nizo writes "A touchphone that sits on your desk running Linux! Has a builtin touchscreen for dialing a number, makeing notes, etc. Wonder if these are for sale in the U.S. ? " The website isn't english, but it looks pretty cool. Very nice design. Features an 8 inch touchscreen, and does email and faxing just for good measure. Runs what is described as a stripped down Red Hat 4.2 (there does seem to be some issue about them releasing the code as required by the GPL, but I'm sure they'll make good on their obligation in that dept should they ship the product). Good to see Linux running small appliance devices like this. I'm sure we'll see a lot more in the coming months.

Thanks to Gael Duval for letting me know that Mandrake 7 is up and ready for download. They sent over the press release, which I've posted below. Essentially, it's ready for "geeks and testers" and includes many new features.

demachina sent us an EE times article about the realtime Linux conference in Vienna. Attendees decided to endorse the Cygnus EL/IX API for Realtime Linux and to start work on kernel patches.

HeUnique was too busy to post, but pointed out LWN's Timeline of 1999 for Linux. Quite a ride over the last year - complete with lots of images and historical markers. It's broken into months or the whole year. This is version .8 - 1.0 will be out after the end of the year.

Fungai wrote with an update to the on-going HP/Puffin Group story. There'd been some confusion with the recent purchase of Puffin Group by Linuxcare, but HP has confirmed that they will port Linux to their 64 bit PA-RISC chips. HP will still be partnering with Puffin Group to do it, with results expected in the first half of 2000.

notsosilentbob writes " Philip's Tivo Linux changes are up on their website." I've been lusting over a tivo for quite some time now. Its super cool to see a big company make good on the GPL tho. Now I just got to buy one. (for those who don't know, the tivo is a digital VCR that runs linux and stores up to 30 hours of tv on an internal harddrive).

Stephen Hurrell asks: "I'm interested in getting feedback about how people and/or sites running Linux with all the usual applications like apache, samba, perl, php, jdk's, postgresql, oracle, X, etc. are handling the Y2K problem. Particularly how they are Y2K testing and communicating results in order to ease management's open source concerns. What do you do and what did you find? There may be a silver lining in Linux that in fact most applications may be using UNIX time structures and that the open source community may be able to respond quicker than Brand M for patches and fixes. Hopefully this may result in increased trust and usage of open source products. What do you think?"

bnagel asks: "I always properly halt my computer. Twice in the past month, when I have booted back into Linux, a number of files are corrupt, and I have to reformat and reinstall. The files get an invalid userid and date and when I try to execute one, bash says that it was not found. I'm using Caldera 2.3. I can't think of using another OS, but if this becomes a monthly ritual, I might have to. Can anyone explain this ext2 phenomenon?" An odd problem which I have not experienced before, and I'm less careful with my HDs. Does anyone have any helpful information?

twdorris asks: "I've been playing around with SCSI under Linux for a while now and I keep running into issues with things not working *quite* right (scanner not responding sometimes, having to retry operations for what appears to be no good reason, etc.). The SCSI subsystem under Linux is supposedly sub-par and is considered by those in the know to be a major hack, to put it nicely. See this little note from the cdrecord author for an example." (More)

An anonymous reader pointed us to a usenet article where an "Insider" claims to have juice on Red Hat and Corel. The CFO has resigned, and it supposedly has something to do with a Red Hat/Corel connection. The post is from a hotmail address so it take it with a grain of salt the size of yugo, but these rumors have been flying for weeks, so ya gotta wonder.

After A long time, Adobe finally start to release few applications for Linux. The first application is Adobe Distiller server for Linux. The other (which I find more interesting) is Adobe FrameMaker 5.5.6 (it's beta) and you can get it Here. Its good to see Adobe start porting their applications to Linux, and I hope they will port all the others (hmm, Illustrator maybe?)

On the mailing list yesterday, Linus announced the current plan of moving the kernel into the pre-2.4 Kernel stage. In hopes of moving in that direction, he'll be "calming things down". Obviously, we won't see 2.4 before the end of the year, however, the current aim is to have it out Q1 of 2000.

Noise asks: "It's not easy to find information on drivers for network cards or modems. I installed Linux on a notebook (works great!), but have not been able to find the drivers for my PCMCIA "combo" card. In particular, I am using Red Hat 6.0 and have a 3Com 10/100+56k modem card (model 3CCFEM556B). Where can I find drivers for these types of cards? "

Matra DataVision has decided to LGPL a set of components that currently earns 3.5 million dollars a year, cost 75 million dollars to develop and has been sold since 1995. Why? Because they hope to sell services to the scientific market that currently uses its own proprietary technology rather than commercially sold components -- a market they value at 450 million dollars. Where's the source? It will be available from opencascade.org on December 20th. Commercial support is at opencascade.com. Some screenshots are available.

TheFitz writes "CBS is running a story about LinuxCare receiving some heavy backing. Also mentioned in the story is the potential for LinuxCare to go public with an IPO. " Several comments from Sifry and a few other tidbits about the company. Worth a gander if you're curious about Linuxcare.

demachina writes "Xybernaut, a maker of wearable PC's featured in Slashdot a couple months ago, has added Linux support. They say Linux "provides a stable platform that works well in a network environment" and it "requires far fewer computer resources than competing operating systems and allows for increased efficiency" " This one has a wrist mounted screen among other things. I'm totally going gargoyle.

karrde writes "Yahoo Biz has a story here about CoSource.com being bought out by Applix. Seems the president of CoSource will still control it, along w/ controling the Linux division of Applix. "

Hans Reiser apparently was offended by us mentioning ext3 and not mentioning his own FS. Under most circumstances we don't care, but he says "ReiserFS version 3.5.12 at is faster than ext3, it is stable, it is on our web site, and SuSE's." Anyone wanna try this out and do some benchmarking? I'm curious.

Bruce Perens writes "In August, I accepted the president's position at Linux Capital Group, a business incubator and venture capital firm specializing in Linux. This is explained in my open letter to the free software community on the group's web site. My firm has announced its first investment, in Progeny Linux, a company headed by Debian Founder Ian Murdock, which will produce a commercial version of Debian in cooperation with the Debian developers. We will be starting and funding several other Linux companies. We now intend to show other businesses by example how to succeed while being a good citizen of the free software community."

An anonymous reader sent us a pretty cool press release where you can read about University of Michigan students protesting their schools enterprise agreement with Microsoft buy arranging with Red Hat to give away 500 CDs, and helping students install it. Often stuff like this slips through the cracks, but this one is pretty smooth. This is the sort of stuff I like to see