iconian writes: "The Linux Journal has a story on IT students and their perception of Linux. One of the funnier myths perceived to be true is that 'Microsoft's technical support is the best in the industry and is superior to that offered by the Linux community.' It just goes to show how little real world experience students have. It's a bit disturbing considering they will be the next generation of technology workers."

Jon Hill writes "It looks as if HP's OpenMail system is not dead yet and development of the project has been assumed by Samsung's software division. This is great news considering OpenMail was the only serious Unix-based competitor to Microsoft Exchange. Now if only it was strongly marketed and made well known, enterprise administrators such as myself could embrace it." For those of not familiar, essentially OpenMail is the *only* e-mail platform out there, besides Exchange that will support a whole slew of Microsoft Outlook features - something necessary in the enterprise, despite that people should know better.

cuebei asks: "OK, Slashdotters - let's talk accounting systems for small-mid sized businesses. With the popularity of Linux servers running various e-business services such as web, directory, mail, commerce, etc, it only makes sense for Linux to become a more mainstream platform in the business world. One of the areas where I can foresee Linux being used extensively is in the area of accounting. Linux is both reliable and scalable, two key requirements for any accounting package. So who uses Linux for HR/Accounting? What options are out there? Open-source or commercial? If you were starting your own business and standardized on Linux as a platform, what accounting package would you use and why?"

Inexile2002 asks: "Ok, I'm going to Chile this Xmas season, and a distant second cousin of mine, a monk in a Dominican monastary emailed me requesting that I bring copies of and set up Linux on their machines and network. I've NEVER set up a Linux network before, won't have reliable internet access when I'm there (if I have it at all) and to top it all off, would really rather set this up in Spanish for the non bi-lingual monks. (My spanish, of course, is weak and useless when discussing computers) For someone who doesn't know Linux well and won't be able to check online help, what is the best hard copy Linux help out there? Is there a Spanish Linux? Will the monks, once they do have reliable net connections, be able to seek bilingual online help?" We've all been in this position before, but the multi-lingual angle is a new twist. Do any of you have any hints, or suggestions to pass along to Inexile2002?

xise writes: "The next installment in the 2.5 Linux Kernel beta series, 2.5.1 is avaliable at the usual place Linux Kernel Archives. Remember to use the mirrors. You can read the changelog here."

solferino writes: "LinuxJournal has a good overview article about linuxBIOS and where it's currently at (hint : moving like a sleek penguin under arctic ice). Why linuxBIOS? To quote from the article "Currently two different interest groups are working on LinuxBIOS: one working on embedded systems and one building large-scale computer clusters. For these applications the legacy x86 firmware is suboptimal." Yes, this was a slashdot story in March this year but this article is relevant for updating the project status and for providing indepth information."

A reader writes "In this editorial at DesktopLinux.com, commentator Malcolm Dean questions whether Lindows is any sort of linux at all, and suggests that the world might actually be better off without yet another proprietary/commercial Windows wannabe (that runs Windows apps, no less). Dean asks how it is possible that, as Lindows.com founder Michael Robertson manages to claims in his latest newsletter, Lindows' ten million lines of code include a Windows Compatibility Module that somehow works better than anything else available today. "Has Mr. Robertson's team accomplished in a few months what took WINE years?" Where is the substance to back the hype? Besides, what if Lindows does succeed: do we really want to perpetuate the use of Windows software on a linux platform?"

vinay asks: "We are trying to integrate our Sun Solaris machines with new Linux servers. One major issue we currently have is to have a single set of automount files that will work for both environments. After going through all of the HOWTOs and the FAQs for Linux automount, we were troubled to see that Linux automount has a very basic feature set, and isn't very compatible with Solaris automount." Might it be possible for Linux to emulate the missing features offered in Solaris automount via expert use of short scripts?

Alan asks: "I'm looking for a way to do document management at the office. We have windows people and linux people, some writing documents that are a few lines (developer notes for example) and others are full of charts, graphs, etc. Currently we have a file server that has shares set up for the documentation, but it lacks any sort of revision control, and with the salespeople writing in Microsoft Word there are cross-platform issues. We were thinking of setting up an wiki or an everything-based site, but as it is only text, it's not good enough for everyone. There is also the matter of getting our master documentation (which is in PDF format) accessable to everyone as well, possibly in an XML format that can be imported into indesign or Pagemaker or something. There are lots of solutions that work for different departments and different systems, but it would be nice to have something that works for everyone."

MichaelJames asks: "Ok, I have my MP3's streaming, all our digital pictures up, and a file server running on one machine in the basement. What would be the best way to do simple backups of the system and data? Get a tape drive Get a CDRW or DVDRW to backup the MP3 and pics, but use the old Zip drive for the file server data?" With drives in the 10-20 gig range only getting smaller and less expensive, what are we to do for backups, that have yet to scale well in the same range. For home systems with up to 100G of storage, what do you use to back up that much data, with a solution that's affordable to the average computer user? Have DVD writers become cheap enough for serious consideration as a backup media?

pjones writes "Government Technology reports that "For reasons of national security and national pride, government officials in countries like China, France and Germany are increasingly adopting the free, open-source computer operating system known as Linux." Noted in the article are China's Red Flag, NSA's Security-Enhanced Linux and much more."

Now that Linux kernel 2.5 is under development by Linus and others, the all-important job of maintaining and updating the "old" kernel series (the one that people rely on in day-to-day use) has fallen to 2.4 maintainer Marcelo. You asked Marcelo about everything from the influence of politics (age and otherwise) to his working enviroment and approach to maintainership; his answers are below.

One of the most-heard complains from people who use distributions like Red Hat, Mandrake or SuSE is the "dependency hell" problem. You want to install an RPM and bang -- you have a dependency problem. There have been a few attempts to overcome dependency problems: SuSE with their YOU (Your Online Update), Mandrake with URPMI, and Redhat with their UP2date program. There is also a solution from Aduva called Aduvizor, but it's not supporting the latest distributions yet. Read on to learn about another interesting solution ...

fsoft writes: "In this interesting article at IBM develWorks, Dr. Edward G. Bradford explains sockets and does some benchmark between Linux and (various flavours of) Windows. Quite interesting results."

Guylhem writes: "The former LDP license was the first license used for our documentation. While we are now recommending the GNU FDL and the OPL 1 without options A or B, many documents are still licensed under the LDPL. David Merril, our Collection Coordinator, noticed that the LDPL is "not free" according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. We have to get in touch with the authors as soon as possible or 2/3 of the LDP document collection will be removed from the base Debian distribution because the code freeze is happening in 2 days. Maybe some of the LDP unreachable authors are reading slashdot and could take 1 minute to submit an updated document licensed under the FDL or OPL v1 -A -B ? Another solution is to find volunteers to rewrite from scratch the concerned documents."

krow writes: "Embedded.com is running an article where the author is making some assumptions of Linux's use in the embedded markets based on the opinion of one consultant and the fact that Lineo had to lay off some people this year. It's still interesting reading though for some insight into a different world for Linux and there is a nice reference in the comments to the interview of Victor Yodaiken of RTLinux fame by by Kevin Fu on the ACM site."

HNFO writes: "HP is unveiling their new 'blade' servers that fit onto a single card. Their press release is here. They are currently available with your choice of RedHat, Debian and SuSE. A picture of the card can be found here and a picture of the chassis can be found here." If you're looking for high-density slot-based computers, earlier postings about RLX's Transmeta blades and OmniCluster's x86 variety might interest you as well.

Lester Hightower writes "I am the CTO of a vertical market application service provider, and we have a couple of applications which could benefit from an interactive voice response (IVR) system. We are an almost-all Linux shop, and most of our production systems are CGI in Perl. I would like to get some feedback and/or recommendations from the Slashdot community on what hardware and software works well, is reliable, easy to maintain, and so forth." Recommendations against hardware, that do not work well for this type of application, are also welcome.

mike_sucks writes: "The first step to porting Debian to the Win32 platform has been made - dpkg is compiling under Cygwin. Check out the post on debian-devel and the Debian GNU/w32 port's site." Some of the posters on the debian-devel list aren't too pleased with the idea.

dont_drink_the_water asks: "I am currently working on a few projects which will (hopefully) use Embedded Linux to deliver content (mp3 players, web servers, other possibilities). The question is, can Linux act as a USB attached hard drive, so that other machines can simply read/write data on the hard drive by using the USB port? Is anyone currently working on projects like this, and has any software been developed for this purpose?"