An unknown reader points us to the Windependence Day contest sponsored by DesktopLinux. Cute idea, and I'm sure some people have exciting stories of battling the talking paperclip...

surfimp writes "Here's a story from NewsForge: 'MandrakeSoft CEO Jacques Le Marois confirms the news this morning, and company spokeswoman Margaret Waters says, while a contract with Microtel has not been finalized, the company is working on getting Mandrake certified to run like clockwork on the Microtel systems. Waters is hopeful that the dotted line will be signed and PCs up for sale by the end of next week.'" Update: 06/20 17:21 GMT by T : Ooops! The Mandrake spokeswoman's name is Margaret Waples, not Waters. Apologies, and thanks to Todd Lyons of Mandrakesoft for the correction.

jukal writes: "As seen originally at newsforge: On Friday we reported the appearance of Microtel PCs with LindowsOS pre-installed at Walmart.com. Then, Walmart.com and Lindows were claiming that LindowsOS 'delivers the stability of UNIX with the ease of Windows and the ability to run most Microsoft programs.' Today, that last phrase has gone missing and there is no more talk of running any programs designed for Windows, let alone Microsoft products"

MrSnivvel writes: "Slackware 8.1 has been released. Highlights of this release include KDE 3.0.1, GNOME 1.4.1 (with new additions like Evolution), the long-awaited Mozilla 1.0 browser, support for many new filesystems like ext3, ReiserFS, JFS, and XFS, and support for several new SCSI and ATA RAID controllers. Remember to buy your copies at http://store.slackware.com. List of download mirrors here. Public releases of Mozilla AND Slackware in the same month, I'm so happy I've soiled myself."

peng1can asks: "I'm searching for a way to print ID cards in a an LDAP and preferably open source environment. We use LDAP heavily, and ideally we want to be able to pull user information and photos from LDAP and print onto ID Cards. Thus far, I've come up against two roadblocks: 1) Trying to make the ID station work under linux would be great, especially if I can script gphoto. But, I can't find an ID-card printer that doesn't supply windows-only drivers. The closest thing I can find is that Eltron provides a programming manual for their printers, but I have no knowledge of how to write a CUPS/LPRng printer driver. 2) If we had to resort to a Win-based workstation, I can find no method for accessing LDAP in a way that would work with an ID card system without spending thousands of dollars per station on an LDAP/ODBC gateway. I could try to write something in PERL for Win32, but can't find a way to control a digital camera that way. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated."

MrOutlander writes "Gentoo Linux releases version 1.2 of their cutting edge distribution with many updates including KDE 3.0.1 (20020604) and GNOME 2 (beta, 20020607) support. I love emerge :)"

DaveAtFraud writes "The latest experimental Linux kernel (2.5.22) is out. The somewhat massive changelog has the details. The patch file is here and the full source is here. If possible use a mirror. I never got 2.5.21 to get beyond single user mode on my dualie so hopefully 2.5.22 will fix that."

kris writes "Linux and Main's Anthony Awtrey put together a very nice analysis of the ADTI "Opening the Open Source Debate" paper before and after the temporary retraction. He came up with some interesting research of just why the paper adressed specific examples such as the FAA and exposes the FUD behind the FUD in the paper."

Ladislav Bodnar writes "This is an opinion piece offering solutions for all the ills of the RPM Package Manager. It has been written with Slashdot in mind - it is a fairly controversial topic and I would like to hear the experiences and views of other users who have tried different package formats and different Linux distributions. The conclusions are pretty straightforward - either the big RPM-based distributions get together and develop a common standard or we will migrate to distributions offering more sophisticated and trouble-free package management. Note: the main server allows a maximum of 100 simultaneous connections. To limit the /. effect, here are two other mirrors: mirror-us and mirror-hu (the second one has larger fonts). Thanks in advance for publishing the story."

Anonymous Coward points to this article on xbitlabs.com, which begins "At the recently held Computex show in Taipei Phoenix Technology Company introduced its new FirstBIOS based on Linux. Among the major advantages of this product, they mentioned such things as PC wake from different standby modes and integrated means of rapid PC recovery in case of failure." That's not all, though -- the article goes on to say that "the most remarkable thing is that you will be able to get access to Internet directly from this interface either via the traditional modem or local network. In this case the data will be stored in NTFS, FAT32 and ext2 file systems. According to Phoenix, all these features fit into 16Mbit Flash memory."

Tonetheman writes "Walmart is now shipping low cost PC's with Lindows pre-installed. And yes I know there was a review earlier on Slashdot about installing Linux on one of these bad boys. This is different and much more exciting. To think of the legions of rednecks who could now possibly be running Lindows instead of Windows..." There's a Newsforge story too. Hopefully Lindows makes a good impression.

chill writes: "A while ago Heroine Virtual had a video editing program out called Broadcast 2000. Then something weird happened and the program was pulled from release with the homepage saying it was too dangerous legally to put out. Something about liability. Anyway, the successor to that program, called Cinelerra, is now available in beta form. Give it a shot and see what is what." And Dominic Mazzoni writes: "Talk about a tough act to follow. On the same day that Mozilla 1.0 was released last week, we released version 1.0.0 of Audacity, our GPL cross-platform audio editor that has been under development for nearly three years. It is based on wxWindows and runs natively on Linux (of course!), Windows, Mac OS (both 9 and X), and some other POSIX systems. Version 1.0.0 just adds a couple of minor features and bug fixes, but it is basically stable and quite useful, though it has some limitations. In addition, we also released a snapshot of our unstable development branch as Audacity 1.1.0. This version adds support for 24-bit and 32-bit samples, automatic resampling, LADSPA plug-ins, and internationalization, plus it has many nifty new UI enhancements."

PotatoHead writes " Parametric Technologies Corporation (PTC) announced in a recent press release, a Linux port of their flagship modeling product Pro Engineer. HP will be the preferred partner for the Linux platform release. This is pretty big news for the engineering and product design crowd folks. There must be some fairly credible requests coming in for this to happen."

There has been lots of press and discussion, both positive and negative, about the new UnitedLinux combine formed by Caldera, SuSE, Conectiva, and TurboLinux. Caldera CEO Ransom Love ought to know more about UnitedLinux's goals and possibilities than just about anyone else in the world. This is your chance to ask him what's up with all of this. One question per post, please. We'll run Love's answers to 10 of the highest moderated questions as soon as he gets them back to us.

CrazyEd writes "LinuxSecurity is reporting that EnGarde Secure Linux has received the Network Computing Editor's Choice award to win the battle of the Secure Linux distributions. Well deserved, me thinks." Update: 06/10 15:16 GMT by T : An anonymous reader points out that Linuxlookup.com reviewed this distro last week, awarding it a perfect score.

Monkius asks: "A year ago, there seemed to be two promising Linux HA frameworks--along with lots and lots of experimental things: SGI's FailSafe, and Kimberlite from Mission Critical Linux. The FailSafe software website now seems very out of date, although the mailing list remains active, and there seems to be forward momentum. On the other hand, Redhat seems to have forked the development of Kimberlite, calling the fork Redhat Cluster Manager. They don't seem to be making development source available, at least to the public. Are these two projects still relevant? What's the current status of Open Source HA?"

Mark Bainter writes "If you haven't checked out kbuild lately, you should. The new build system Keith Owens has put so much time into has a long list of benefits, including much shorter build and rebuild times, and greater accuracy. It appears his system is well liked by most, kernel developers (though not all). So the question is, why won't Linus merge it? Keith has been announcing for some time that it is ready to merge, and has worked very hard on trying to keep everything up to date as the development kernel continues to change, yet his requests to merge seem to be largely ignored. Linus did weigh in on the topic, but his views don't seem to resonate very far on the list, and seem rather arbitrary to me. Keith doesn't seem to be all that fond of Linus' thoughts on the matter either, and has called for an email campaign to get Linus to merge it in all at once. Perhaps instead of everyone on /. emailing their (partially informed) opinion to Linus, an open discussion amoung Linux users/developers who might not normally participate on the kernel list would lend some weight one way or another."

Benanov asks: "I'm doing a literature review on the Feasibility of Linux for a public-access lab (i.e. not Computer Science students at a university but instead the entire student body would have a login), and I haven't found any detailed studies about any places where this is actually done. If you know of any citeable sources about studies / reviews, I'd really appreciate it."

Zadig writes "It appears as if Dell, Oracle, and Red Hat CEOs have decided to make 'Unbreakable Linux'. Could a giant arise amidst today's insecure and constantly patched linux world that could hold the title of Unbreakable Linux? I doubt it, but it will be fun to try, what are your thoughts?" There's a similar article on CNet.

m0RpHeus writes "According to Linux Today, SuSE is denying per seat licensing for United Linux. `We really don't plan any per-seat licensing for UnitedLinux,' said SuSE's US Director of Sales Holger Dyroff. UnitedLinux, it seems is divided on this issue."