irregular_hero asks: "I'm curious as to the experiences of other users about Redhat's much-publicized Red Jat Network support offering. I was initially impressed by the product, which seemed to offer a central console for application of updates. However, in recent weeks, I have become somewhat disillusioned with the service. This morning marked the 12th time I have been unable to even log on to the service in the past 2 months I have used it. I get various errors: 500 Server Errors, pauses of interminable length, and even empty pages. This morning, a new error occurred. Once logged in, all of my painstakingly prepared system profiles had disappeared. I can only hope that they will reappear soon." Sounds like there might still be a few bugs. Irregular_hero's bug-list continues, below. Have any of you found workarounds to these problems? Do you have others to add to the list?

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Linux 2.4.3 now holds the world record by performance with IBM's DB2 in TPC-H. TPC-H is a decision support benchmark consisting of a suite of business oriented and ad-hoc queries and concurrent data modifications. This is way cool as the world record was held by SQL Server 2000 on Windows 2000 before." Caveats: this is only in the 100GB (smallest) category, and all but 2 of the other entries are several months old. Even so;)

grubby writes: "A member of my local LUG NCOLUG has written an article in LinuxJournal about what the PowerPC and Linux could do together. He brings up many good points about the history of the WinTel PC and what he hopes the future may bring. I have personally had numerous conversations with him about his ideas and would like to know what the slashdot population thinks about them. Check it out, it's a good read." This piece takes a somewhat broad view of things -- which makes sense, given that radical changes can take time to grow in the background before they actually make public waves. Also of interest on the PPC front: kilaasi writes "Looks like IBM is getting back to it's PowerPC which is/was/will be co-developed with Motorola. IBM has some tricks that will increase speed and at the same time decrease power consumption." Here's CNET's brief story on upcoming PPC developments."

blakestah writes: "Well, it looks like someone on the LKML has taken upon himself to do some benchmarking of ReiserFS, ext2, and XFS using the 2.4 kernel series. It is not a real benchmark test, but kind of interesting nonetheless. See the results (in Spanish) at this LUG in Mallorca. Simple runs of dd, tar, and rm are shown, and for most of the tests XFS is pretty dern fast, beating all the others. The exception is removal of a large source tree (the kernel source), for which XFS is the slowest by a fair amount. See this kernel post for the translations of important words. It will be nice to see more such open benchmarking posted, because benchmarks provide developers goals." The contrast between FAT32 and XFS is particularly interesting to see.

wfrp01 writes: "Bruce Perens gives us the skinny on Linux Daily News. Notice his use of the term GNU/Linux in a business context." Of course, HP's printers are still shipping with Windows-only drivers... and Windows-only configuration tools... and described as "Linux-compatible" in their advertisements.

kitplane01 writes: "Three students and a professor from Northern Michigan University spent the semester benchmarking a bunch of Linux kernels, from 2.0.1 to 2.4.0. Many functions improved in speed, but some did not. Total lines of code have tripled, and are on an exponential growth curve. Read their results here."

This Q just in from pvjr: "I work for a non-profit Christian radio station, but this question could apply to anyone in radio broadcasting of any format. We are using Window as our platform, essentially due to the fact that all of the broadcasting software is Windows based. I was wondering (hoping actually) if there were any Unix based broadcasting software out there? This should not be confused with Realplayer or other streaming software as the software needs to be able to generate logs with a variety of different catagories, allow for fillers, logos, and jingles, along with editing. If there isn't, this would be a wonderful place to start an open-source presence, where one could take advantage of the stability, reliability, and security of Unix for mission-critical machines."

Lysol asks: "Many years ago I wrote a POS (Point of Sale System) in a language (that's amazingly still around) called PowerBasic. One thing I really liked about it was the ability to do inline assembly and compile to machine code, which was a very big deal for DOS-based Basic code. For my POS app I used many text graphic libraries that gave me a poor-mans GUI for DOS. Now I'm going back to school and I need to brush up on my C, and that got me thinking about developing it in Linux. When I deployed this system it ran on old 386 machines. A lot of newer systems run on expensive hardware and it would be cool to provide a free GPL POS on Linux that can function as aterminal/text based solution. If you've ever used a cash register, sometimes GUI stuff with a mouse is not the best...especially for end users." One only has to look at FreshMeat to find examples of text UI libraries (and I'm sure that list isn't a complete one), but which ones have you used that you found enjoyable to develop in? How easy would it be to develop a text-mode application that has a UI that is just as capable as any GUI?

flsquirrel asks: "As I spent 5 hours of my Sunday afternoon trying to get some form of Linux to load on my Sparcstation 5, I started to wonder where the support for all these Sun boxes is headed. Redhat has dropped Sparc altogether as a supported platform. Some others like Mandrake have recently picked it up but seem dismally unprepared to tackle the platform. Most distributions ignore the platform completely. So I thought I'd throw this out to the Slashdot community for discussion. Is there any hope of saving Linux on the Sparc? What options do SPARCstation owners have for a reletively up to date distro that isn't in beta or otherwise have bizzar issues stemming from someone just trying to recompile an Intel distro for the Sparc architecture?" One of the great things about Linux is its ability to run on many different architectures. So why is SPARC support beginning to lag? Lack of interest? Lack of resources? Would anyone be interested in contributing the missing necessary resources?

Scott McNeil e-mailed me regarding Linux Standard Base releasing .9 - check out the full release of information below.

Mosix is a scalable clustering system for Linux, released under the GPL. Version 1.0 for the 2.4 kernels is now available.

GroundBounce writes "Here's an article at NewsForge detailing how Red Hat is taking the initiative to broker deals with state legislatures to change parts of UCITA ^[?] which are damaging to open source software, such as mandatory warranties and reverse engineering. They are also working with the uniform law commission to try to change the prototype for the law." Good work by Red Hat - that's a necessary change.

Thanks to Dan Gillmor for pointing out Linus' reply to the comments that Mundie from Microsoft made this week. The response is vintage Linus - but the points he raises regarding openness vis a vis science & learning and open source is very cogent.

CarrotLord asks: "Looking at the recent release of IBM's Small Business Suite for Linux got me wondering about distribution compatibility and standards. Personally, I run Debian, and am considering a move to Progeny. However, I am concerned by the fact that many products (particularly commercial ones) are available for only a particular subset of distributions (usually RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, TurboLinux and Caldera, but rarely Debian-based distributions or the BSDs). What is the current state of play, particularly in regards to tools for developers to enable them to create and test installation packages for various distributions?" Such a tool would go a long way in removing the force behind the "Linux fragmentation" argument that most of Linux's detractors often refer to.

Gnight asks: "After reading a recent article at ABC News stating that U.S. citizens work more than any other industrialized country, I have started to wonder more about the subject. So my question is, how much does the average slashdot reader work in a week? Where do you live? and What do you do?" Slashdot did an informal poll on this a long time ago, but it was more from the workday standpoint, though it looked like the majority of us were working 9-10 hour days. Is it still the same today as it was almost 2 years ago?

There's a pretty cool article running on Linux.com about the how-to for writing kernel drivers - in this case, the PC speaker. Interesting case and it's interesting to see what's going on in there.

A reader submitted: "Just got a call from a friend who used to work for Linuxcare until about an hour ago. The merger with Turbolinux has been called off and there are heavy casualties at both companies. According to my friend, Linuxcare is now down to about 30 people." That's just hearsay - but LinuxGram has a confirmation story as well.

JoeT-Bone writes "Found this at LinuxToday, It's a UnixReviw.com review of the of the IBM Small Business Suite for Linux. " Part of Big Blue's continuing move to porting to programs to Linux - anyone had experience with this? Good, Bad? Post below!

An Anonymous Coward writes: "I saw this article today in Linuxgram. It talks about how Linux Global Partners apparently has left Metro Link, one of its investments, high and dry. Wonder if this will affect Ximian or Gnucash." Metro Link, it turns out, has been doing pretty well in the meantime, but hasn't seen much of the $5 million dollars it expected from LGP, and as a result has been investigating other partners. The LGP portfolio lists Metro Link, but looks like it hasn't been updated in a while.

Patrick Darden asks: "Alacritech has a series of high performance FastEther NICs that offload the IP stack onto ASICs. They call it Session Layer Interface Card technology (SLIC) and claim that it increases TCP performance tremendously. PC Magazine has reviewed this card twice (the latest here) and shows 16-400% speed boosts over other NICs. They have a single port, dual port, and quad port. These are for NT only right now, but Linux drivers are in the pipe. Intel has a NIC geared towards servers that they claim decreases CPU usage tremendously. But only for NT. 3Com has a similar NIC, also only for NT (afaik). What is the best FastEther NIC for Linux? Are there any performance roundups? Any studies based on real criteria? Any real performance figures?" What about FastEther drivers for the other Unicies out there? There was a similar Ask Slashdot about this about two months ago. Is this a substantially different technology, or just more of the same under a different name?