An anonymous contributor wrote to tell us "Sysdeco Mimer AB, Uppsala, Sweden, will announce a port to Linux of their rdbms MIMER at the Internet World Sweden Expo on nov the 10-12th. See: link " Well... it's in Swedish, but I see the word Linux on the page.

Here's a small roundup of the Linux and Schools news this week. Wired covered the Mexican School story today, and reveals that the most ambitious US project to introduce Linux into schools is in Oregon's Multnomah County which will install 30 Linux servers in high schools next month. Anyone have any info and numbers on the use of Linux in other schools or universities? Apparently schools can get help at The Linux Schools Project. In France, the sale by Dell of PC's without OS to the CNRS is making its competition think. The CNRS tends to be a trend-setter for all other French research and higher education facilities, which number around 300000 users. To address the needs of Linux users such as these, IBM has set up support services for its Linux using customers, and Dell has signed a partnership agreement with Mandala International (apparently a Free Software specialist VAR).

Just in case you didn't listen to this ~30 minutes show here. You'll hear Dan Shafer & Brian Cooley explains regarding the Linux & GUI/commercial issue, the Beowolf project, and the "Halloween" documents (1&2)

Linux Today tried to verify allegations published in the Register that the OMG (responsible for the CORBA spec) did not like Linux because it was free. Chris Rhodes of the OMG denied this in this statement saying that the Register misconstrued the role their source played at the OMG.

Sun has loaned the Debian project three (yes, I said three) Ultra 30 workstations. They are very nice - 1MB cache, 128MB RAM, SCSI, etc. One will be hosted at KachinaTech, while the other two will be sent to Debian developers who do frequent bootstraps and the likes. Have a look at the Debian UltraLinux page. Sorta makes me wish I was leading the UltraLinux port...

Per Wigren was the first reader to write in to tell us that Linux.org has apparently solved their network problems, and the sites usual content is now back online.

Russ Magee was the first of many of you to write in about Robert Cringely's analysis of the Halloween I document. He thinks the OpenSource community has no cause for concern, and he reminds us to stay focussed on Linux, not Microsoft. Karsten M. Self wrote "The article Art of War by Varian and Carl Shapiro is a good introduction to the basic strategies involved in a standards war. The book Rules by the same authors is a very good read with a lot ideas pertinent to the current debate.". However Ben Woodard writes "I was talking to the Access tech support people here at Cisco about Halloween and how MS is planning to use embrace and extend, Em&Ex, to capture the market. They told me how Microsoft has a broken version of CHAP negotiation in the PPP protocol and if you want CHAP to really work you must use Microsoft's proprietary version of CHAP. It got me wondering if other people know about places where Microsoft has used Em&Ex but it is burried so deep in the protocols that most people don't know it exists. It would be interesting to try to compile a list of these little known incidents of Em&Ex. " Obviously it is impossible to know whether Ben's example is an example of flawed testing or real intent to break CHAP, but were serious evaluations of OS's to include standards-compliance tests, an interesting picture might emerge. Not only are standards an issue, but so are patents. So far, Linux has been lucky: many Unix patents have elapsed. Patents are something to mull over, while hacking.

scoop writes " StarOffice 5.0 Personal Edition for Linux is available for free for non-commercial use. The offer addresses to all individuals, private persons and students and is exclusively restricted to individual, non-commercial use. StarOffice 5.0 is a fully-integrated and Microsoft Office-compatible suite of productivity applications. It provides powerful Web enabled word processing, spreadsheet, presentation graphics, email, news, charting and graphics applications. StarOffice runs native on the Linux Operating Environment on Intel platforms and is also available for other operating systems. "

LinuxWorld has an article which may have some valid points, but would discourage me from porting my apps to Linux. How many of you have had difficulties porting from libc to glibc? (Please only answer if you tried it). How different are the different distributions for your app? How much does autoconfig solve? Any people from Red Hat, Debian, SuSe, Caldera, PHT, etc are encouraged to relate their experience. S: My comments are that Ian Nandhra was one of the founders of the LSA, and that his article is inaccurate in assuming that software will be sold at a 60 percent discount.

Andy Tai writes " The Object Management Group, the body overseeing the CORBA standard, and Linux International put out a press release advertising the available CORBA implementations on Linux."It's all about options. Users don't want to be bound to only one platform or operating system," commented Bill Hoffman, President of the Object Management Group. "Linux offers another level of independence and CORBA vendors have responded. As Linux comes out of the back room and into the mainstream, I suspect other middleware vendors will follow this trend." This is good evidence of the complementary relationship of open standards and Free Software/Open Source."

There's a good story running at over news.com about a astrophysicist building his own supercomputer equivalent by using 140 Alpha boxes, and Linux. This has been mentioned-Avalon is the codename-but the price is so cheap (313,000$US) for this new verison of it that it warrants mentioning. The old cluster, 70 machines, was 315 on the supercomputer list. This might be in the top 100.

noble where you can read that Red Hat got itself a new President. Matthew Szulik has accepted a job as president of Red Hat. He'll be working to sell Linux to the PHBs of the world.

ThoraX695 writes "LinuxPPC Inc. has just released their plans for at least two minor updates and a major upgrade to the PowerPC port of Linux on their website. It looks like the major changes will be the 2.2.x kernel, Gnome instead of KDE as the default WM, XFB (which is based upon XFree68), and glibc 2.1 support." I'm just happy to see that the alternatives to x86 are getting good support. I'm seriously considering a PowerBook G3 instead of a P2 Laptop when my current p.o.s. melts down. (When? after als, its amazing this things boots) Course there is that one mouse button thing... will Apple ever get over that crime against the universe? The release also notes that LinuxPPC.org and .com will split, leaving org for developers and .com for the company. Best of luck to both sites.

Freshmeat has announced a new partnership with 32BitsOnline to help introduce Linux to their OS/2, Windows and BeOS readers. Freshmeat benefits by getting more content (editorials/hardware reviews/etc) from 32BitsOnline.

Liberation, one of the major french newspapers published two articles on Linux today. The first discusses Linux as a threat to Microsoft and contains a quote from Bernard Dufau, president of IBM France: Nous pensons que Linux représente à terme une menace pour Windows (We believe that Linux is a threat to Windows). It also reveals that France Telecom's portal Voila uses Linux (nice Tux logo at the bottom). The second article reveals that AFUL's agreement with the French ministry of Education is similar to the one Microsoft signed with them when Bill Gates was in Paris. Apparently, headmasters and schools boards of directors would often frustrate teachers efforts to introduce Linux into their schools because while other software providers had signed agreements with the French State, Linux had not. As usual, try babelfish if you can't read french.

Nirvani writes "check here. Some other mirror have it to, ie: wcarchive. Have fun! " Ok, are we sure that this is the real one? I see files at least *grin*.

Patrick writes " LinuxWorld Expo's Website is now. It looks Good! March 2-4, 1999 in San Jose, CA. Linus will be giving the Keynote and there will be over 40 conference sessions. " I'm hoping I'll be able to go to this thing. It looks like a lot of good stuff.

Several folks wrote in to tell the world that Red Hat Software has released v5.2 of their distribution. You can snag it from the mirror sites. For those of you on less then speedy connections, LinuxCentral is shipping the official version starting the 9th, and I'm sure the usual places will be carrying super cheap unofficial CDs just as soon as they can burn them.

glens writes "LinuxToday has been reporting on the shutdown of linux.org and this is the latest article. Seems to be developing into an intersting tale. " Update www.linux.org seems to be resolving now, but the actual site is not yet back. The page currently has the official explanation of the ruckus.

In a U-turn that will be welcomed by all members of the Linux community who still have to use a Windows box to access Lotus Notes at work, Lotus has announced that it is looking into porting its SmartSuite and Notes/Domino suites of applications to Linux. It would also make SmartSuite open-source. This link was found on Linux Today. Unlike the analysts of the story, I believe this is a low-cost (type make) move which will be very lucrative to Lotus (many Linux users in Fortune 500 companies, have 2 PCs, one for the company standards of Notes/Office (Windows) and one to do real work on (Linux). For those that do not know SmartSuite, it's a pretty awesome suite of office applications, including Voice Recognition -- I really hope this too will be open-sourced: Lotus Organizer time and contact manager, Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, Lotus Freelance Graphics presentation graphics, Lotus Word Pro word processor, Lotus Approach database, Lotus ScreenCam multimedia, IBM ViaVoice for Word Pro and 1-2-3, Lotus Mail Internet e-mail.