Ivan writes "Lunar Linux 1.0 was released today. It's a source based distribution, with gcc 3.2 and the latest versions of packages such as Mozilla 1.1, OpenOffice.org 1.0.1 and GNOME 2 and KDE 3. From the about page on their website: 'In the beginning Lunar was a fork of Sorcerer GNU Linux (SGL). The fork occurred in late January to early February of 2002 and was originally made up of a small group of people who wanted to collaboratively develop and extend the Sorcerer technology.' Download the ISOs here."

I_am_Rambi writes "RedHat has released their latest OS, 8.0. Here is Red Hat's ftp site for download and some mirrors. If you need help there's a Howto." Jeet81 adds: "Red Hat is out with a new release, Red Hat 8.0. Looks like Red Hat is moving towards the windows XP style using its new Bluecurve graphical interface (the new default email client 'Ximian Evolution' looks a lot like MS Outlook)." So what's the verdict on Null or Bluecurve or whatever it's called? Good idea, bad idea?

sholgate asks: "I've been asked to look into implementing a paperless office under Linux. We receive emails, letters, word documents, PDFs etc and need a way of converting and storing them in a way that provides easy searching and accessing. We've been offered two Windows solutions, one based on Canon ScanFile and the other using Lotus Notes. My office went with Canon back in 1995 and now has a load of unreadable CDs as the original software was DOS based doesn't seem to work under Win98/XP. We now face paying for conversion to the new system plus new license fees. We are primarily Linux/Unix based here so Windows is inconvenient and history has shown that a closed product is not a good solution. I favour having a directory browsing system based on thumbnails (such as nautilus or konqueror) and searching with grep, but I can see the benefits of more complex systems that store a database of search terms etc. Have other Slashdotters thought about paperless offices? What answers did you come up with?"

An anonymous reader writes "Linus has put out a call for testers with the release of 2.5.40. IDE appears to be in working condition, and the only really obvious thing that could be a problem anymore is the lack of any working volume manager... (LVM is b0rk, atm) So unless that's a problem, start your kernel compiles."

Manuel Arriaga writes "[To the editors: I am not a professional programmer, nor will I ever be one. My income does not depend on my computing/programming skills, and hopefully it never will. So promoting free software I wrote does not help me in any financial way, no matter how indirect. libtrash is free software (GPL2), and I distribute it for free from my website. I have nothing to gain from the increased exposure, except for knowing that I am helping others. And I know slashdot isn't freshmeat... With that out of the way:] I have seen this topic discussed in the LKML multiple times by now, and many more people asking in the newsgroups why "I can't recover my deleted file on GNU/Linux". Here is my answer to that question. libtrash gives Linux a real "trash can". And it has been doing so (with varying degrees of stability) for more than one year now. If you consider it appropriate, make this information public on slashdot."

Jon writes "Eugenia from OSNews is giving Red Hat 8.0 a run for its money. She posted a very detailed and balanced review for the new version of Red Hat, which aims to be a "business desktop". Very interesting article and discussion over at OSNews." Several people also sent in the stories from InternetNews as well as LinuxPlanet.

An anonymous reader writes "A discussion on the Linux kernel mailing list between Linux creator Linus Torvalds, Linux guru Ingo Molnar, and a few others debated the name of the upcoming stable kernel release. The choices: 2.6 or 3.0. Evidently there's been enough improvements, most notably the VM, that they're leaning towards calling it 3.0..."

Josh Berkus asks: "One of my clients would love to convert their entire office to Linux. But one thing keeps them tied to a NetWare file server: a little utility called 'Filer' Filer allows the sysadmins to retrieve deleted and overwritten files, up to a week after the event. With 70 secretaries using that server, that ability is crucial. I've looked around the Internet, but cannot find anything quite equivalent in the Linux world, except maybe hourly backups and that's a pain. What the client really needs is a utility/mod for the filesystem or network layer that archives files instead of over-writing or deleting them. I had one kernel hacker offer to write me something like that, but my client does not want to be a test case. Note, that we have nothing against Netware, it's just that this client has historically not been able to get good Novell support. Anybody know anything that's already in production like this? Is Reiser working on this for ReiserFS?" This sounds deceptively easy. If this was a personal machine, this would be easy, but the showstopper is that this has to work as a share meaning that this "trashcan" like functionality needs to be implemented at the filesystem level. While I can understand the submittors desire to not be a test case, if there doesn't exist a ready-made solution to this particular problem, how difficult would it be to add this on to ext2/ext3, Reiserfs or some other suitable open source filesystem and test it for reliability?

MBCook writes "Everybody's favorite Xbox hackers have got Linux running for roughly six weeks, and now it runs well enough to announce that Windows has been run inside Linux with common PC virtualization software. They even have a little video of it playing a MPEG 4 of The Matrix fullscreen!"

9jack9 writes "Fortune Magazine has this article entitled Servers with a Smile. While they probably get almost as much wrong as they get right, it's still an interesting article, if for no other reason than it's in Fortune, with a readership undoubtedly consisting of people more focused on business than technology. To me the strange thing is that in portions of the computing world Linux and related phenomena (GNU/Linux, OSS, etc) does seem to be "the hottest thing", but in other parts of the computing world it is all but invisible. It reminds me of NT in the early days. There is also a related article Does Software Yearn to be Free?."

joestar writes "What else to say? I've tested the RCs and they were great... There are two very interesting links: the Press Release, and a very nice presentation. From the presentation: 'Affirming its leading position in the Linux desktop arena, Mandrake Linux 9.0 introduces many newly redesigned graphical desktops and configuration utilities. The famous "Mandrake touch" is evident throughout the many clean, attractive and friendly desktops to make everyday tasks easier for all users of a Mandrake system.' And apparently it's already LSB-1.2 certified!" Update: 09/25 23:57 GMT by T : Apropos new releases, an anonymous reader writes "Parts of Red Hat's next OS have been unofficially leaked, as news.com reports here. The official release date is scheduled for next Monday, 9/30/02." Update: 09/26 00:29 GMT by T : Gaël Duval points to less-swamped links to the press release and to the Presentation & Features page. Thanks, Gaël.

Vicegrip writes "In an article on leaked release notes on Redhat 8.0 CNet also revealed that Bernhard Rosenkraenzer, known here on Slashdot as berorh, has quit over objections he has on what Redhat is doing to KDE in the new release. Bero says that the new version of KDE in Redhat 8.0 is going to be crippleware. I know I always found Bero's comments here on Slashdot helpful and insightful. His worries about what Redhat is doing to KDE for 8.0 have me rather concerned and thinking of switching distributions."

ealar dlanvuli writes "BuisnessWeek Online is reporting that AOL/TW and Lindows have decided to work together in bundling a version of Netscape 7 with future Lindows products. One wonders if they should instead be supporting OEone and making it scream."

KobyBoy writes "Damion Yates wrote a very nice and informative article about how the BBC is using Linux. Linux is quite widespread in their in-house server environment, their development environment and of course in their production environment. He even mentions the excellent support Donald Becker (from Linux NIC card support fame) has provided him." Update: 09/24 21:54 GMT by T : Whoops -- this article is pretty old. Make that, the BBC is still using Linux.

serendigital writes "Unix guru Simon Cozens wrote about his "conversion" story in the UK Unix User Group Newsletter. He touts: OroborosX and XDarwin. This gives you a rootless X server and Aqua-like window manager. He also seems to like the libraries: the NeXT approach of separating libraries off into their own subdirectories and separating out library versions makes for a much tidier filesystem arrangement than simply bundling everything in /usr/lib. One of the more controversial "differences" in OSX." And on the other side of the switch, there's Wil Wheaton does Mandrake.

An anonymous reader writes "This story explains how the latest Linux development kernel is now able to start and stop over 100,000 threads in parallel in only 2 seconds (about 14 minutes 58 seconds faster than with earlier Linux kernels)! Much of this impressive work is thanks to Ingo Molnar, author of the O(1) scheduler recently merged with the 2.5 Linux development kernel."

An anonymous reader asks: "Well, my web host is down again, so I thought I'd ask the Slashdot faithful if they can recommend any GNU/Linux based hosting sites (preferably virtual servers) running distributions besides Red Hat. I know this has been covered in the past, but it seems everyone uses Red Hat, and I'm a Debian type person. Anyone out there have a host they can recommend?"

shift8key asks: "Last year, a friend asked me whether I would sponsor his NASCAR race car. The sponsorship came cheap and I decided to do it. Since I did not have a commercial message for my business, I had him put 'Linux.org' and a penguin on the hood. He had more inquiries about it than any other message on his car. My community phonebook called me to ask if I would repeat the message there, and I think I will do it. Have any Slashdot readers ever done any voluntary sponsorship of Linux? If so, what experiences did you have?"

The first ever official TPC-C benchmark on a Linux system has been published. This was run on a cluster of 32 HP servers with Intel Xeon CPUs, running Redhat Linux and Oracle RDBMS. The system had over 18 terabytes of storage, and cost over 2 million US dollars. Performance was higher than a similar system running on MS Windows.

cotyledon writes "Today's New York Times editorial (Free Blah-Di-Blah) describes Linux as good for consumers and good for programmers. It recommends "Government units abroad and in the United States and individual computer users should look for ways to support Linux and Linux-based products. The competition it offers helps everyone." This is the paper's opinion, btw, and not a guest columnist."