Long ago and far away, I started writing a series called "Road To Linux," in which I set out to learn Linux in a few weeks. Talk about clueless. Nearly one year, two wasted computers, a ticked-off spouse, (and a Yellow Lab who ate a motherboard) 30-plus books and manuals and much assorted debris later, I've more or less made it.

Niklas Paulsson was the first to tell us that Red Hat now has a press release on their website Announcing v6.1 of their distribution. It was on the FTP servers last week, but now its official.

RaymondInFinland writes "Red Hat 6.1 appeared on ftp.redhat.com Only a i386 version but the release also comes as an ISO image. " Its not supposed to be official for a bit yet, and my guess is that it'll be pretty rocky downloading for a bit, but it is there.

Grouik asks: "Hello, Searching here and there for information about which Cell phone modems could be usable on my Dell linux laptop I discovered that there are very few people interested about that kind of stuff. Maybe it's just as hard as with winmodems? If somebody has successfully made such a device work with linux, please share with us!"

YACC (or "Yet Another Anonymous Coward") asks: "One of my hands is disabled and I am trying to switch to Linux. Windows has a slew of utilities that can remap one side of the keyboard to the other, make the shift keys "sticky," etc. I was wondering if anything comperable exists for Linux/XFree86. Any help would be appreciated. " If something like this can be done with the exist tools, please post the details.

Morpheous writes "C|Net Download.Com is showcasing Armed Linux, which apparently is similar to WinLinux 2000 (it runs on top of Windows). Unfortunately, the website doesn't give too many details, except that they are attempting to create the "easiest" to use distro of Linux yet."

[Dilbert] was the first of many to send us over to the self-evident reality that Jesux was a hoax. Check out the story we did about it for more details. *sigh* I'm glad this whole thing is done with. Note from Roblimo: Thanks to Alert Slashdot Reader Suraj Peiris, we know the true identity of the Jesux perpetrator, but as a courtesy, we're not publishing it - or his real e-mail address or the password he uses on his anonymous e-mail accounts. (Pudge, if you're reading this, you'd better change that password RAW!)

gleam writes "The guy who cracked the secure Linux box has posted how he did it. It's a rather interesting read, and it does use a crontab exploit that is present in all versions of RH. " Much more detail then the original story had.

Mr. Pliant asks: "I'd like to set up a CVS server on my Linux box but I'm having some trouble finding the docs to do so. The stuff on Cyclic's site was a little crytpic and the info wasn't organized very well. Anyone have any pointers? "

Almost everybody seems to have submitted this CNN "Ignorant journalist has a tough time installing Linux" story. I'm a little tired of this theme, but decided to run it not only because so many of you submitted it, but also out of nostalgia; I wrote something similar myself back when Slashdot was so fresh and new that "getting slashdotted" meant maybe 200 e-mails max, and now I'm a full-time Linux user. So please be kind to this poor overworked journalist. Everybody (even you) started out ignorant and had to learn, right? ;-)

Lots and lots of Slashdot readers have either sent in this ZDNet article or a direct link to the Jesux homepage." It's a hoax, folks. Think: if you were a Christian believer, would you name your Linux distribution something so close to "Jesus Sucks?" The concept isn't even original; variations on this theme have been floating around the Net for years because of Unix and its "kills" and "aborts" and "daemons."

This week's Slashdot interview subject is Eric S. Raymond. You already know who he is, and may even know that his new book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, subtitled Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, will be published by O'Reilly in October. We anticipate lots of questions for Eric. Please try to avoid the obvious ones he's answered thousands of times already, and try to ask only one question per post! We'll forward the selected 10 - 15 questions deemed most interesting by Slashdot moderators and/or editors to him Tuesday afternoon. Answers will appear Friday.

While I was unaware that this was even a problem, Cygnus Solutions announced EL/IX API which is "...a major step to pre-empt the fragmentation of embdedded Linux..." Essentially, it's an open source, configurable API that lets developers create software for embedded devices running Linux or Cygnus "eCos" OS. Standardization is a good idea, I suppose, and embedded seems to be the way the wind is blowing.

DaveHowe writes "Interesting speculative piece in ZDnet about SUN's long term plans for StarOffice and of course it's development into StarPortal; It's a little TOO anti-SUN not to be taken with a pinch of salt, but does raise a couple of interesting points:That the licence for current downloads is non-redistributable, and requires registration, and That there is no guarantee that Sun won't withdraw StarOffice at some point after StarPortal is active, leaving the Linux community high and dry."

Uart writes "Linus Torvalds, is the youngest recipient (at 29) ever of The University of Stockholm's honorary doctorate. Read about it here." (From Linux Today).

Doran writes "The U.S. Dept. of Defense is showing off its new $15,000,000 Computer Forensics Lab and it looks like they'll be using a Beowulf cluster to gleen as much info as possible from the computers they confiscate. Here is the story from Nando. An interesting aside is that they seem to be using Clinton's 'approval' last week to allow sale of more powerful encryption software as a justification to ask for $80,000,000 more for the Center. " Beowulf cluster mentioned, but not Linux, oddly enough.

RayChuang turned us on to this ZDnet story about the Linux Clustering Cabal project, which, Ray says, is "...the one that will allow Linux server clustering of many server machines. Sounds like just the thing to finally get eBay working reliabily and also make John C. Dvorak eat his words about the deficiencies of Linux."

mrflip writes "On September 20th, PCWeek announced a $1000 contest to be the first to hack either the linux or the NT server they set up. Well, four short days later, the linux box seems to have been compromised. The winner states "Hi guys, It's been a nice challenge, now send me the cash :)." He explained that the exploit was not a linux feature but was due to a closed source CGI script with improper security checks. " Going to require Solomonic ruling - the intent was to test the two OSes, and this is obviously not an OS test.

elemur asks: "I was wondering if there are any projects to expand the use of XML in Linux? There are alot of areas where XML could be more easily and consistently used than continuing making more and stranger configuration files. Many configs could probably fall under a generalized standard application config DTD, and applications that needed something more targeted could supply their own. Some sort of DTD repository could be setup on the machine to handle this. Then, apps just need to use libxml (or whatever it would be called) to handle the reading and parsing. It would seem to make things much more consistent. Has anybody looked into this sort of thing?" It's a good thought. And a standardized configuration file format might be the thing to reduce some of the complexity most folks find in Linux. What do you all think about the capabilities of XML?

Magorak writes "There's an interesting article I found here about Linus Torvalds' take on the future of the software and hardware industry. There's tidbits about Linux's future itself, the competition with Microsoft, and about customized software becoming more important. It also gives us an interesting view on how Linus sees the future of computers and technology. "