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.

Fred M writes "For use in high-computing area's Siemens has build their hpcLine systems and showed it on a meeting for customers in februari. Base of the systems are cpu modules, each consisting of 2 Dual-CPU-Boards. Each module has 2 Pentium-CPUs - then PIIs 450 MHz - and memory of 2048 MB max. 8 modules (= 32 cpu's) can be mounted in one rack. Connection of the modules is done with Scalable Coherent I nterface (SCI), that has a bandwidth of 500 MByte/s and uses a Ring-Topology. A story (in German) can be found here "

Matt writes "Much hype has followed the release of latest version of SuSE (6.0), and judging by the review over at Ars Technica of this hot distribution the hype is well justified. While packing a big bang, SuSE incorporates tools like YaST, SaX, KDE, StarOffice 5.0, and so forth to get users of any experience level up on their feet and running productively. As a long time user of RedHat I find SuSE to be a worthy competitor, as well as a strong indication that distributions as a whole are continuing to do positive things to stimulate the growth of the desktop OS user base for Linux. Definitely a worthy read, check it out!" CowboyNeal swears by SuSE. I'm itching for a new Debian CD.

Elbie asks: "I just received a digital camera as a gift, but the only software that comes with it is for these two OSes which look pretty alien to me. How can I get those pictures out of my camera (Canon PowerShot A5) from my Linux box ? Is there any Linux software out there, and if not how to figure out what protocol is used (it uses a standard serial cable to communicate with the PC)"

Hmmm...this must be the day of decent AC questions. Surprise surprise! Another Anonymous Cowards asks: "We're interesting in finding an existing implementation of the UDF file system for CDRW devices for Linux or other PC Unix operating systems. Does anyone know of such a beast? Otherwise, does anyone know where the UDF spec may be obtained?"

Chris Farris writes "The Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts, in cooperation with USENIX and Linux International, is pleased to announce the 3rd Annual Atlanta Linux Showcase. The Atlanta Linux Showcase will be held at the Cobb Galleria Centre in Atlanta on October 12-16 1999. Interested exhibitors should contact exhibits@linuxshowcase.org More details will be coming via our website soon. " If its anything like last years-- hell who am I kidding? I ate half a tin of Penguin Mints. I don't remember anything except the head ache and dave and nate drinking 151.

Luca Lizzeri writes "The WSJ reports that IBM, Novell and Compaq are taking equity stakes in Red Hat (subscription required). An excerpt: "Red Hat Software Inc. [snip] said it obtained equity investments from three more computer companies: International Business Machines Corp., Compaq Computer Corp. and Novell Inc." Pretty please will someone find a link we can read and post it? And guys, don't just post the article contents in the comments- if you guys keep doing that I'm gonna get sued for copyright violation. Update: 03/09 09:33 by CT : Joy! stick sent us a free version of the story.

Linus has finally released Linux 2.2.3 after several prepatches and lots of testing. Hopefully, it should be the last one for quite awhile. Check out the changes summary on Cutting Edge Linux, and don't forget to use a mirror!

Debian GNU/Linux 2.1, aka slink, was released last night (again). It contains well over 2500 packages, and packages for GNOME and KDE, though not included in the distro, are available. Intel, Alpha, SPARC, and m68k are the supported architechtures. Potato (2.2) should be frozen shortly. More details and CD order form at netgod.net. Congrats, guys!

An anonymous reader sent us a link to an article that expresses the most amazing cluelessness about Linux I've seen yet outside of the creative panel that brings us Jesse Berst. A few good points, and a bunch of obnoxious flame dragging statements that make me irritable. It's like he's trying to bait Slashdot readers. Don't take the bait. This one isn't worth it.