haaz writes "Applix is looking at doing a port of Applix Anyware Office to Linux for PowerPC processors. Please send a message saying "I want Applixware!" (or something to that effect) to iwantapplix@linuxppc.org. The market is a lot bigger than people realize on PPC, and if there was a really good office package, e.g. Applix, we'd have hundreds, if not thousands more people in Linux full-time, and they could drop the Mac OS completely. "

Adam Glass wrote in to say "Stuart Anderson, Chairman of the Linux Standard Base Written Specification Subcommittee, recently spoke at a meeting of FLUX -- Florida Linux User Xchange. The discussion was wide-ranging and informative, giving a clear picture of the LSB project's purpose and implementation. A transcript can be found here. "

Ladies and gentleman, both Hemos and I arrived Safely back in Holland yesterday afternoon. After spending all night catching up on 3 days of reply required email, writing a paper, and finishing all my homework, I finally now have a chance to sit back and write a summary of the whole event as best as I can muster. So it that link and read on if you're curious.

Andy Tai writes "Printer makers are working together to define a single universal printer driver. Called the Universal Printer Driver Format, it will replace the 3000 printer drivers in existence. UPDF will allow the characteristic of each printer to be described in a text file, residing in the printer itself." S: This effort is 2 years old (not related to Intel's initiative) if you look on their website. It looks pretty open from their IPP pages, including specs and apparently joining is free. Looks to me like an area where Linux participation may be beneficial for Linux and the PWG by providing early widespread testing (if printer manufacturers release descriptions for existing printers in file format before actually including them in their newer printers).

David Raufeisen writes "Opera Software has had an ongoing project to port its lightweight web browser to non-ms operating systems such as Linux,macos,BeOS and OS/2. In their latest status report they noted that the Linux and Macos teams have failed and they are shifting the project to another team, Delays suck.. I personally can't weight to try out their web browser in Linux.. I used it heavily in windows before and it is superb. "

An anonymous contributor wrote to us that "An employee of SAP (the company that created R/3, a software comparable to Baan and Peoplesoft, loved by managers), wrote at de.comp.os.unix.discussion: "There is a company-internal version of R/3 for Linux". " This goes towards supporting Oracle's view about Linux, and not HP's. Could someone find the message for us on dejanews? I tried but failed.

Don Krause asks: "One of my department heads approached me and stated that he 'needs NT server and IIS4.0+ active index' to produce a searchable database for our field service engineers. I'm sure this can be accomplished using Apache on Linux, but I haven't located an acceptable search engine. Any suggestions?"

Ed Finch writes "There's an article on InfoWorld Electric in which Oracle reaffirmed its commitment to Linux at ALS." Interestingly Oracle stated that existing support from Red Had, SUSE and the like betters their own, somewhat casting doubt on previous reports that Oracle was to provide its own support service. (Speculation: perhaps that news came from internal discussions at Oracle. The director of Oracle's Intel Technical Divison, Parikshit Bhaduri seemed pretty open to some idea of Linux support by his company.) Ed continues: "Note the sharp contrast about the eventual support of Baan, PeopleSoft and SAP on Linux between Oracle's statements and HP's "

Chris DiBona has posted a nice little archive of images from ALS for those of you into that sorta thing. If you're interested, go hammer on this page. Pay no attention to that picture of me, but I've never seen Hemos looking any sexier. Robert Edmonds stopped by our booth and asked us to plug the debian webcam that they've got running way over at the other end of the building. Check it out. The official webcams be found here check them out quick- we're all going home soon!

It's all fun and games out here at ALS, hopefully I can sit down now and actually get the summary out before either netscape crashes again, or something else occurs that forces me to leave the safe haven that is the Slash/Themes/Meat booth. Hit the link and read the deal...

James Renken writes "After a long time without compiling, rebooting, and repeating, version 2.1.126 of the Linux kernel has been released! You can get it from the usual places. "

We're finally settling it at ALS. Kinda crazy, but finally got ye old email up and running again. I'll post a lively entertaining full blown summary of the fun and games later today, but in the meantime, Mandrake and Raster are running a a webcam over at their booth (way off at the other end of the building).

Found on Linux Today: A British company will soon be launching an MP3 player running on a 220 MHz StrongARM and Linux. Because it is technically a PC, it may be able to avoid a lawsuit with the RIAA (unlike Diamond Multimedia). It's the size of your car radio, has a 2.1Gb hard disk (35 hours of music), and should allow you to login to it!

HP is thinking of incorporating Linux into its product plans, but it does not quite know how yet: low end unix boxes? embedded OS? Obviously they are worried about cannibalizing sales of HP-UX. If HP did provide Linux in this manner, it would provide also provide support. This follows up on Unix Review's recent article.

Hemos and I are seconds away from leaving for ALS. Everyone be good while we're gone! We'll hopefully be back online yet tonight and be able to post live reports from the show. Looking forward to seeing a lot of you at the t.o/fm//. booth. (Thanks again to Cyclic Software and VA Research for getting all of us down there and setting us up)

Barry de la Rosa writes "There's a story on TechWeb about the new Linux kernel, due "by the end of the year". Interesting to see a mainstream pub'n like this hyping an OS release - doing what MS pays millions for in PR... "

Al writes "TIME has an article about Linus and Linux. I guess this means we're mainstream now! " I figure we've seen it all now. Well, there is still Better Homes & Gardens, Rolling Stone and Cosmo...

Linux-Mandrake mailed us to let us know about some interesting happenings as of late. Their site now features a documentation area as well as an updated FAQ. Hit the link below to read more.

Nick Hall writes in with a question on a really nifty idea: "I'm setting up a small (4-8 station) LAN for a hip, swingin' local bar that wants to be even more hip and swingin' by putting internet terminals in half the tables. Putting aside the wisdom or hip-ness factor of this endeavor, I've almost sold him on the idea of running Linux (rather than Win9x) on these terminals and the server, and I need any information on "kiosk" type apps - is there a Linux window manager designed to limit users to a few key apps in this fashion? Applications designed around this? People who have done this before? Any help would be appreciated!"

BeanDip asks "Does anyone know of any resources for adding better support for newer printers under linux? I own an HP Deskjet 672c and under linux, with the support for the hp up to the 600 I get bad quality color prints 300x300 dpi when under M$ with the HP specific drivers I get good quality prints." I get a lot of questions like these about getting Y printer to work under Linux, so what can you do to get a new printer...any new printer to work with it?