StArSkY writes "The Australian has an article today outlining how Telstra, Australia's largest Telco, is switching to Linux and open source on the desktop. Their pilot has been quite successful, and improved stability has been noticed. On trial are Star Office, Gnome, Mozilla and Wyse. Spending AUD$1.5 Billion a year on IT, means Telstra using Open Source is a massive boost to Open Source developers and support professionals. Not mentioned in the Article is that Telstra also just Dumped IBM Global Services, and will be running IT in-house again! Telstra will be hiring Linux-savvy people I think..."

Charles McColm writes "As one of the flock of Linux desktop users I have always taken it for granted that Linux is inherently more secure than Microsoft Windows. The truth is, I've never really paid much attention to Linux security, even on the Linux router I had running for a year. I always knew I should be concerned about security, but I never found a good starting point until I decided to review O'Reilly's Linux Security Cookbook (LSC)." Read on below for Charles' review.

Naturally, when answering your questions, he boosted his company. (Wouldn't you?) But I assure you, he wrote these answers himself instead of having them laundered by a PR team. Whether or not you agree with Michael and the way he runs Lindows (and used to run MP3.com) you've got to give him credit for speaking more openly than most other modern American CEOs.

chriseh writes "For those of us who prefer Linux to the candydrop OS, good news! YellowDog Linux 3.0 has been released. For those who don't want to wait, you can get an enhanced membership at YDL.net and download ISOs directly. As per other releases, ISOs will be available to everyone/mirrors two weeks after the CDs have been on sale.Finally, I can run Linux on my 12" Powerbook." extrarice amplifies: "New features include: Redesigned installer, a unified KDE 3.1/GNOME 2.2 desktop (both WMs share the same icons and menus), Kernel 2.4.20, and the usual package refinements/updates. More release info can be found here. Note: ISOs are not available yet, and CDs are scheduled to ship in mid-April. I have been running YDL 2.x for about a year now, and it's a fast, stable distro."

hansroy writes "Massachusetts Department of Revenue is still using Windows 95 on the desktop. Faced with upgrade costs of $500-600 per user, they're considering Linux at about one-third the cost. This comes at a very good time, as the new governor of MA is making significant budget cuts this year."

Most of the questions we got for LinuxWorld exhibitors were pretty general, with no specific exhibitor attached to them. I did my best to get appropriate people to answer them. Here are the results. (And for those who wonder... Kevin Mitnick emailed - he's been traveling and busy, but hopes to get his answers to us shortly.)

Anonymous Coward writes "The Register has a story about traveling to a magical country where seeing Linux laptops displayed in stores is perfectly normal. The author then goes on to predict that this year will see much more desktop action coming not from Red Hat or Euro-Distros, but from China and India. Makes sense to me."

slashdotess writes "Information Week reports: "About a year ago, Patrick McCartney, a Johnson Center project manager, created a Linux desktop environment that could also run government-mandated Microsoft apps. This let his team of 30 engineers continue to program in a Unixlike environment and create Word documents and Outlook E-mail all on the same PC. This mixed-use scenario is slowly taking hold, encouraged by a growing number of applications for running Linux on PC desktops." Score another one for Linux on the Desktop."

chrysrobyn asks: "Every write-up I see about journalling file systems under Linux discusses efficiency (embedded) or speed (desktop/server). Have any studies been done on reliability? I've used Linux since Slackware 96 (and kernel 2.0.0), and put it on 9 or 10 machines over the years (Slackware on x86 and Debian on PPC), but I've never strayed from ext2. Always, when the uptime gets high, 20-50 days, the filesystems start to get minor fsck errors. Not that I repair the system and expect it to stay live, I just use the fsck -n to help me decide when a repair is in order. Since the same thing has happened on a variety of hardware (386-PII and every interface in between and 601 and 750 processors with Apple hardware), I'm leaning on blaming the ext2 filesystem for these, the slightest of problems. I typically keep my servers up for as long as possible because 95% of my hardware problems have happened during resets and cold power-ups. It's time for my every-other-year rebuild of my personal server, with another on its way, so I was hoping to incite some anecdotal Slashdot conversation on the journalling file systems available for Linux. Personally, I'm most interested in hearing about the file systems supported under Debian stable for ease of administration for this machine which is a 5 hour drive away from home. I've been around the block a few times, so I'm not fearful of patching the kernel with better patches, but I'm respectful of the work the Debian assurance teams have done."

Sivar writes "Red Hat plans to enter the desktop business OS market, The Register reports. Red Hat says that the move is in response to growing frustration with Microsoft which has peaked since the introduction of Microsoft's new licensing scheme. The article states that the desktop offering is due next year and, surprisingly "...the company is considering subscription-based pricing.""

Gentu writes "OSNews features an interview with Shawn Gordon, president of TheKompany. Shawn talks about version 1.0 of Aethera and Kapital coming out in September, porting a lot of their Qt apps to MacOSX, the future of Linux on the desktop, how the embedded Linux market was surprisingly successful financially for them, as well as selling well their desktop apps. It is really encouraging to read that a desktop-oriented company actually made real money from Linux this year!"

Figured I'd take a moment now that I've caught up on most of my post-LWCE email buildup to mention a few things that caught my eye at the Javitz Center this year. Hit the link below to get bits on PS/2 Linux, the Sharp Zaurus, and whatever else I remember before I click 'save.'

Mr.Intel writes: "CNN released a story reviewing LinuxWorld and Linux's progress since last year. They mention new hardware and market niches coming to light in 2001. Mike Balma, a Linux strategist at HP, said 'The move to an increased array of outsourcing, migration and porting services that have been traditionally available to Unix customers is part of the continued rollout of the operating system within HP's product line. Previously, HP had informally offered such integral service and support only to its best Linux customers. But as the operating system gains momentum, more customers are seeking more services.' I hope this means as installed customer base increases, companies like RedHat will start making real money." Archie Steel writes "Interesting news for the Linux Desktop: Open For Business have an article on the partnership by HP and MandrakeSoft announced at the current Linux World Expo." Update: 01/30 16:56 GMT by H : Just a quick note: Rob is gonna be in the Golden Penguin Bowl, while I'm going to be doing a presentation with the Boston Consulting Group about the demographics of open source developers - if you are interested, it's tomorrow (Thursday) from 4:00 - 5:15.

Joshua Drake has written an article for LinuxWorld.com called The Kernel of Pain. He seems to think 2.4 is fine for desktop systems but is only now, after a year of release, approaching stability for high-end use. Slashdot has had its own issues with 2.4, so I know where he's coming from. What have your experiences been? Is it still too soon for 2.4?

Now that Linux kernel 2.5 is under development by Linus and others, the all-important job of maintaining and updating the "old" kernel series (the one that people rely on in day-to-day use) has fallen to 2.4 maintainer Marcelo. You asked Marcelo about everything from the influence of politics (age and otherwise) to his working enviroment and approach to maintainership; his answers are below.

Last week, you asked Shawn Gordon questions about his venture TheKompany, an outfit which has been (fairly) quietly working on a small flotilla of software for GNU/Linux systems, and some cross-platform applications as well. His responses are below; you might be surprised at a few of them. (And some lucky Debian hacker might even pick up a job.)

Bob Young prefaces his answers to your questions by saying, "You may notice I've ducked some of the answers below - there is a reason for this. My role at Red Hat these days is as Chairman of the board. Matthew Szulik is Red Hat's CEO and will be a better person to answer some of the specific issues that these questions raise....

vukicevic writes "Hewlett-Packard and Ximian have partnered to make Ximian GNOME the default desktop on all HP-UX workstations later this year. HP will also be offering Ximian GNOME on its Linux workstations. The press release has more information."

Now chromatic has stepped through another couple of books, in addition to the nine in the previous parts of this series on books for the Linux newbie-to-semi-newbie. Actually, the selections this time go on the assumption that you've taken a few weeks (or some very intense days) to absorb the information you need to accomplish some basic tasks, and they take on the challenge of going beyond the basics. Note: here are links to part one, part two, and part three of this series.

cmickelson asks: "I've been running SuSE Linux 6.x on my laptop for over a year now and everytime I would compile something I would have to run make several times because of errors during compiling. Now my laptop is very unstable, Windows is unusable because of constant crashes, but Linux generally runs well except for Netscape core dumps, and the compiling problems. Anyway I just assumed the errors were due the system's instablility. However, I recently assembled a new desktop computer and installed SuSE 6.4 on that and the same thing happened when I tried to compile Samba. I had to run make five times before the whole source tree was completed. Is this typical? I find it hard to believe that gcc/gpp could be that unstable, but why else would this happen with two different systems? Is this due to the AMD K6-2 processors (which both laptops have), or is SuSE the problem?"