dfn_doe asks: "Is there an easy way to replicate a very large Linux install across multiple machines using a CDR as the transfer medium?? I have 9 boxes that need to have about 9 gigs of Web, Database, and other information spread across two drives and 10 partitions and I REALY don't want to do it manually. Any utilities? Any suggestions? In case anyone is interested this is for serving a large distributed database to a secure Web Server." Using a CDR? That's odd, if you have a newtork, you should be using that to automate installation as opposed to burning loads of CDs (not to mention the installation). What do you all think?

muadib wants to know about the following: "Given the current discussions on tuning, I am trying to find out if there are any performance monitoring applications for Linux. I don't mean things like xload, xosview, etc which provide only a small amount of data. For anyone who's done benchmarking under NT, I mean something like their built in perfmon utility that lets you view and capture just about any statistic on your system or on a remote system. Capturing is the specific functionality I'm looking for b/c I'm working on a Linux device driver, and it would be nice to have historical data of CPU utilization, interrupts/s, etc. so that I can compare complete system perfomance between code revisions."

Denovous writes "WYSE is apparently producing a new Linux thin client based upon the Slackware distribution, instead of Java as originally planned. The client can be started without a network, as the OS resides in 8.5 MB of memory. Check the article out here "

Vamphyri writes "An ABC News correspondent says the ``Linux market will, as promised, now be dominated by RedHat's commercial success.'' which he goes on to say is a good thing. The full story is here but way down at bottom of page. " It actually offers one quite interesting comment: Red Hat netted 10 million last year, and devoted 20% of that to R&D. The IPO will raise almost $100M. If they continue that trend, they will put $20M into Linux, GNOME, and more. Interesting.

John Campbell writes "Linux 2.2.10, the next in the stable kernel series, is out. It's about a 300k patch, and it contains the fix for the DoS bug recently reported here (if you've already patched it, don't let patch back the fix back out... you are using patches, right?), as well as assorted other stuff. The new kernel patches can be found, as usual, on ftp.xx.kernel.org, where xx is your country code. "

juniorboy sent us JP Mogenthal's latest piece from Internetwork, this timing cautioning people about Linux and along the way tries to get at the root of why people are switching.

Black Parrot writes "Linux Today posted a link to this collection of case studies of Linux in the enterprise. It makes interesting reading, and will be a good advocacy reference for when your boss comes around asking whether Linux can really do the job. "

Spud wrote to us with an interview with ESR. Fairly standard material - why Linux is better, and why the Open Source idea works. It's good to see ESR back in the swing of things again, tho'.

Andrew Hutton wrote me with some interesting news about his Ottawa Linux Symposium. It seems that they now have some prizes to give away, including 2 Netwinders, and a bunch of User Friendly hats, plus a few copies of Civ: CTP. He says that with any luck, anyone who registers before July 1st should have a 1 in 20 chance of winning a prize. Also, it seems there now is an IA-64 talk, a Mozilla talk (our friend Mike is a busy man, it seems), and of course, Alan Cox's keynote. If I get lucky, I'll be giving a tutorial while I'm there (if I'm there). Stay tuned and check the website for further details.

EvilNight asks: "How do you get an IDE CD-ROM changer to work with Linux? I know the kernel has support for these devices but I have tried to use them in the past and have had no luck (with the NEC 6x4). I am planning a fileserver which needs to have the ability to serve up 20 CD-ROM discs and I really want to use Linux for it. SCSI changers are easy to set up (increment LUNs). The cost of SCSI changers is a bit high though (about $190). The IDE changers are very cheap ($85). I was looking at the Nakamichi 16x5 IDE changer. Has anyone had any luck getting it to work under Linux? Will the discs switch on demand or do you need to switch them by running a command? How does it handle an access conflict such as trying to read discs 2 and 5 at the same time? I would greatly appreciate any advice that you can give me."

Rounding out a week with a lot of Red Hat news, def con cyber has written a good piece describing what a lot of you have been talking about: changes in Red Hat over the last few years. I think that this one sums up quite well a lot of the email I've been getting regarding RH. As a side note, the Slashdot feed on their portal site has been blatantly deleting all stories about them. They say that the SEC is requires this of them, so all I can say is that if you want uncut Slashdot, get it here. But then again, you probably were anyway... *grin*

Chmarr asks: "I'm trying to get a GNU/Linux box (Red hat-5.2) running with two differing ethernet cards (rtl-8029 and rtl-8139). While the box works just great with one or the other of the cards (using the ne2k-pci and rtl-8139 drivers, respecively) I run into problems if I try and use both cards simultaneously. The rtl-8139 driver loads, finds the 8029 card, complains and gives up. I'd love to be able to control how the PCI driver problems for cards, but the old ISA method (io=0x6100 irq=5 on insmod) doesnt work for PCI: it complains that the symbols aren't available. Does anyone know how to force a PCI driver to look at a particular address?"

Eric asks: "Does anyone have some information for people learning how to setup a GRE tunnel with linux? I know there is kernel support, but that's about as far as i've gotten, I can't seem to find any info on the web about how to setup a GRE tunnel. And major and minor number for making a GRE0 device would be gladly accepted."

knarf noted a story linked from LinuxToday about Red Hat's IPO called Red Hat's Charity Case at Andover News. Several people noted that the story has many errors. Fortunately knarf has written a pretty good summary of what he considers wrong about the article. Several of them are a bit extreme, but many are good points. If you read the original, this is a good rebuttal worth reading.

Wil Mahan writes "Salon has a short article with some interesting details about the upcoming Red Hat IPO. It gives a brief overview of the S-1 filing, including potential "risk factors", such as the threat of being squashed by Microsoft. The full text of the filing is also available (warning: 1.5 MB of legalese). "

Miguel de Icaza , GNOME Guru, and candidate for most hyper human being in the history of humans being, has written an essay discussing Red Hat and the beating that they have taken within the Linux Community. This is worth a read.

Gryphon writes "PC Magazine has published a pretty level-headed 8-page review of the Linux 2.2 kernel. Mostly a features review, compared to Windows NT. I think this is pretty significant, considering a lot of Windows users (including me in years now past) read that magazine! "

Several people have written in lately to note that LinuxHQ has moved to Kernel Notes. But the plot thickened recently when LinuxHQ sprung back to life looking quite similiar to its predecessor, but with a different license. Kernel Notes is GPL, copyrighted by the LinuxHQ Project, but the "New" LinuxHQ is copyrighted by ECS and not GPLd (as well as not crediting the creator of the nice logo up top). Can anyone clarify the confusion for us all? I'm getting a lot of questions about this and a lot of it smells pretty fishy.

cpt kangarooski writes "Well, an enterrising reporter over at Salon has found that certain blue comments in some Linux source code may make it eligible to be censored in Australia. Take a look here " Mmm...fun with censorship. Congrats go to Jamais Cascio (known as cynical around here), Slashdot reader, and author of the Salon article.

Vox wrote in to send us a link to a feature that appears over at Linux Today. The article is called Linux is not Red Hat and describes the fears that a growing number of the old school Linux users have been expressing lately. Specifically it talks about MetroWorks deciding to only support Red Hat for their CodeWarrior for Linux release.