.

JigSaw writes "OSNews has reviewed the Fedora Core 1 Linux distro, but the author personally found lots of usability problems and bugs with the distro, making Fedora Core a trying experience. The writer puts the blame on poor QA of Fedora Core 1 done by its community, since Red Hat has shifted focus to Enterprise, with Fedora serving merely as a testbed for them."

Teppy writes "I noticed something unexpected the other day when reviewing the subscriber counts for our MMORPG, A Tale In The Desert. Of everyone who tries our game, Linux users are definitely more inclined to pay money to subscribe. In fact, overall, about 15.6% of Windows users who do the free trial will subscribe, while among Linux users the number is 19.3%. Furthermore, Linux users tend to remain subscribers for a longer time. Are we the only game company noticing this?" Is this down to loyalty, choice, or other mysterious factors?

Matt Will writes "The Official Samba 3 How-To and Reference Guide was written by John H. Terpstra and Jelmer Rinze Vernooij in collaboration with the core developers of the Samba-Team (www.samba.org) and expert end users. The book is written with special focus towards administrators of Microsoft Windows systems, giving them a first insight into the capabilities of Samba and a well guided step-by-step guide for migrating systems from a Microsoft solution to Samba." Read on for the rest of Will's review.

Mecha-A writes "Linux From Scratch 5.0 was released earlier this month, incorporating GRUB as a bootloader, GNU coreutils, GCC 3.3, and lots of other package upgrades among other improvements. If you haven't tried it, LFS is a procedural outline for building a Linux system from the ground up. For those who can't get enough customizability..."

Lee Busby writes "As a co-author, I am biased, but I think that our recent paper describing a diskless Linux deployment at Lawrence Livermore National Lab (PDF)may be of general interest. It's a little different than most diskless systems -- simpler, and designed to be high performance."

lems1 writes "Start compiling the excuses you will tell your boss to upgrade your cell phone now. Motorola has opted to use Trolltech's Qtopia to power up the next generation of SmartPhones. Get the scoop/specs from here and a nice high-res picture from this other link. The phone will have 'digital camera, video player, MP3 player, speakerphone, advanced messaging, instant Internet access and Bluetooth wireless technology' capabilities. On top of being Linux-based of course." Update: 11/12 00:44 GMT by T : Yep, this is the same phone mentioned a few weeks ago.

An anonymous reader writes "Last week, Softier made news with one of the first native ports of Linux to a Digital Signal Processor (DSP) architecture, introducing its "MediaLinux" and "MediaBIOS" for TI's DM64x DSP platform. In this whitepaper, Softier CTO Eatamar Drory and Senior Programmer Or Sagi discuss the unique approach to real-time processing that enables MediaLinux to run existing TI DSP algorithms untouched within the context of real time processes. Added benefits to this design include predictable scheduling and short interrupt latency. The article discusses key architectural points of the MediaLinux approach in comparison with two well-known alternatives."

tantive writes with this announcement from the Gentoo home page. "Gentoo for PowerPC G5 now available. We're proud to announce the availability of the Gentoo for PowerPC G5 32-bit LiveCD. ISOs are now available on our main OSU mirror. The LiveCD has been tested on a dual 2GHz G5 SMP PowerPC machine with 2.5GB RAM, a 1.6GHz machine, as well as others. It includes pre-released yaboot-1.3.11 bootloader and a 2.6.0-test9 benh kernel. It runs at 100% speed, with fans currently also at 100% (kernel developers are working on slowing down the fans when not needed)." Read more below.

shamir_k writes "Joey Hess has come up with an innovative solution to a problem we have all faced. He's put his whole home directory in CVS. Not only can he move between multiple computers easily, he also has automatic distributed backups."

bobmatnyc writes "InfoWorld reports that Microsoft is planning an "security assault on Linux" by hyping results of a commissioned study pointing to the number of security holes in Linux vs. Windows, the number of days it takes to fill the patches, and by raising questions as to the reliability of code submitted throught the OS process. I suppose if they focus very narrowly on one measurement of security, completely ignore script-level vulnerabilities, default settings vulnerabilities (such as root access for all users), and the demographics of the user population, as well as a zillion other things I'm not clever enough to think of off the top of my head, they may have a point. "

An anonymous readers writes "Infoworld is running a report on the Desktop Linux Conference, at which Bruce Perens suggested that in order to get Linux to the enterprise desktop, the Linux community should base their efforts on one single distribution... based on Debian. Perens went on to say that enterprises will be willing to pay Linux companies to engineer versions of Linux to suit their needs, but that the base distro should remain free. He suggested that by 2006, 30% of enterprise desktops will run Linux." Here is a wired story with more information about his proposed UserLinux project.

killergreen writes "I know some of us (myself in particular) really dig LiveCDs for work (some make fantastic diagnostic and/or security tools) or play. Well,here's one that incorporates the 2.6 kernel for experementation."

Henry G. writes "Lionstracs of Italy has released the Mediastation X-76 music workstation. It runs Red Hat and KDE 3.1. The base model features a 1.67 Ghz Athlon, 512MB RAM, 80GB HD, CDRW/DVD-ROM, 8.2" LCD, and a host of other things. Full specs can be found here and pictures can be found here. To this submitter, it looks more like a keyboardized computer than a computerized keyboard."

Dan Clough writes "Mastering Red Hat Linux 9 is a huge, very complete guide to Red Hat Linux 9. It's over 900 pages, and includes the "Publisher's Edition" of RH9 on 2 CDs. It is written in a style which should accommodate Linux newcomers and more experienced users alike. There are a lot of examples, code snippets, and screenshots throughout the book. In fact, sometimes the abundance of these tend to make the material a little long to wade through. Experts should have no trouble skipping over the sections they don't need, though." Read on for the rest of Dan's review.

cybermint writes "Tux Racer, the well-known game starring Linux mascot Tux, has made its way into a redemption based arcade machine, which has recently been released by manufacturers ICE. The arcade version, co-developed by Roxor Games, is much more simple than the original PC version. It has two big buttons, one for left, and one for right. As far as I can tell, there is no longer a way to jump or do tricks. Tickets are earned by collecting fish. Looks like lots of fun for the kids - I'm glad to see the developers have finally found a good market for their game."