protonman writes "A hefty flame war has broken loose on the debian-devel mailinglist about (amongst other things) the legality of mplayer. The interesting part in this conflict is that unlike in previous alledged GPL violations, the culprit is not the unwillingness to provide the source, but the prohibition of the distribution of binaries, thereby violating section 6 of the GPL: 'You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.' Read also the blurb on the MPlayer homepage."

bobz writes "The Linux Game Tome has announced the winners of the Happypenguin Awards. Games, toys and libraries in 25 different categories were nominated and voted upon by the Linux gaming community. Take a look at the best Linux gaming has to offer." Alas, no SimCity 4, and no Sims Online.

Greg Herlein writes "There is finally a way to do direct PC to Phone calling from linux: GnomeMeeting now supports decent quality, low-cost VoIP calls to any real phone in the world. It's about time." The calls are through a company called MicroTelco; read this FAQ page to learn more about it. (And don't forget TheKompany's approach to IP-telephony-with-Linux, using a Sharp Zaurus plus Net2Phone.)

developerWorks writes "Ever wish you had a place to let your Linux applications play -- where they wouldn't hurt anything else? Do your killer apps spend too much time killing each other? Originally conceived as a kernel developer's tool, UML lets you set up multiple virtual machines that are isolated from each other and from the hardware. Now, you can test applications all the way to failure without breaking the host system -- or even requiring a reboot. Veteran administrator Carla Schroder shows you how in this tutorial."

groovemaneuver asks: "I've managed to get a working OpenLDAP directory running on my network. Linux, Windows, and Apple boxes are all happily authenticating. I have imported the 'apple.schema' file to the LDAP server from one of my Macs, but I cannot seem to find any info on the proper syntax for the various apple schema attributes. Anyone have any idea where one could find this? This is the one obstacle keeping my network from having a single source of authentication, and I'm sure this info would be useful to more than just myself. Thanks!"

BrunoC writes "Looks like Red Hat is getting a little Microsoftish and is quietly introducing its brand new 12-month-only Errata. Quoting The Reg: 'Red Hat's current death list EOLs RH 7.1-8.0 at the end of this year, while 6.2 and 7.0 get theirs as of the end of March.' You can read the whole article here." I don't see how this is "Microsoftish" -- the code Red Hat creates or includes is still GPL, and you can pay anyone willing to fix it. They're not required to support it forever :)

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.)

Joe Barr writes "The story of how BitKeeper has come to be Linus Torvalds' (and many other kernel hackers) tool of choice in maintaining the Linux development tree is worthy of a book. Here's the Cliff Note's version of McVoy's contribution to Linux kernel development, BitKeeper, and countless hours of flaming on the role of open source and proprietary software."

Robin Miller has posted his third Linuxworld story. Theevilbalrog sent in a link to some LWCE photos. Some other Linuxworld-related stories include this one about open source in government and this one covering some of the many Linux business stories at the expo.

h0tblack writes "The latest ADC Newsletter has details of a few sessions Apple are hosting at LinuxExpo in Paris in a couple of weeks. The sessions are: Mac OS X for the Linux Community, Mac OS X in Heterogeneous Environments and Mac OS X and Developer Tools. Shame that the first session clashes with the keynote from RMS ..." Yes. Shame.

keihin writes "From IBM: IBM's Global Security Analysis Lab (GSAL) has done extensive analysis of the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA) chip available on some IBM systems. We have the chip running under Linux, and have studied it extensively. In order to clarify a lot of misunderstanding about the chip, we are making available some helpful white papers and open source device drivers for Linux, so that interested people can test and use the chip in an open environment."

greechneb writes "Roblimo is reporting again on LWCE's second day. Check out his reports on break dancers, hp, suse, gentoo, linux on laptops, and most important, free booze." See yesterday's story if you missed it. Some other LWCE notes: United Linux is sucking in more partners, and even Microsoft won one of the show awards. And yes, Robin is going around asking the interview questions. :)

For everyone who can't make it to New York, roblimo has posted impressions of LWCE's first day, in which he takes note of Start buttons, prods Dell about laptops factory loaded with Linux, and watches the Golden Penguin Bowl. I suppose he was also asking vendors some of your questions.

Most Slashdot readers aren't coming to the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in New York this week. If you're not coming, but you have a question you'd like to ask one of the exhibitors, please post it here. I promise to ask 10 of the highest-moderated exhibitor questions on your behalf, and I'll do my best to ask more than 10, time permitting. If you have a question for anyone who is holding a conference session or tutorial Thursday or Friday, please feel free to post it, too. I will try to ask speakers at least a few questions, but that's chancier than getting hold of exhibitors (who are in booths where they're easy to find), so no promises. One question per post, please. Hopefully, I'll have time to type up the answers over the weekend and post them Monday or Tuesday.

Anonymous Coward writes "The Financial Times offers a very interesting read about Linux, its possibilities for business, and its threat to Microsoft. Also a second article about "Europe's open-source option"."

thekernel32 asks: "Recently the topic of getting people trained in the Linux/UNIX environment has troubled me. Where are people going for this stuff? I recall taking an Microsoft Networking Essentials class that I dropped out of. The reason why I dropped the Microsoft class was because we were being taught about the existence of Routers, File Servers and other networking topics, but we never saw or [worked with] any of them. I really feel that it would have been more useful to get hands on experience with daemons and real hardware, rather than just being told that they exist. What decent training programs out there have a hands on approach?"

MadFarmAnimalz writes "BusinessWeek has coverage of Linuxworld up, and it makes interesting reading in places. Amongst things touched upon are the open-source business model, how vendors will be tempted into locking in customers into their offerings, and other things." I'll be out there tomorrow for the Golden Penguin Bowl, as well as judging exhibitors. Busy day.

watzinaneihm writes "Eweek has an Article about how Linux is getting accepted in Enterprises.IBM is releasing Tivoli for Linux. CA released Unicenter for Linux a few months ago.I got rumours about rumours that HP might do something similar with Openview. " One for those of you who dress nicer than me.

HappySlacker writes "Looks like the forums from slackware.com that Patrick Volkerding (Slackware's daddy) had to take down because of massive trolling are fully active again after 2 years of hibernation as read-only at userlocal.com." Update: 01/21 19:23 GMT by T : Jeremy from LinuxQuestions.org points out the forums on that site, which is recommended on Slackware's links page.

fungai writes "The Business Day reports that the South African government has decided to adopt open source software and develop support programs with local research institutes and universities. The CIO of the State IT Agency says: 'The logic for open-source is so compelling that after a year of debates we decided to stop talking and declare government an open-source zone.'"