A flood of people have written in to say one thing: it's out, and you should get it

I was tickled to see the Tool of Objective Truth at the UK branch of ZDNet showing... Linux crashing less than NT. This nonsense is accompanied by a positive Redhat 5.1 review

Ryan Losh writes "After becoming addicted to playing the old coin-op video games with xmame, I have come to the conclusion that my old Sound Blaster is in need of replacement. Which soundcard does the /. community recommend?"

Josh Goins writes "The latest issue of Sunworld Online can be found at here. The cool thing about it is that it seems to mention Linux more times than Sun. :-) "

Christopher Craig writes "2.1.113 is out and includes the SMP fixes. " Everyone knows the drill:Go flood FTP sites and consume bandwidth. And nobody download patches, download the whole file. And forget about bz, go with the tgz, let's make sure every mirror is bogged down again *laugh*. I love new kernel releases. I just wish I had something faster than the mutant 21.6 modem connection...

Martin Vermeer writes " A discussion Phil Hughes (of Linux Journal) had with an Informix spokesman on the difficulty of porting Informix SE [from Solaris] to Linux. The answer to his question, how much work was involved, is given in the subject line :-) So much for the "problem" of multiple incompatible UNIX versions vs. "one binary runs everywhere" for Windows, of which M$ tends to make such a big number... "

Something many people do not know is that European law prohibits tying products together. This makes it illegal for a vendor to refuse to sell you a PC without a Microsoft OS... This law exists to prevent anyone from leveraging their monopoly to enter a new market. (That's why a lot of US companies should seriously consider suing in Europe. They're more likely to win there). Perhaps in a related move, Dell is considering making Linux an officially supported OS in Europe. They appear happy with Linux's community support.

Mike Stein writes "This is an interesting story from ISD Magazine. Since most users of Linux are in technical fields this dicussion and its implications are very important. Most of the story centers around the move in engineering to NT Workstations from Unix (Sun, HP) Workstations."

Eric Princen was the first to break the news that the 2.1.112 kernel is out. Everyone knows the drill:Flood all the ftp sites and make them unusable for a little while. It's a 250k patch, and changes quite a few things. Check it out at the usual places.

Slashdot reader Ignasi G. writes "For the past months I have been very happy reading almost everyday how Linux has been gaining popularity in the computer world. Linux is today an OS with a well deserved recognition, but still lacks support for other tasks which are very popular nowadays, such as multimedia. And I think this is something we must keep in mind, because good multimedia capablilities is something many users want to have in their computers. I sent e-mail to Matrox asking them about Linux support for their multimedia products. You can find my letter and their respone here. " Anyone know of a different but good frame grabber card he may use? Alan?

Andrew Mobbs sent us a link to an interesting note posted on usenet by someone from Sandia labs. The post is about a Beowulf Cluster being built out there, and the specs will make you giggle like a school girl. 400 nodes. All Alpha. It's all good. Methinks a linux system might score a bit higher in next years super computer list...

Jeffrey Davis writes "LinuxPPC has a big fresh new release, R4. link ". Indeed they do. The new release features Netscape Communicator, The GIMP, and a very "Kontroversial" Desktop Enviornment. Interestingly enough, the LinuxPPC folk are incorporated, and some of their stuff seems to imply they're for-profit. Can anyone clarify? It's good to see some commercial development work being done (and some good work, at that)!

Elliot Lee wrote in to tell us that Linus is the cover story in the next issue of Forbes. It proclaims "Peace, Love and Sofware". I find it strangely appealing that the Free Software Movement is so often thought of in hippy terms. Peace man. Anyway, uber cool for Linus and big PR for open source. Always enjoyable to see that sorta stuff.

Bill McCarthy wrote in to send us Mark Tebbe's latest piece on linux and corporations. It's a fair piece. Nothing particularly new or insightful to anyone regularly reading here, but it's a good general summary to remind people of what needs to happen if we want Linux to succeed in the corporate world.

Everyone's favorite PGCC distribution recently took a big leap: Stampede is now at 0.86. The major changes are not well documented, but are said to include a much easier install, and administrative tool updates. Stampede packages may be browsed here, and non-Intel ports should be on their way soon.

Linus has done it again: kernel 2.1.111 is now available. It is a modest 150k patch, and only 177 files were updated. Major updates include fbcon updates, some smaller /proc updates, and some sound updates.

Back at Infoworld Nicholas Petreley keeps writing about Linux. In this week's forum article he compares the dominant operating system to Tolkien's One Ring: the one who has it will inevitably be corrupt. Linux is like Tom Bombadil, the only character immune to the seduction of the evil Ring. A short article with an insightful comparison that might explain recent moves by Netscape, Oracle, SUN and many others. Go check it out.

A new Linux distribution has been released. This one is called Linux-Mandrake and has nothing to do with Mandrake of Enlightenment fame. Its goal is to provide an easy to use environment for beginners, and provides out-of-the-box support for French users (accents, etc). It's based on Redhat 5.1 (with all bug fixes up to 17th July) and a fully functional KDE. Users can mount their CD's without messing with /etc/fstab. It seems a good idea as an introduction as long as it does not lead to dumber users.

Jon Squire writes "I figured I'd ask the well informed slashdot readers if anybody has heard of or is developing Voice recognition software for linux? I'm also interested in developing TV Tuner Support for the ATI All in Wonder if no-one else is doing it. "

The Debian Project has finally released version 2.0 of their Linux distribution. After many months of work and testing, Debian 2.0 was finally released at 00:00:00 UTC. Consisting of over 1800 glibc-compiled packages, very few mirrors have it, but you are encouraged to use them as ftp.debian.org will be swamped for a long time. Those of you who are truly in the know will order a CD from netgod. Ding dong, libc5 is dead!