Charles Bronson wrote in to tell us that Slackware now has its own domain name. Shockingly enough, its Slackware.com. The distribution that so many of us learned to love Linux on now has a happy home on the web. If there's one thing for certain, its that Slackware users are definitely attached to their distribution. Dave says its because of Slack's advanced packaging system *grin*.

emptybody was the first of you to write in with this PC Week story that Compaq is about to ship RedHat 5.2 bundled on some of its servers, and provide 24-by-7 support for them. This apparently will save time for them, since they currently pre-load Linux by hand. If this is becoming a problem, it suggests demand for Linux Servers is increasing. Gateway also expects to deliver such servers by the end of the year. Kim Brown, an analyst at Dataquest Inc, says this means Compaq is walking away from SCO, and that Linux is starting to be acknowledged as the low-end Unix alternative.

Jean-Paul Smets has opened his new site Freepatents.org (mostly in English), which encourages Europe to maintain its no-software patents law. This law is apparently under threat. He's also well known for this study of the economics of free software (in french only at the moment, contact me if you can translate it, but you can use babelfish in the meantime). The new site contains the text of a resolution adopted by the french ISOC at its Autrans meeting, which requests that before Europe introduces any patent law a detailed study be conducted to determine the impact of patents on innovation, competition and free software, and that provisions are added to ensure large corporations cannot use patents as a legal manoeuvre to block innovation, competition and free software. The League of Programming cites example of patent misuse and reasons to be against software patents.

Courtesy Linux Weekly News. Samba 2.0 has been released. Samba is a fully Y2K-compliant and supported "file and print server suite" for Linux, and an often cited free software success story (it is GPL). 2.0 adds the ability to "integrate seamlessly into an existing Windows NT domain". See the press release (with an amazing benchmark relult at the head), or the Samba project home page for more info.

CsJmn writes "I came across this short article on Linux in the January issue online edition of Healthcare Informatics magazine (a healthcare computing industry trade magazine). The story is about half way down this page ." The story is about the sucessful introduction of Linux to Huntsville Hospital in Alabama. Apparently, John Carpenter, Microsoft's worldwide healthcare industry Marketing manager is worried "It will certainly drive us to put new stuff into our products."

rdsmith writes "This week's Info World has a short article on Linux and its growth over the past few years. It makes a couple of mentions of ESR and the Halloween document. Although the article bases Linux's growth on numbers provided by Redhat, it's still good press for Linux. "

Ryan wrote in to say "Apparently Creative Labs is looking to hire someone full-time to develop and write Linux kernel drivers for their audio products, as this posting to the linux-kernel mailing list shows. Specifically meantioned is the role of this person to grow a team of engineers to support Linux. I'm unsure if this team is in the OSS community, or internal to Creative. There is also meantion of ALSA, my favorite Linux sound system. Assuming the resulting drivers are available for free (even if only in binary format), everyone with a Creative sound card will win big."

Eugene Sotirescu writes "If anyone doubted that Linux is poised to break into the limelight, here's proof: a Newsweek article by Steve Levy, with all the right names, saying the right things, about the right system. "

Alan writes "The Linux booth was an absolute smash at the Comdex in Vancouver today. This was it's first day, but the booth stayed packed from when the doors opened to about an hour before they closed. And when I say packed, I mean PACKED. People were overflowing into the aisles to talk to the volunteers that were there. We quickly ran out of the Caldera CDs and Linux Journals that were donated. Even people who weren't part of the booth but used linux were stopping to talk to people about it and help to show them all about linux. We were literally the most busy booth there. There was even a tv crew from BCTV (www.tvforbc.com, no story though) who came out and put us on the news! In short, Linux was the toast of the show :)"

Matt Welsh (who is probably not coincidentally program chair...) wrote in with a call for papers for the upcoming O'Reilly Linux Conference. It looks like a cool conference, almost a Linux Expo of the west (in August): two days of tutorials, followed by two days of a multi-track conference. They also will have evening "breakaway sessions" for special interest groups (sorta like BOFs, it seems). I actually may submit a paper...

Linuxberg from the people who make TUCOWS has opened, and is offering a copy of WordPerfect 8 to win. The website seems to me much more geared towards newbies than Freshmeat, providing a somewhat different service. It also appears less comprehensive than SAL. Interestingly, this Ext2 interview of the president of TUCOWS shows his company's been using Linux for quite some time.

Plutor writes "Applix has ported their office suite to LinuxPPC, and CNN has an article about it. It's always a nice thing to see main-stream press attention-I'd like my next box to be PPC. "

Chad Miller was the first to tell us that pre6 is out. Remember that the new kernel.org mirrors are up and running- you can hit ftp.<country code>.kernel.org for a mirror near you. Help ensure that everyone can download it faster so we can hammer this thing smooth for the 2.2 final.

Mike asks: "I was wondering if anyone knows where I could buy a linux plate logo (to fit in that 1" x 1" square in my computer case). I have been searching around, but I cannot seem to find one."

Jonathan wants to know your thoughts on this issue: "I'm thinking of purchasing a magneto optical juke box (in particular an HP 80ex), I was wondering if anyone has had any sucess running them under linux, or just an experience with them in general."

alank asks: "I am investigating a network upgrade for a school. The core Servers are Linux based, but most workstations are currently Macs or PC's and the plan is to move these over to Linux at some later date. Currently the issues on managing large numbers of WinXX programs means that considerable tech support time is wasted on fixing them. I remembered the kiosk article where someone mentioned using Assimilator for the Macintosh to keep images of the hard disks on the servers so it could be replaced, I could not find anything comprehensive on the Windows side to do the same. Should I be looking at dual booting, and somehow using linux on the clients to re-image the drives? How would you do this?

An anonymous reader wrote in to say that "Unix World is running a series of tutorials on configuring services on Linux. This is part 4, but there are links to the previous secitons. Topics include: HTTP, FTP, Telnet, inetd, Firewalling, Mail services and more. find it here "

Ryano writes " TechWeb has a story about LinuxPPC's strong debut at MacWorld. I was interested to read the bit about Linux tapping into Mac extensions to use features it doesn't yet support itself. Additionally, there is also some stuff on the future of LinuxPPC. "

Jeroen writes "USAToday features a nice mainstream article about Linus Torvalds, with mentions his grandfather and contains quotes from his father." The article calls him the next Bill Gates, albeit tongue in cheek.

Panu Hällfors writes "The first one installfest ever in Finland takes place in Ulvila from 16. to 17. January. I'm expecting something like 60 to 70 new installs and of course about as much experienced users to drop by to lend a hand to new users. We'll probably install mainly the new RedHat derivate SOT-Linux which is translated to Finnish. More info can be found on the Internet site of the event, "> here (In Finnish and *only accesible from Finland*) "