Patrick Dunn writes "On ZDNET's Smart Reseller they have a story about Red Hat maybe being a mini-Microsoft by it's business practices." I'd guess that the 2 most common conspiracy theories that pop into my mail box are 1. MS-Linux and 2. Red Hat becoming the next MS. What do you think?

An anonymous reader sent us linkage to a ZDNet UK Article written by Martin Butler of the The Butler Group. The article doesn't say much new, it really just says linux is just the "New Thing" (Just like windows was so many years ago) and that it will factionalize when money becomes involved. And its already started to happen. My take? Bring it on! As long as a base system of kernel, libs, and utilities is compatible accross distributions, divide all you want. Debian for Hackers. Red Hat for Suits. Slackware for loons. And the 28 other assorted distributions for whoever wants them. Its about options, and as long as we adhere to a minimal set of requirements, everyone will be happy. Am I crazy?

Gracchus writes "SuSE has announced they will release the Euro edition of ver. 6.1, with the expected inclusion of the Linux kernel 2.2.3, XFree86 3.3.3.1, KDE 1.1 and GNOME 1.0, on April 12th, with the North American version scheduled for May release. This page is in German, but you non-Deutschlanders can get yer translations at Babelfish . Watch "permissions" get translated to "Permian eating ions"! Can I get fries with that? "

Well, starting this morning, DELL are starting to sell Linux pre-installed on selected workstations, dell asks for additional 99$ for the installation. Full report from News.com is here. Speaking of pre-installing, IBM just told Info-world reporters that they will keep selling Linux servers, but they will "wait-and-see" about selling Workstation pre-installed with Linux. Am I the only one who thinks that IBM need to learn about selling from Dell?

Stephen Williams writes "LinuxToday reports that Bowerbird Computing have released a new open source license called the New Copyleft License. Seems to be aimed at people who want to sell their free software, rather than charge for support." At the rate these licenses are proliferating, soon there will be one license for every app. Does anyone besides me think this is getting crazy?

Jim Hill wrote to us about the Puffin Group & Hewlett-Packard, a popular story today being on both MSNBC and in the public section of the Wall Street Journal. It's an interesting business case story for Linux and major corporations-send this out to your bosses to show them it can be done. And if anyone has a HP icon, send it my way. Update: 03/18 02:36 by J : For interested parties, the Puffin Group website.

An anonymous reader was the first to let us know that ftp.redhat.com has something new- Starbuck, aka Red Hat 5.9, aka Pre 6.0. Hopefully this thing will be on the mirrors.

mattdm writes in with this query: "I'm trying to get PAM (on Red Hat Linux 5.2) to work with Kerberos. Has anyone done this succesfully? I'm using pam_krb4 from this URL. It works to authenticate people perfectly, but it doesn't save a TGT or set the proper environment variables. This is pretty important to getting Linux officially supported at the university where I work, so any help would be great." Update: 03/17 06:48 by C :The link posted above doesn't work, but you can go here to browse through their PAM files. Thanks to tjrw for the link. Update: 03/18 04:38 by C :The original link has now been fixed.

Hygelac writes "ESR has written an article for Linux World dubbed "Halloween V". It's basically a reaction to Ed "The Sheriff of Nottingham" Muth's statements in a PCWeek article. Nothing earth shattering, but somebody had to do it, right? "

Surplus Baggage writes "Caldera is planning to release the beta of OpenLinux 2.2 at Novell's BrainShare conference. It's the first distro to be based on a 2.2.x kernel. ZDNet has the story. " I've been reminded by people that Stampede has the first 2.2 out. As well, SuSE 6.1, out in a couple days will have a 2.2 based distrib. /me slaps own face.

NEC, the world's second largest semiconductor manufacturer, believes that the sucess of Linux would allow another microprocessor architecture to be established in the PC market. If Linux becomes mainstream, the basis for microprocessor competition would be cost/performance and not architecture. Although NEC might design its own processor architecture for Linux, it's more likely that they use the existing MIPS architecture. In related news, Justsystem will port its Ichitaro word processing program to Linux, and offer in July ATOK, a program for Japanese-language input.

peter royal writes "MegaCar is a high-class Brabus 5.8 outfitted with a 153kbit/s wireless internet connection. It is 16 9.6kbit/s GSM modems in parallel, with a Linux box acting at the router." Just when you thought you'd seen everything.

Red sent us a link to a Linux article on CNN. Take it with a grain of salt- the author makes some good points and tries to slice through the hype. Dwells on a trying to explain what source code is. He basically dismisses Linux as hype and buzzwords.

Gary Geisbert asks:"I recently got an AST ascentia M6000 laptop, and proceeded to install Red Hat 5.2 on it. When i got to the xf86config, I realized there was no support for the ATI LT Rage Pro chipset that's in this laptop, so i temporarily used a vga config. Then, I upgraded my xf86 to version 3.3.3.1 which *supposedly* has support for my chipset. I installed it and nothing works right unless I hook up an external monitor and mess with the CRT/LCD function key after X loads up. And after I exit X, I have to hit the same button a few times to get the LCD to synch back up. (which is how things worked before the upgrade). Has anyone successfully setup xf86 with a similar configuration? "

MindStalker sent us linkage to an article from an upcoming PC Magazine that covers Linux in a Major Way. Distribution comparisons, an installation guide, and tips.

Ever want to Multitaks operating systems? Thomas Reagan has the answer for us- he says " VMWare for Linux Beta is out! Go to the homepage to download it! " Any of you who saw this have been pretty impressed. If I actually ran a different OS, I'd consider it. (now if only vmare.com had real bandwidth)

Buddha writes "Ever dream about floating around? We're going to do it, with Linux. Everybody's seen Apollo 13, right? All those shots of Tom Hanks floating around were actually him floating around! The crew rented NASA's Vomit Comet to pull it off. We're a group of 4 MIT students, and we're training to fly on the Vomit Comet -- we're slated to fly in one week. Our testing software is all written for Linux. Follow us as we get ready. "

piman writes "Today Debian wrapped up glibc2.1 nicely into the unstable/main directory. I hade to remove timezones (not needed anymore), egcc (replaced with new gcc), and checker (don't know why), but it's working fine so far. " I don't even have a slink CD and I'm already eyeing the unstable tree. This isn't healthy. All you livin-on-the-edge types jump in there and screw your boxes up. Can't be worse than the GNOME 1.0 rpms...

desslok writes "This article in the National Law Journal talks about how Linux might make work scarce for intellectual property lawyers. It describes the open source model and how it will mix with business from a legal standpoint."

FolkWolf sent us a link to CNET which as an article on Red Hat Backlash speculated on by the The Gartner Group. Basically revolves around the recent investment announcements. They talk about RH walking a line between boasting their successes, and alienating themselves from the community.