Everyone's favorite operating system received more positive press over at The Irish-Times. Christopher Blizzard was the first of several to send in the story. Chris says there are a few inaccuracies and no real revelations, but it's always swell to see the positive press.

Wow. An MSNC article on Linux. Everyone should go and read that, just for the sheer juxtaposition of interests. Thanks to Christopher Carlson for this one.

James S. Blachly wrote in to talk about something that has been brought to my attention before, but you all should read this. He writes "The latest buzz on the linux-kernel mailing list is the copying of the Linux Logo, the Penguin. Apple is using the penguin as the new logo for Quicktime. An image can be seen either when installing the new quicktime 3.0 drivers or at www.apple.com/quicktime/. Apple is shamefully capitalizing on other peoples creativity. The linux penguin logo is originally by Larry Ewing. His terms of usage may be found here."

The similarities are extremely strong, but let's be honest, most cartoon stylized penguins look the same. "The Wrong Trousers" features a Tux-Like Penguin, and I seem to remember some old Warner Bros cartoons with somewhat similar birds as well. And it wouldn't surprise me if whoever created the Quicktime logo just didnt know. Only in the last 6 mos has Linux really become enough of a mainstream fixture that we would expect major companies to worry about conflicting mascots.

Stampede has joined the ranks of available Linux Distributions. Stampede aims to be easy for the new users as well as powerful for the power user. Ships with KDE as well. Thanks to Bob Grabowsky for sending the info.

You know the drill guys:download kernel, compile kernel, run lilo to install it, reboot, redial, download next kernel...

RedHat has announced that future versions of their very popular Linux Distribution will include Netscape's Navigator web browser. It's a lot to think about, what with the DOJ/MS issues with browser bundling, and the recent netscape bombshell. One thing is for certain though, having Netscape preinstalled for RedHat users is very nice for the newbies that Linux is winning over every day courtesy of all the positive press it's been getting.

Yet another ground breaking announcement this week. After the exciting news from the Govt about our favorite court case and the publicity bonanza for netscape doing "right thing" by handing out the source Navigator, Linus blows them all away with the latest kernel patch. Analysts are stunned. "Grab it" they say. And we listen.

I know everyone has been talking about the Linux Expo coming up in may, but Greg Hankins asked me to plug the Atlanta Linux Showcase as well. Bruce mentioned it in passing in his debian-announce message. The showcase runs from Oct 23 to 24 in Atlanta. Sounds cool...

debian-announce just sent out a message saying that Bruce Perens will be speaking at the LinuxExpo. In addition to LinuxExpo, Debian hopefully will be at The Atlanta Linux Showcase, International Linux Kongress, and the SANE conference.

As a side note, the message also mentioned that the Berlin is joining up with Software in the Public Interest (Debian's Corporation).

Linus has released kernel 2.1.80. But this isn't just any ordinary kernel- for the first time in a Linux kernel, the ARM architecture is supported. Newton Linux might not be too far off if a dedicated programmer has some motivation.

I sure hope you know where to get it by now.

Prasanth Kumar sent us this MicroTimes article which lists the top 100 people of 97 (I guess anyway) and lo and behold, there is Linus, with yet another mysterious reference to whatever-the-heck-transmeta reference. Linus, if you read this, send me email and tell me what you do! *big smile*

The latest in a virtual tidal wave of amazing pro linux mainstream news articles can be found here. It's just a really short little "Redhat is cool" thing, but they did list it first- above Apple, Be and OS/2. It amazes me that in the last year Linux has gone from something that nobody understands, to something that anyone who keeps up with technology has to know about.

Thank Adrian Likins for letting us know that The LinuxExpo Website has been updated. They now list costs, dates, events and lot's of other information. The dates don't overlap any of my classes, so there is a very good chance that I'll be there. Hope to see ya.

meese wrote in to tell me that RHAD is holding a Screen Saver contest. Winners will be decided by votes at the Linux Expo, and the prizes will be various video cards (Winner gets a 3dfx). I wish I had time to enter this one.

Hitchhiker wrote in to say that a couple of nasty new holes have surfaced recently in the kernel. Apparently both the filesystem code and memory allocation code has serious holes. Don't worry- 2.0.34 will be out soon with fixes for both. Read this one for some better info.

Tucols has opened its doors. The Ultimate Collection of Linux Software (Com'on, we could have had a better name guys! Wasn't tucows enough?) thanks to Kenneth Sarmaat for letting us know.

Well the only reason I ever watch the super bowl is to see the fantastic commercials, and this year those ads have a bonus. The RedHat Linux based Alpha Render Farm that Digital Domain built up for rendering scenes in Titanic will apparently be use to render 10 commercials for Super Sunday. Hope they post mpegs or something so I can see them. Follow the link below to read the official RedHat press release.

Thanks to the several of you who wrote in to let me know that Linus has released the 2.1.79 kernel- an over 700k patch. Wowsers. Grab it from the usual spots.

Evelyn Mitchell sent us this story where you can read about slowdowns in Client OS sales. According to the article, Microsoft still controls 87% of the operating systems sold last year. The gem though is the comments about IS managers evaluating free OS's like Linux. Could 98 really be the year Linux breaks into the main stream corporate world in a big way?

This story was sent to me by 11 people, but vertigo was the first. It has a lot more of the same information about the Bonk/Boink attack, but more importantly is the the comments at the end from Jiva DeVoe, the primary source for the article. His solution to the security hole is to run Linux. It then mentions how much better Free Software is for security. It gave me warm fuzzies.