securitas writes "The New York Times' Steve Lohr reports on a fundamental shift taking place in Silicon Valley in the post-dotcom era: the geeks are back in charge. New start-ups and companies that survived the bubble 'are based on innovation and are run by people with deep technical skills.' These companies have real technology and a solid technical base that have historically been the bedrock of Silicon Valley - something that was temporarily forgotten during the dotcom bubble. Profiled companies include Tellme Networks (speech recognition), InterTrust (DRM - digital rights management), VMware (virtual machines) and Scalix (Linux e-mail servers)."

keesh writes "Linux kernel 2.6.0-test9 is now out. Changes include SATA support and XFS and CIFS fixes. Because of the change freeze, this is a fairly minor update. In the announcement, Linus suggests that -test10 will be the final release before 2.6.0-final. Don't forget to use a mirror."

An anonymous reader writes "The latest offering of Mandrake's distribution, 9.2, has been found to not only be incompatible with some LG CD-ROM drives, but to destroy them during the installation process. Mandrake have posted information on their errata page and further information can be found on this thread [google]. Along with over 350Mb of updates within a week of release, it's not been a good start for this latest release."

JoeBuck writes "According to this message from Ian Murdock on the Debian developer's mailing list, the Progeny folks have ported Red Hat's Anaconda installer to Debian. They have also written a tool that "facilitates the creation of Anaconda-based Debian installation CD sets". They are also engaged in other interesting unification work, and hope to be able to allow collections of managed RPM and .deb packages to coexist side-by-side." uberkludge points out an article with more details at Ars Technica.

Bombcar writes "This Migration Document is also available. It has details on going from WinNT to Linux/FLOSS/Samba et.al, with less detail on RedHat/Ximian/GNOME and more on SuSE/Mandrake/KDE. See Kurt's post to Samba Technical for more details."

Glowing Fish asks: "I am volunteering for a non-profit that is currently in the process of giving away grants of systems (some using Linux and some without an OS) to various non-profit organizations. One of the problems is that many of these organizations have a somewhat skewed version of what they need, thinking they need Pentium IV systems with 100s of megs of RAM with Windows XP installed. I have been given the job of politely explaining that for most non-profit organizations, it is not necessary to have this type of computing power. What is the best (and politest) way to explain to people that they don't really need this type of computing investment? Without Microsoft-bashing, how would you explain the ever spiraling relationship between RAM and OS bloat? What type of systems would you suggest to a non-profit organization for office work, and why?"

theblackdeer writes "eWeek has an article up about an Evans Data Corp survey that the majority of Windows developers agree that linux is a more secure OS. "Linux scored high for innate security among respondents, more than two- thirds of whom 'use or target Windows with their code.' Indeed, only 23 percent of the developers were primarily Linux developers.""

An anonymous reader writes "It's official, Samba creator Andrew Tridgell is Australia's smartest man... in IT anyway. He's received Bulletin magazine's 'Smart 100' award for the IT sector. He's also written about how Samba came into being, which was basically because he was trying to avoid doing any real work on his PhD. He also tells us how he discovered Linux and why he believes Open Source Software is superior to proprietary code... He also talks about rsync and his plans for the future..."

brentlaminack writes "Time for this week's dose of I, Cringely. This week the Cringe talks about Ballmer's Orlando comments from this week. He compares Ballmer's comments with Linus's. Nothing new here for the /. group, but a good read for the non-technical."

OrenWolf writes "CNET is running an article on the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, which is Red Hat's shiny new 'enterprise' version of Linux. Major changes include more IBM Mainframe support, support for AMD64 (x86_64) processors (aka Opteron, Athlon64 and AthlonFX), changes to support options, integration of Stronghold Apache, and much more."

richardeholder asks: "Our Novell partners differentiate themselves in the marketplace by promoting their areas of expertise or specializations; this allows their customers to know what their skill sets are and what they can reasonably expect these partners to provide for them. As we embrace Linux, we would like to extend the title of 'Linux specialist' to partners who merit it. Before we move forward on this initiative, we would like to ask the Linux community for guidance on what should constitute a Linux specialist. Should we require certifications such as LPI and the RHCE/RHCT, or are there other more valuable ways of demonstrating Linux competency?"

molarmass192 writes "Open magazine has the first review I've seen of the upcoming SuSE 9.0 (or should that be SUSE 9.0 now?) Professional distribution. To summarize, they are impressed with the upgrades to Yast (it's fully integrated into the KDE control panel), Samba integration, Winmodem support, network configuration management, and performance. It's not the most thorough review I've ever read, but it's an interesting look at what to expect for those who have preordered SuSE 9.0."

Skunil writes "The IDA Open Source Migration Guidelines provide practical and detailed recommendations on how to migrate to Open Source Software (OSS)-based office applications, calendaring, e-mail and other standard applications. These guidelines have been designed to help public administrators decide whether a migration to OSS should be undertaken and describe, in broad technical terms, how such a migration could be carried out. They are based on practical experience of a limited number of publicly available case studies, and cover a wide range of management and technical concerns."

pair-a-noyd submitted this one choice piece of flamebait, I'll just quote it ".. I have a hard time seeing the Zealots as any different from terrorists because of the nature of their threats. I expect one of them -- or perhaps a group of them -- will go too far at some point and do significant damage to the open-source movement, the ongoing litigation with SCO or their employers. I strongly believe that if September 11 showed us anything, it was that zealots of any movement represent a huge risk to that movement because zealots do not consider the repercussions of their actions" Like the zealots he speaks of, he goes to far, but he does make legitimate points that the Open Source community has wrestled with in the past.

Ashcrow writes "Almost exactly 7 years ago, Matthias Ettrich announced the start of a new desktop environment, originally called Kool Desktop Environment. Check out LinuxFrench's article (English translation) and the news at Dot KDE. Thanks to the KDE Team for a great 7 years!"

JigSaw writes "Tony Bourke put together a long article, benchmarking File System, System, Compilation, OpenSSL and Web Performance for both Linux and Solaris on x86 hardware. While SPARC's Solaris is said to be more optimized than its x86 counterpart on the other hand so is Linux 2.6 compared to 2.4. Solaris-x86 performed well in the tests, but Linux 2.4 seems to win most of the tests and the overall impressions."

Andrew Baxter writes "Ian Giblin is a senior contributing editor to bargainPDA.com for all things Linux. In his latest review Ian brings an in depth look at the YOPY YP-3700 from G.Mate, Ian informs us that "this device is geeky, and I mean Battlestar Galactica geeky" and that it is "undoubtedly the most linuxy handheld device I've seen. It out-linuxes the Sharp Zaurus range." Read on for many pictures, device specs and in depth information on this Linux PDA device now available in the U.S. and also South Korea."

sniggly writes "The Inquirer has an article about how Montreal, CA based Linuxant has created a 'compatibility wrapper' allowing standard Windows NDIS 5.0 drivers to work on linux. After pointing to another project allowing windows printer drivers to work on OS/2 the author asks 'Are printer and network card drivers going to become, over time, a commodity with Win32 drivers one day the 'de-facto standard' run via wrappers?"

prostoalex writes "InformationWeek magazine has a lengthy article about the issues that enterprises face when vying for Linux+Windows interoperability, as most of the corporate infrastructures are seldom monocultural. What's also interesting is the InformationWeek surveys of the IT professionals. The following questions are asked and the responses to them are nicely graphed: 1) Reasons for choosing Windows, 2) Reasons for choosing Linux, 3) Top Windows concerns, 4) Top Linux concerns, 5) Top interoperability issues."

Fefe writes "I recently did some benchmarks for a talk about scalable network programming I held at Linux Kongress 2003. The benchmark results turned out to be surprising enough to present them on their own. This ought to end those pesky flame wars about whose IP stack or memory management scales better. Or maybe not."