The prolific Hetz Ben Hamo sent in the attached press release, and plea for writings to Insignia. As we have heard some bigger companies have begun a flirtation with the wonderful world of Linux. But Insignia as a company, and as others have shown, they need to know that there is a paying market there. So, if you are interested in SoftWindows for Linux, read below to find out how to help.

Colin Walsh writes "The Babylon Project aims to become a standard development platform for computer games (and possibly other software in the future) allowing the developer to make one executable that can run on any x86 based microprocessor, regardless of operating system (thus freeing the developer to concentrate on developing the GAME, and not having to worry about platform specific problems). In fact, given time, the Babylon Project could conceivably allow a game to be run on virtually any processor that supports the Linux kernel."

Our sister publication Freshmeat has another LSB editorial. This one emphasizes the need for tests of standard APIs (something with which I would agree), but also appears to advocate the same level of compatibility as in the DOS world... Although compatibility is nice, it is not some Holy Grail. Microsoft is killing ISA, DOS, and eventually Win16 because it's a mighty pain to keep things compatible. A better solution seems to me to be a strong spec, but also open source code to avoid the need for legacy API horrors are needed to keep binary compatibility.

Patrick Aland sent this story from MSNBC about Linux. The story itself is a well-written one, talking about some of things we already know: about how wonderful Linux is and how all it needs is one great application and nothing will stop it. I dunno, I think that the Gimp does a good job, but what do I know?

Iñaky Perez Gonzalez writes "I have released the latest snapshot of the Linux USB code (UUSBD); it is somehow useful, because now you can read from a keyboard the pressed keys ..."

Kernel development seems to go real fast these days. You can check out the updates in 2.1.119 at the Cutting Edge site. In the mean time 2.1.210 pre-patch 1 is already available at ftp.kernel.org.

Jim Kinney sent us a link to this SunWorld Article where you can read that SCO is in the process of making their Unix run unaltered Linux binaries out of the box.

Simon Janes writes "The Red Herring is running an article this Sept on Transmeta called Stalking Transmeta. They were making up their "Herring 100" and rumors started coming out again about Transmeta so they had to investigate. They learned, nothing. :)"

Hetz Ben Hamo got the exclusive scoop from SciTech, makers of the Display Doctor, with more information about what the soon-to-be-released beta will have, as well as future plans. This is good stuff-more games, more display-related materials (obviously). Click below to get the full message.

We have another development kernel: 2.1.118. Scrolling throught the 400K patchfile I saw video drivers and updates in various other places. You can grab it at ftp.kernel.org.

subhas sent us a link to a fairly standard anti-linux article. It covers all the usual arguments against the OS, but paints it as just the latest pawn in the database vendor wars. He doesn't question the technical stuff, just the lack of support. InfoWorld gave Linux best tech support, does that mean anything? What about Red Hat and Caldera? Maybe it isn't as much about support as marketing. Well that, and Linux can be a bit rough on newbies, but even that is changing rapidly.

Sean wrote in to send us this link to a response from Adobe about a Linux port of Photoshop. They say exactly what you would expect (not enough demand to justify a port) and something you wouldn't (they suggest looking at the Gimp).

Jeremy Arnold has written an essay on what he calls LUTE- the Linux Usability Testing and Evaluation project. It could help make programs more usable by organizing volunteers to test software and clean things up. Far to often great programmers aren't the best at creating the ideal user interface. Perhaps this project could put people who understand the human factors in touch with the guys who write the killer code. Hit the link below to read it and throw in your 2 bits.

matt writes "From a Sun Press release at Dr. Joseph Reger, Director of Technology Marketing at Siemens Nixdorf, explains, "it is true that HP will not have to do an endian transition, but it is also true that HP's Unix, HP-UX, is probably going to be the only operating system on IA-64 that runs in big endian mode. To my knowledge all flavors of UNIX on IA-64: Solaris, Linux, Santa Cruz Operation's UNIX, Digital's UNIX... and you name it--all UNIX will run on IA-64 in little endian mode and NT certainly will run in little endian mode. "

It's definately been a hot topic lately, no doubt about it. But Daniel Quinlan wrote in to send us a press release from the LSB stating that the Debian/Red Hat standards project (LCS) will be working with the LSB. Daniel has also been named as Bruce Perens replacement as the head of LSB. Besides having an @transmeta.com email address, Daniel has been the head of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. I'm really glad to see this come together. Anyway, I've attached the announcement- click below if you want to read it.

Eric S. Raymond wrote in to seek out some help for maintaining the ever popular Sunsite archives. You can click the link below to read what this will mean. Hopefully there a few kind souls out there that can help keep this important site running smoothly. Update Eric wrote back to say thanks, he's got over 100 responses, plus Red Hat has donated money to hire someone to help keep Sunsite alive.

D. Koppenheffer writes "LA Times has a story on Linux this morning." As well, Corey Saltiel sent us an article by Petreley about the in-fighting within the Linux community. Read more here.

Continuing the stream of good press on Linux, Techweb is carrying an article about the benefits of Linux. Thanks to talon for pointing this one out.

Freshmeat is carrying an editorial by Ian Nandhra of NC-Labs, one of the founders of the LSA (=XYZ). He chides slashdot readers but does not address their main concern: the notion that the LSA will own IP, and that the definition of LSA standards is not truely open to all (LSA can refuse to renew a membership), as is traditional in Linux. He does not seem to realise that many readers agree that a standard is necessary to maintain the diversity of Linux distributions -- but neither at the price of diversity nor at the price of abandonning open methods.

dan peterson writes "Our machine, happy.digitaldune.net, is a widely used machine on the internet. we help debian people with cvs and with the debian-doc project. the power went out today, and now our machine is telling us the partition table for /dev/hdc1 (/home! ack!) is bad. fsck tells us: "attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open /dev/hdc1". acan you or anyone help us out on this? this drive has 5.5G of our life on it! :)"