jhpb wrote in to send us a link to the Open Group's jdk. Why do we care? Well, because this version just happens to use Linux Threads. Very cool.

Rob Clark was the first to write us about a Linux article currently running in The Economist. Much of this is familar info to us, but the graph of user satisfication is interesting, and more important to the overall goal of World Domination (tm) this will be running in the print edition as well. Stefane Fermigier wrote as well, mentioning that this article says that Oracle will be ported to Linux. Anyone know anything more?

Matthew Tippett let us in on a very interesting item to disect: Computer Associates is porting Ingres II, their RDBMS program, to Linux. Wow. CA is one of the bigger players in the enterprise market, and perhaps even more interesting, are very close to Microsoft. I hope some IS managers take note! Check out the announcement at DejaNews, or find it on comp.os.linux.announce.

The Debian Project has officially declared Hamm as entering the second beta phase. With around 44 bugs to stomp out, it hopefully won't be too long before the final product is released. Those of you on the true "bleeding edge" can order CDs from Johnie Ingram, or can get info on downloading the images at the Debian CD image site.

Bill McCarthy sent us this InfoWorld story where you can read about Red Hat employee Ryan Tilden going above and beyond the call of duty to support Linux. It's amazingly positive publicity, and its on InfoWorld. Very cool.

Chris Farris writes "Online Registration for the 1998 Atlanta Linux Showcase is opened. Showprices are $60/day regular and $35/day student during pre-Registration. Prices go up at the door so register now. ALS '98 will be held right after Networld+Interop on Friday October 23rd and Sat Oct 24th. Speaker and vendor lists can also be found on the web page. This year will be even bigger than last year. "

Reid Rivenburgh writes "InfoWorld has an article explaining how the major database companies don't think linux is big enough to warrant ports of their database software."

Simon_Jester sent us a link to the latest Spencer Katt Column where you can read rumours that Caldera and Red Hat could be merging. Now that would be a significant event.

sasha e. writes "Wired.com has a nice story on Avalon, making interesting points about Beowulf as the future of supercomputing. Nice bit of pro-Linux in there as well.. "

Jason Y. Sproul writes "Eric Kidd has started a mailing list for people interested in hacking robots based on Linux. Send mail to majordomo@randomhacks.com with the body "subscribe linux-robotics". "

Greg Hayes wrote in to say "A call went out for support of a port of the popular demo loader iXalance for linux." You can go to the TBL homepage if you think you might be interesting in such a project. Some of the demos are pretty cool, a port certainly would be quite excellent for showing off, say, GGI or something *grin*.

Rodger Donaldson sent us a story that's on Linux Weekly News right now. Apparently we've got vendors now selling PPC Linux boxes. Now you don't need to handle that messy Apple overhead for your butt kicking super machine. Check it out over Microux.com for the details.

Johan was the first to warn us that 2.1.108 has hit the wire. Those Linux users who live on the bleeding edge are probably already downloading it though...

P.J. Hinton wrote in to tell us that John Dodge has collapsed under the tidal wave of email from Linux Users in response to his column from few weeks ago. He's decided to throw Linux on an older box and try it out so he can speak more fairly in future columns. I for one am glad to hear it.

Andy Bakun writes " This link Contains photos from the "linux revolt" held outside Fry's and CompUSA. I wish I coulda been there. Gotta love the pic of the balloon penguin... made by MS publicity folk. " I saw a photo of somebody wearing one of my T-shirts too. I gotta move to california.

Johan Van Gompel writes ""Have you ever heard of Linux?" he asked, producing a gold cigarette case and pulling out a sardine. "Of course. It's a free version of Unix." "Someone's preventing it from gaining mass acceptance. I want you to find out who it is. We believe his initials are B. G."" Excerpt from The Maltese Penguin.

Mark Pearlstein writes "I just received a message from the GNHLUG mail list that papers and presentations from the 98 Linux Expo have been posted to extremelinux.org."

Jerkweed wrote in to tell us that things seem to be cool once again on the Beowulf thing. The Official site is back, and they've got the extreme linux cd available as well. Very Cool. Glad to see things are back where they should be.

Eric Harlow writes "Looks like I'll be writing a book for the next few months on gnu development using Linux. I've convinced a publisher that it's necessary and that there's a market for it - and they're going to take a chance on it. I want to gear the book towards the growing number of ex-windows programmers as well as up and coming list of Linux application developers. The book is going to focus on database and gui development with Postgresql and GTK+. I was wondering if there were other topics that people wanted covering or thought it would be a good idea to cover. I also was going to talk about PHP, CGI, CORBA, and maybe threading - but I don't want to write a low-level book. I think that Linux needs application developers and I want to write this as a starting point to help people write some serious applications for Linux, primarily GUI and internet. Suggestions on topics appreciated since I have to give the publisher a finalized table of contents soon when I hand in my first chapter. -Eric "

Michael Stutz wrote in to plug his Linux Bumper Stickers. Normally I wouldn't post it, but, well, they're Linux95 stickers, the demand is fading, so he's offering them 25 for $10 to interested Slashdot readers, so what the heck. Now no more product plugs for a few days people *grin*.