Pierce sent us a link to a story over at Yahoo where you can read about An UltraSparc version of Linux. Sun actually has some fairly inexpensive ultra's these days. And this company will apparently build UltraSPARC Linux boxes for you. Not bad.

Redhat has now announced that Intel, Netscape, Greylock and Benchmark Partners have invested in it. Intel wants to target ISPs with their Linux strategy. Intel will also be joining Linux International. It will be interesting to see in which way Red Hat will react to UDI given the discussion about it on the kernel list, summarized by Linux Weekly News. (updated)

Informix is stepping up its Linux support with a ports of Dynamic Server (expected to ship by the first quarter of next year) and the Dynamic 4GL toolset (to ship within days). Plans are also being made to bring Universal Server to Linux. This turnaround in Informix' strategy is due to the realization that deep-pocketed corporate customers also use linux.

Richard Harmon writes in with this bit of networking trouble: "I'm trying to set up a linux firewall at my office, but I can't get the forwarding to work. I've tried ipportfw, but it acts like the packets don't match the masq' rules or something. I can't figure out a way to have the smtp, pop3, imap, x.400 and so on forwarded /through/ the firewall with NAT (network address translation).. I basically want my firewall to sit on the mail sever's old (outside) IP, and then when it recieves network traffic on that IP to forward it to our internal network (192.x.x.x). HELP!!!

OctobrX hinted at it, but here's the deal. Slashdot, Freshmeat, and Themes.org are going to be going to the Atlanta Linux Showcase at the end of October. Hemos and Myself will be representing Slashdot, along with OctobrX and Scoop from Themes & FM respectively. We'll have a booth and some VA Research machines to run web sites on. The whole adventure is being sponsored by VA and Cyclic Software. If there is demand I can bring shirts for folks. We're still working out what we're going to do with the booth- the nude interpretive dance idea seems to be a popular choice though.

Well, approximiatly 20 million of you folks submitted the latest Berst column about Linux, over at ZDNet. However, what has been intersting to read is the different submittors take on the article-some of them have embraced whole-scale, while others (myself included) just think that he's hedging his bets, and trying to straddle the fence. So, give it a read, and let me know what you think.

Ken Miller was one of the first to send in the notice that the Gray Lady of Journalism herself had noticed Linux. On the down side, you will need a free account to login for this story. But this definitly shows that Linux has made it in the Old Media world.

Adam Wiggins writes in to ask this question: "Someone please tell me there's a descent sound library for Linux? Price is no object - we can afford to drop a couple thousand bucks on a license, although obviously a GPL'd one would be cooler." Good question! Click the link for more!

George Greer writes "While idling doing a search for Transmeta on AltaVista, I came across the title "Recent Ph.D graduates". Naturally I was curious. On the page link they list the following people now working at Transmeta and their focus. Craig Anderson, ``Improving Performance of Bus Based Multiprocessors'', Autumn 1995. Advisor: Jean-Loup Baer. Current Employment: Transmeta, Inc., Santa Clara, CA. David Keppel, ``Runtime Code Generation'', Spring 1996. Advisor: Susan Eggers. Current Employment: Transmeta, Inc., Santa Clara, CA. Jack Lo, ``Exploiting Thread-Level Parallelism on Simultaneous Multithreaded Processors: Hardware and Software Techniques for Effectively Managing Shared Resources'', Spring 1998. Advisors: Susan Eggers and Hank Levy. Current Employment: Transmeta Corporation, Santa Clara, CA. As if there's any doubt left they're making a (really cool) processor. " Mmm...and based on what Linus said at Linux Expo, I think it's clear that they are headed toward SMP fun.

Chad Cunningham writes "C|Net has posted a story on NT5.0 vs. Red Hat Linux 5.1. Not a bad article, but again they missed some of the things that linux can do as well as NT. For example, they touted the ability to control management functions on NT from other NT machines as well as from a web browser (only IE4 of course) . They seemed to think it was better than being able to telnet into your machine and edit ANYTHING from ANY computer. Of course, I guess no one told them about linuxconf... "

Todd Burgess writes "This is an article I wrote that I feel illustrates many of the flaws in the ideas being promoted by the Linux advocates. The article is called Linux For the Masses and Other Popular Myths and can be found here. "

Jamie writes "An article on ZdNet says that Intel and Netscape plan to Invest in Red Hat. The announcement will be made at ISPCon '98, and the money will most likely go towards creating an enterprise support group within RedHat. "

Steve writes "S.u.S.E. has launched it's Linux Office Suite 99 and plans to start shipping it on Oct. 15th, according to this CNet Article "Priced at $79.95, S.u.S.E's Linux Office Suite 99 includes a spreadsheet, word processor, presentation graphics, a database, fax program, and other traditional business applications, the company said." and "Linux Office Suite 99 is also able to exchange document data with Microsoft Office 97" Woo-hoo! "

GPFault writes " Urchin, a "bad-ass" website/webserver statistics application was just ported to Linux, whoo hoo! It also runs on IRIX, FreeBSD, BSDi, and Solaris... "

John Goerzen writes "CNN has a story about Linux that is very positive. They talk about the pending announcement of a "major database company" to distribute Caldera OpenLinux, and gives an interesting and funny list of things to do while waiting for 100% Java support in IE. This is probably the best mainstream story on Linux I've seen yet. "

Maro Shim writes "After Oracle and Informix, IBM will announce support for their DB2 database under Linux. Sybase and Caldera will announce Sybase for Linux "

homebrewer writes "Hey, I just got off the phone with a sales guy at Insignia Solutions. He said that there has been a lot of interest lately for SoftWindows95 for Solaris x86 and Linux. He said that the best way to sway the business decisions is to e-mail them to tell them you are interested. The issues seem to be "How many people are there requesting these products?" and "Do we price it at $169 like the Mac product or $549 like the SPARC?" I wonder how many Slashdotters would be interested in purchasing this product? e-mail for UNIX customer service is: unixcs@isinc.insignia.com " (This is a repeat of Hemos' Post, but it's probably worth repeating).

Stephane Arguin writes "The french site "Les Nouvelles neuves de Linux" say that Compaq France will support Linux on all their Intel and Alpha machine by the year 2000..." Mind you the page is in French, so for all I can tell they might be talking about anything. Update There is a quick translation attached now.

We have a double whammy this time folks, and before you turn your noses, we all know that Linux is Y2K compliant. However, since it is such a buzzword today, people will want to be assured that it is compliant. How do we go about this? Here are two questions that might help us with the big answer: George Girod maintains a Year 2000 web page at here and would like "to find good links to any Year 2000 compliance information for Linux, its utilities, and other Open Source stuff. I would like to create an Open-Source section on my page and will use the links toward that end." and chardros asks "...are there any other major Y2K issues with Linux and core applications for it? Apache, Sendmail/Qmail, Samba, RDBMS's such as PostgreSQL, MySQL?" Click below for more...

Red Hat is releasing the source for their Neomagic chipset XF86 server. This was part of their XBF project, which releases binaries of X-Servers that you would otherwise not be able to get an server for. (note to video manufacturers:release specs! this is dumb!) Anyway, Neomagic has given Red Hat permission to release the source. Very cool. I've attached the official press release after this.