Sand_Man wrote to us with the latest public relations stunt with crack-a-machine trials. This is a month long trial, pitting Linux vs. NT boxes against each other. Details are in the story, but does this whole thing strike everyone else as tired PR stunts now?

Byte.com is featuring a column by Jon Udell regarding Linux and databases. Using comments from users, other tech industry people and personal industry, Udell takes a nice walk-through the closed-source databases, as well as documentation issues.

MoonCat asks: "Are there any Open Sourced OCR (Optical Character Recognition) packages available which are comparable to their commercial counterparts in terms of recognition performance? "

Ledge Kindred asks: "I am looking for a distributed filesystem to run on my Linux boxes at home. I have several and most of the "extra" space on each one is "going to waste" - I'd like to be able to combine it all into a single network-able filesystem. How?" Click below for more.

peterjm asks: "Well, some one here at work has decided that the answer to all of our problems would be the acquisition of a bar-coder/scanner for labling and keeping track of all of our pc's in the office. A web hunt reveiled all sorts of the little suckers, but what I was wondering is, are there any bar-scanners that are designed (or have software designed) to run under Liunx?" Linux needs support for some of these if it wants to be considered as a possible tool in the retail market.

brazilian brain writes "Did you know that users don't like the inclusion of payware bundled with our everyday's "official" Linux distributions? And that they need an User's Guide more than an Install Guide? Linux in Brazil ran a poll for 30 days, asking what users expected from the next editions of their preferred distributions, and discovered these facts - and many more." (Poll results have been translated to English; the rest of the site is in Portugese)

Zerbey writes "According to Linux Today The Royal Family's web site is now running Red Hat as apposed to Solaris. See for yourself on Netcraft. Congratulations, Ma'am :) "

Tuesd@y asks: "I have been trying to find a way to get Linux to support my sound card, a Voyetra Turtle Beach Montego II Quadzilla, for quit some time. Is there any one out there who can offer some advice or even better a solution?" It's not listed in the Sound-HOWTO and appears to be a fairly new card. My guess is that support may be unavailable for this card at this time, and if this is true, are there any folks looking in to it?

Several readers have written in with the news that, yes, Linux-Mandrake 6.1 (Helios) is out. The ISOs, and the whole bit are availible from their site as well as mirrors around the Web.

Skogshuggarn writes "The initial public release of Linux - version 0.01 - occurred on the 17th September 1991. The world's best operating system is therefore 8 years old this Friday. Happy Birthday " Seems like only yesterday that our little kernel was in potty training, and now here it is all grown up and ready for world domination.

Carlie Fairchild writes "Linux Journal opened its polls for its fifth annual Readers' Choice Awards. The polls will be open until October 15, 1999. It's your opportunity to vote for your favorite Linux software, hardware and companies." Seems like there are quite a number of options in each category this year

aftersci writes "Partially privatized French TelCo FranceTelecom contracted with free-software consultants Alcove to revamp their infrastructure. Debian GNU/Linux, Apache, PostrgreSQL, Perl, and PHP will be used, though they apparently won't be throwing out all their Windows clients. Sorry, no France-Telecom link yet. " And note that the article is in *gasp* French. So you might want to use Babelfish for an awkward and humorous translation.

jregel writes "Linux.com has an interview with Stefan Steefeld and Graydon Hoare, two of the Berlin core developers. Interesting stuff that should dispel a few rumours and inaccuracies surrounding this project. "

An Anonymous Coward writes "Apparently, the recent claim for the trademark "Linux" in Germany will be "properly" handed. According to this article (in German), Linus Torvalds holds the rights for Linux in Germany and the EU for quite some time. The German Linux user group LIVE has already unchained their lawyers to take care of the recent attempt to register Linux as trademark again. " Try Babelfishing the article.

BootHead sent us the article at ZD-Net that appears most designed to draw a link from Slashdot in quite some time. Its about Women and Linux. Course they call them "LinuxChix" (cough) but its just sorta the standard tirade on "Girls can be Geeks Too" (which no geek argues with in theory, we just never be able to find girl geeks of our own ;)Update: 09/16 09:29 by H :Check out the additional linkage about the debate of whether "Women need an OS of their own."

I've received notes from a few different places that Red Hat will be taking down its onsite servers for the duration of the Hurricane Floyd. The staff is leaving at 3 today and the place will be closed on Thursday. If Floyd doesn't cause any serious problems the web and ftp servers (as well as the *@redhat.com email addresses) will come back up soon by friday. Update: 09/15 01:01 by CT : FTP and WWW are mirrored offsite, and assuming DNS propogates properly service should continue without problems.

Andreas Spengler writes "Apparently a german lawfirm has filed a claim with the german patent office for the trademark Linux in Germany. It's still unknown what their goal is. " The article is in German, as one would expect. Babelfish the article.

swestbrook writes "It appears that Mandrake 6.1 final is out. It's starting to appear on the mirrors everywhere-grab it from here or the usual places. No news of the release on their website but details should show up today. Update: 09/14 10:44 by H : I've been informed by Mandrake that it is not out yet-they are still going through the beta process, so don't be surprised by bugs in the current beta. You've been warned.

Norm J writes "Linuxcare is running an interview with Matt Welsh, author of Running Linux, 3rd edition- it's a great read. " Matt continues to display a staggering amount of good humour and intelligence.

haaz writes "LinuxPPC Inc. took the wraps off their newest release, LinuxPPC 1999 Q3, today. It's got RAGE 128 video card drivers, and a whole gaggle of fixes for iMacs and Blue G3s, plus new glibc, GNOME and gcc packages. Bochs is thrown in for good measure, along with an updated graphical installer. "