jgalun sent us a ZDNet article about Linux Hackers going from the underground to Linux Day Jobs. They talk about VA Research, SGI, LinuxCare and assorted other companies that many of us lust for employment at. They don't mention BSI though *grin*.

scenic writes "A Washington "Think Tank" has a report complaining about the new "Assessing Microsoft" conference. In particular, they have an issue with the OSS remedy that many, including Nader and Love, have proposed (i.e. opening up the Windows source code). There is quite a bit of stuff concerning Linux (about a quarter of the long article) and why OSS and Linux are temporary phenomenons created by "media interest in identifying a viable competitor to Microsoft." "

An anonymous reader sent us a link to Ace's Hardware and suggests checking it out. The site looks pretty good- similar to Tom's Hardware, but with some other different stuff. Check it out.

Scott Stevenson writes "A News.com article describes a study which dings Linux for poor SMP support, access to only 1 or 2GB of memory, and lack of clustering. Of course, it doesn't say anything about NT's uptime issues on a per-machine basis." Also says that hard data isn't available on Linux being reasonably crash proof.

An anonymous reader sent us a fairly positive article about Linux but written primarily from the perspective of a Mac advocate. Talks a lot about KDE, the usability issues and similiarities between Mac and Linux advocacy.

Well, I seem to be the Santa Claus of conference exhibit-only passes today. As the title would make obvious, we've got fifty free LinuxExpo passes. The conference is in Raleigh-Durham, May 18-22. Click below if you want address information and such.

sallgeud sent us a CNN story that poses the age old question is commercialism good for Linux? Its a pretty good summary type article of the issues. Talks about the fears of a single distribution taking control, tag-along software, and has several Linus quotes.

Zyber writes "Red Hat is sending 6 geeks to the beach where they will live in a luxury beachhouse. The contest involves locating the Gnome footprint throughout their website. While on vacation you will have to maintain a geekworld website as well as being "videotaped, photographed and documented for the world to see". Hmmm. Female geeks? " Don't we wish.

A member of Clan Anonymous Coward asks: "Does anyone know HOW to get these things to boot Linux? I have done a WWW search and found mailing-list messages that say it can be done. I have tried with Linux 2.0.36 off an LS 120 disk and all I got was continuous screenfuls of binary numbers scrolling off the screen. As far as I can determine LILO boot block did not even start execution. I tried formating the disk as /dev/hda and /dev/hda2 and both gave me similar results. The /dev/hda2 attempt had 'linear' in lilo.conf. Do I need a later version of lilo?"

Couple of interesting developments in Linux hardware lately. The Linux Store is selling super cheap linux boxes. news.com has a story about them where they proclaim that they will only be advertising on sites like Slashdot and Freshmeat except that Scoop doesn't even had ads, and I'd never heard of them before reading that article. An actual advertiser (Penguin Computing), however now has a 8 CPU Xeon Box that runs Linux (of course). First 8 CPU box I've seen running Linux (which I didn't even know could do 8 way SMP. Although I've been told of 32 and 64 chip linux boxes in development by other companies. No I can't name names).

jsparkes asks: "I haven't been able to find definitive information on mounting FAT32 filesystems in linux. It seems like it was implemented by Gordon Chaffee, who has this Fat32 homepage. It seems that it was added in 2.0.34 and should also be in 2.2.X. Does it work? Is just like an ext2 fs, or are there limitations? I'd like to dual boot linux and win98, but if I can't use my large FAT32 partitions, it would be pointless. (I have a 10G win98 drive, and will use a 1.2G for linux..)"

Couple of new Linux Portals to mention: An anonymous reader sent us a link to LinuxStart- a yahoo-ish Linux focused site, and FaKe wrote in to send us JustLinux.com. EmilEifrem sent us Earthweb's newly announced OpenSourceIT, which isn't a portal: More like a better designed LinuxWorld, with a cheesier name. It Debuts with the standard ESR and RMS profiles. All of these sites look pretty decent- its pretty excellent that Linux can support this much content. Anyone else remember when it was just Me and Scoop? We've come a long way. Very cool.

weink writes "Debian is in the process of getting their logo in order. The vote will take place in about a week. After the logo contest at GIMP, here are the options. " I am so happy that I have my Debian box running again. apt is so good for lazy sysadmins. Oh, and I vote for Raul's design. Super smooth.

Lampropeltis Alterna wrote in to tell us that Dell has bought equity in Red Hat. Another hat has been thrown into the ring. I've always thought of Dell as completely in bed with Microsoft, it'll be interesting to see how they follow this up.

TroyD sent us a link to a WSJ Article on Linux that Says Linux is Good, but that it lags behind its rivals. Troy also sent a choice quote from the article: "...Linux currently lacks some of the features demanded by corporations. [...] Among them are the ability to run simultaneously on many processors in a single computer and to keep a log of what the computer has done." Cool. I can save a lot of diskspace: rm -rf /var/log.

Anonymous Coward writes " Linus and maddog will be on a panel, along with a Microsoft guy (Jim Ewel) and someone from DH Brown (Tony Iams). This will be in Atlanta at the AIIM '99 conference. " The actual date will be April 14, 9-10 AM.

Smasher writes "The redesigned, more ambitious incarnation of Salon is now "completely rebuilt" around Linux and Apache. This is a great boost--Salon is a very popular site, and this gives Linux even more exposure to the mainstream. " We see Salon articles regularly on these pages. Glad to see them take the plunge. Update: 04/05 10:17 by CT : here's a news.com story on the same thing.

dave writes "There is a thin line between publishing groundless falsehoods about Linux (FUD) and writing about serious limitations that need to be addressed by the Linux community. Nathan Cochrane opens his first in a series of editorials on Linux Today about this very subject. "

irix sent us a link to an ABCNews Article on Linux's Growth. and says "I thought the predictions and overall analysis were pretty good coming from CNET. I was really amused to see a Microsoft banner ad on the top of the page :)"

REwT6 wrote in to say that Metalab, the archive formerly known as Sunsite, is shutting down. Having served the Linux and Open Source as the defacto clearing house for free software, it will be missed. Next week it will begin its new life as a mirror of download.com.