tal-home writes "Newsforge has a story about the decision Dreamworks made to port ALL of their front-end servers and workstations to Linux. Their new movie, called 'Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron' which will hit the theaters in late May, was created in a 100% Linux enviroment, unlike older movies like Shrek and Lord of the Rings that used IRIX servers as a rendering farm. It's a good time to mention that this move by DreamWorks also includes porting the artists workstations to Linux, in addition to the servers. Redhat and HP helped out in the switch." Word has it that Adobe may be pursuing unix versions of it's toolset as DreamWorks isn't the only shop switching.

wirefarm asks: "I know there is are lot of well-supported pieces of hardware for Linux, but I was wondering, which vendors really go out of their way for the community? While tracking down drivers for a wireless PCMCIA card today, I found that the vendor boasted of having Linux support, but it was seemed that they were actually touting drivers that were community-developed, rather than written with any help of the company. So my question is this: Which companies really stand out when it comes to providing specs and developing drivers?"

ulbador writes "From the Linux Mandrake PPC site: Mandrake Linux 8.2 PPC is now available for Macintosh users. This newest release offers G3 optimization, user-friendly configuration tools, and the most up-to-date software. Visit your local mirror."

krishnaD asks: "I have been using webalizer to generate access log reports for the site but lately my customers are asking for statistics like average amount of time spent by visitors on site, if a person reaches a page X, what is the probability that from here he goes to Y? From which link people exited the site etc. Basically, they are asking for a detailed flow analysis of usage patterns of visitors. Are there any tools that will do this kind of analysis? I love to know what kind of tools other sysadmins use to generate reports for their clients."

MobyTurbo writes "Well, it's technically a day late, but SuSE Linux 8.0 is now shipping. The increase from 7.3 to 8.0 is due to the inclusion of KDE 3.0, a SuSE-modified kernel version 2.4.18 (with Andre's VM), an improved firewall, among other packages that have been upgraded or added. (Including a couple of new games. :-) )"

Johnny Mnemonic writes "The Spanish province of Extremadura has adopted Linux for the official OS of schools and offices, largely because of price. Simply, they don't have enough money for other OSes, and they promise to handle the rollout more gracefully than a similar Linux initiative in Mexico. According to Wired, this is the first time a European school system has switched to Linux."

Lisa writes "An Apple iBook turns out to be a great choice for running Debian GNU/Linux. Edd Dumbill, the editor of XML.com explains why." This could also be an argument for why to use Mac OS X instead of Linux in the first place, but if you do want to use Linux, then a Mac is a good choice. :-)

Daniel Stone writes "In results released by Project Secretary Manoj Srivastava today, Bdale Garbee was elected Project Leader ahead of Raphael Hertzog and Branden Robinson. Congratulations Bdale! And no CmdrTaco, the debs are not (quite) yet ready, but they *are* very close." The elections page has more information.

green pizza writes: "Linux Kernel 2.5.8 has been relased. Major improvements include readahead cache tweaks and support for hot-swap PCI on certain IBM machines." Here's the changelog; if you want to experiment with the bleeding edge, check out the list of mirrors provided by kernel.org.

flupps asks: "I've been asked to hold a two-day crash course in a class of students that currently are studying to become MCSD certified. I'm looking for ideas how to set this up. I was thinking about starting with some general file system descriptions, where to find what files, the man pages, the tab-button, etc. After that move on to some of the daemons and just explain what they do." He's got at least one idea to start with (below), but what must-have skills or demonstrations would you add?

An Anonymous Coward writes: "John Looney recently posted to the lkml, asking about the possibility of one computer serving multiple users. That is to say, multiple keyboards, mice, monitors, etc, hooked up to a single server. The advantages of such a setup in a lab type environment are obvious. The following discussion ranges through several technical issues with such a configuration, including a kernel limitation of one virtual terminal active at a time, and the typical lack of quality in long video cables. However, none of the issues raised are unbeatable. James Simmons, for example, has been working on cleaning up the virtual terminal code, with many related fixes already merged into Dave Jones' tree."

bbh writes: "NewsForge has an article about the Free Software Foundation asking the makers of LindowsOS a simple question, 'Where's the Source?' Lindows CEO Michael Robertson has an interesting take on what the GPL means."

Dejected @Work writes "MSNBC.com, a definitely sketchy source of Linux information, just came out with an article "Linux for the Masses" about the ease of installing Lycoris(formerly Redmond Linux) on the desktop. The author even concluded you can 'fall in love with an ever-easier-to-use operating system.' It sounds like great news but am I missing something?" Several favorable reviews of this distro recently. It looks like all you have to do to get the reviewers on your side is to let them play solitaire during the install. :) Update: 04/13 14:53 GMT by T : Eric Krout also suggests the two-part review (part one and part two) over on monolinux.

jferg was one of the first people to write about the coverage in today's Observer in regards to the latest business happenings at Red Hat. The article touches on the launch of RH Advanced Server, but one of the most telling statistics was "Red Hat now has 90 percent of its 630 employees working to lure corporations looking to move their computing platform from expensive systems running on the rival Unix operating system to Linux, widely considered to be the more cost-effective choice."

Anonymous American (Sherman Boyd) writes: "I was looking for a flexible, powerful distribution that makes it easy to build a 'custom' Linux box that meets my exacting specifications. I think I found it. Gentoo Linux has just released version 1.0 of their innovative meta-distribution and to celebrate I decided to throw it on my laptop and write this article based on my experiences." And good news for anyone interested in trying Gentoo: yesterday, Daniel Robbins announced the release of version 1.1a. Read on for AA's detailed look at putting Gentoo on his machine -- Gentoo has a different style than today's typical distributions, and it bears some explanation.

DarkClown writes "Just noticed the ISO for Yellow Dog Linux 2.2 went up for download on their main server; you may want to wait for it to hit a mirror, though." It was available for purchase a few weeks ago, and now you can download it for free, you moochers. You might also want to check out the installation guides, including an instructional video via Real Media.

fabiolrs writes "Mandrake Linux has an article in response to the message they sent on march 11th. They claim that because of user help they are "cash-flow positive"! That is great news since Linux community is now sure it will continue using one of the nicest distros available!"

PeterMAN writes: "If you want to learn how to share your systems on a heterogeneous local network and how to use it to compare and test applications on different operating systems and architectures, then take a look at these two articles that compare SSH, remote X, VNC, and other technologies as ways of remotely running applications." That link is to the second part of the series; here's the first installlment.

MiTEG writes "The Washington Post has an article on a cheaper alternative to Microsoft's Office Suite, ThinkFree Office. Currently selling for $50, their product also includes a one year subscription to Cyberdrive, a 20 MB web file-storage service. While it's no StarOffice, this glowing review may help people realize that Microsoft is not the only option." 'Glowing review' probably isn't the right term to use, since the reviewer found quite a few faults.

dex@ruunat noted that this morning, in a message to the debian-devel-announce mailing list, Anthony Towns, Debian's Release Manager, wrote: "I'm becoming increasingly confident in woody's release readiness. So, to go out on a limb: Debian 3.0 (codenamed woody) will release on May 1st, 2002." Congrats to all the debheads putting this thing together. I have a blank CDR waiting ;)