serps writes "Australian IT reports that Linus Torvalds will be attending Linux.conf.au later this week. Also attending are 'an impressive list of international open source legends, such as kernel guru Alan Cox, PHP developer Rasmus Lerdorf, and Slashdot's Jeff "Hemos" Bates, Australians Paul "Rusty" Russell and SAMBA pioneer Andrew Tridgell will also be speaking.' And yes, tickets are already sold out."

scrm writes "The next version of Windows should be built on top of Linux, according to this article by Robert Cringely of PBS." If Microsoft wanted to, they could be the world's largest vendor of Free software .. couldn't they?

developerWorks writes "The first step in improving Linux performance is quantifying it, but how exactly do you quantify performance for Linux or for comparable systems? In this article, members of the IBM Linux Technology Center share their expertise as they describe how they ran several benchmark tests on the Linux 2.4 and 2.5 kernels late last year. The benchmarks provide coverage for a diverse set of workloads, including Web serving, database, and file serving. In addition, we show the various components of the kernel (disk I/O subsystem, for example) that are stressed by each benchmark."

dogmeant asks: "I have yet to see MOM (message oriented middleware) offerings on Linux much less open source projects that address the same. And while we're at it, what about tools that address SOA/BPM (Service oriented architecture/business process modeling) type architectures on Linux? Is the Open Source community ready to take on challenges like this?" If anyone else out there has this particular itch, maybe this will be another niche in which Open Source software can catch some Enterprise mindshare.

An anonymous reader writes "It would seem that UnitedLinux is pushing into the telecomms market according to this article at ITWorld. Is this the first market they are trying to meander into? I perticularly like this quote: 'Telecommunications grade servers must meet specific standards regarding electromagnetic interference, electrostatic discharge, corrosion, grounding and seismic durability.' Hmmmm."

An un-named reader asks: "For various reasons, I've been out of the workforce and IT industry since 2000, before which I was employed as an NT-based sysadmin at a large Canadian company. After moving to NYC I found the market flat and got into other work for a while. Now I find myself wanting to get back into IT professionally, but my resume is getting no nibbles at all (over 800 resumes submitted in the last year or so). As a result, I decided to take some training courses to get me back up to speed not just in the W-Intel world, but give me some usable knowledge of Solaris, a CCNA and Checkpoint. Here's where things bogged down. Are there any decent schools out there who have good facilities, good instructors and do more than 'teach-to-the-exams?"

aszoth asks: "I working on a project that is going to require approximately 4 hours of video recording per day for about two months. We are currently using DVM tapes, however the extraction and compression time has left us with a large library of tapes un-converted. We are considering other methods, in particular real time MPEG 2 or MPEG 4 Compression. We also would like to be able to slow down our frame rate from the 29.7 fps to something along the lines of 5-15 fps. I am wondering if any one has any suggestions on possible ways to do such compression (or get similar results) with a Linux box. Thank you for any help you can give."

An anonymous reader writes "It's official: MandrakeSoft has filed a 'declaration de cessation des paiements' - the French equivalent of a U.S. Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. From a statement issued by the company: 'This reorganization of liabilities enables MandrakeSoft to continue its current operations, which are showing increases in revenue and significant decreases in expenses. MandrakeSoft's strategic partners are supporting the company in this process and the MandrakeSoft team is focused on continuing to deliver high quality services and products to its customers.' Best wishes to MandrakeSoft as they work through this process."

popoutman writes "Mel Gorman has announced the availability of a guide to the 2.4 kernel VM including a walkthrough of the VM code. Anyone interested in obtaining a solid understanding of the Linux 2.4 VM will certainly want to take a look at this documentation. Mel says that the effort is at least several weeks from being finished, but that he's releasing it now with the hopes of getting feedback to be sure he's on the right track. He also notes that the 2.5 VM is still too much of a moving target for him to document it just yet." See also a Kerneltrap story.

developerWorks writes "The Intel Xeon processor introduces a new technology called Hyper-Threading (HT) that makes a single processor behave like two logical processors. The technology allows the processor to execute multiple threads simultaneously, which can yield significant performance improvement. But, exactly how much improvement can you expect to see? This article gives the results the investigation into the effects of Hyper-Threading (HT) on the Linux SMP kernel. It compares the performance of a Linux SMP kernel that was aware of Hyper-Threading to one that was not." Ah, the joys of high performance.

Tangential writes "New story on LinuxBusiness week says SCO is about to mount an effort to get all Linux sites to pay a per cpu license for so-called patent violations."SCO has been proposing to charge users $96 per CPU for a so-called one-time System 5 for Linux software license to protect their systems from SCO-enforced patent issues if they ante up as soon as demand is made." They've retained David Boies (DOJ prosecutor of Microsoft) to handle the legal issues." Note: I've been unable to substantiate this - which are fairly incendiary claims. Further updates as more is heard.

An anonymous reader notes that OFB has a short blurb about a new Linux distribution, Ark Linux, based on Red Hat and chasing the ever-elusive goal of being "easy to use for the masses".

replicant_deckard writes "This opinion piece I wrote to Open explains how dual licensing (simultaneous use of both GPL and proprietary license) works. Dual licensing gives you basically both the support of the community and a profitable Microsoft-like business model. Seems that this model used by MySQL and TrollTech is getting more popular. Now my question is where are the limits?"

DCowern writes "Mandrake today announced version 9.1 of their distribution. While there are some interesting choices for new packages (like kernel 2.4.21pre2 and XFree86 4.3 beta) the most groundbreaking thing about this release is the way in which they decide which packages are "high priority" for development and inclusion in the standard install. Any registered user at MandrakeClub can vote. Their opinion is that no one knows where development effort needs to be spent better than the end-user." Update: 01/10 19:38 GMT by T : That's "distribution."

McDoobie asks: "Is there a market for low cost shareware in the Linux/BSD and Unix market in general? Would it be worthwhile to have a small home based business next to ones regular day job producing well made, but small, shareware for an environment that is dominated either by large corporations or Open Source developers? If so, what should a potential developer/publisher focus on to make their products/price range attractive to customers? What type of customers are most likely to look into such software? SOHO? Small Enterprise? Home users? In a nutshell, where should one begin when investigating the potential of the Un*x (and perhaps Apple) environment for the small time developer who's interested in earning a few dollars on the side?"

An anonymous reader writes "Nicholas McGuire examines the requirements of embedded systems and suggests some key issues that need to be addressed in order to improve Linux for use in embedded applications, in this technical article at LinuxDevices.com,"

Kenny Mann asks: "I currently run a Linux distribution called Lunar Linux and it is a source based distribution branched from the original Sorcerer GNU Linux. I've done a bit of research on compiler optimizations and such and was wondering what kind of performance is there really to be had for setting these options? I know that the more options the greater chance of unexpected failures, so my next question is what about optimizing your kernel?" Optimization is tricky, and I think the answer to this question is more complex than "yes, optimize" or "no, don't optimize". Rather there might be classes of applications that are safe to optimize and classes of applications that are not. How do those performance hounds out there feel about optimizing the kernel, however?

An anonymous reader writes "This article at LinuxDevices.com provides an overview of the recently approved Embedded Linux Consortium Platform Specification (ELCPS). The new standard is likely to accelerate the adoption of embedded Linux as a platform within smart devices and systems of many shapes and sizes."

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet is running a story on what a lot of us already know: Linux IS cheaper than Windows. This not because it is free. It is because Linux admins, although slightly more expensive, can handle a significantly larger number of systems than their Windows counterparts."

An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices.com has published the proceedings from the Fourth Real-Time Linux Workshop. 26 of the papers are now available as PDF downloads, on topics which include robotics, chemical process control, digital PID controller, medical imaging, real-time graphical programming, device driver architecture, shielded processors, quality-of-service, real-time FIFOs, and more. Check 'em out!"