mpawlo writes "Wired ran an interesting piece by Russ Mitchell in the latest issue of the magazine. Mitchell focus on the so called war between Microsoft and Linux and why Linux will have a hard time winning such a war, and especially in respect of the desktops. The article was only available in the paper issue, but is now also available online."

LordDavon asks: "I have been trying to find a good video conferencing solution for Linux. The main issue is that my family and many friends are subjects under the Microsoft tyranny and use Microsoft NetMeeting. Although it is a nicely featured application (Whiteboard, VNC, File Transfer, etc...), I am failing to find a comparable application for Linux. Is there a single, low cost, multi-platform application that can compete?" While I'm not so sure about the existence of a whole suite of Open Source applications that can compete with NetMeeting, are there apps that are usable solely for video conferencing? We touched on this exact question two years ago, we also talked about shared whiteboards as well, although a bit more recently. Are any of you out there using Linux (or any Unix clone for that matter) in Video Conferencing? If so, how?

daramannen writes ""The committee is examining whether switching the Bundestag's more than 5,000 computers to open source would improve stability and security, as well as save money, Schroer said. By the committee's estimate, implementing open source software throughout the federal government could result in savings of 250 million marks (US$116 million)." "

Nickus writes: "According to this announcement on the Progeny homepage, development of their Progeny Debian has stopped and will no longer be available for sale after 15th of October. They will provide a migration path to the next release of Debian though."

hta writes "Over the 7 years that the Linux Counter has been operative, a lot of people have registered who can no longer be verified. We do not want to publish false data to the world. So we have to remove the data when it is too old, and have decided to give two grace periods." See below for more information - but go out and get counted!

Jens asks: "For some time now, I have been looking for an affordable solution to multi-home my little network. I have both DSL and cable feeds and it would be nice to combine them with some basic load sharing but more importantly with some failure protection for both incoming and outgoing traffic. My DNS provider allows for round robin access to my two feeds for incoming traffic load sharing and to dynamically change my DNS entry which could be used for feed failure protection. Are there any Slashdot readers who have tackled this problem? Seems like there are quite a few people out there in my shoes but nobody seems to have found the magic solution."

Bryan Andersen asks: "I'm looking for a filesystem that I can rollback all the changes made by a user to a given date/time. Are there any for Linux or *BSD, or is my only option to go to one of the NAS vendors? I want this so I can more easily cleanup after users trash all the files they can access. Yes I know this would mean I'd have to have much larger partition sizes, but I feel with disk prices the way they are I can't go wrong doing this." I'm not aware of any filesystems that can specifically do this, and I'm not quite up on my JFS knowledge to know if any of those can be adapted to this task without code changes. It would seem like the easiest way to do this would be to mirror the drives at set times (your "commit") and then a "rollback" would be a simple matter of restoring from those images. Of course, there may be just such a file system in the works that I simply haven't heard about yet. Have you?

An anonymous submitter sends: "MontaVista and Robert Love are developing a patch for the Linux kernel to make it fully preemptible. Lots of users are involved, and tests show huge reductions in latency. Robert's kernel patches are here. Finally, an interview with Robert, on preemption and more."

nerdguy0 writes "It appears that Winamp isn't just for Windows anymore. Nullsoft has a Linux alpha of Winamp3 out on their site. Hopefully it doesn't overshadow all of the hard work the XMMS people have done." Does winamp have better playlist controls then xmms? I've taken to using freeamp just because it has decent playlist controls. I say decent, not good. I want something with a tivo type of intelligence, but everything that claims to do something like this, well, doesn't.

po8 writes "The 2001 Annual Linux Showcase (ALS) is offering free registration until October 15, to try to increase attendance. If you're in the Oakland, CA area, perfect! If not, plane tickets are really cheap right now." In the past, this has been the Altanta Linux Showcase, which was always one of my favorite shows to attend. If you can make it, definitely check out - run with USENIX, it tends to be a more programmer/developer oriented show, rather then marketing.

mutantcamel writes "Eddie Bleasdale, the director of NetProject has been offering £10,000 to the first hacker to infect his Linux machine with a virus for the last two years, and so far no one has hit the jackpot. He's re-announced his challenge to virus writers following a Gartner report which told IT depts. not to trust MS server software because of recent worm attacks on their servers, but a Microsoft exec said yesterday that the hugely successful worm attacks were due to 'tardy' sysadmins."

Milo_Mindbender asks: "Our lab has a few dozen Linux machines with varying configurations of hardware and software. We're trying to keep track of all the configs so we can get the machines upgraded when we have parts/time/money to do so. Right now, I have a little shell file that I have everyone run which copies the output of a bunch of commands and /proc files from each machine to a central server. The problem with this is that you get a lot of info you don't need, and it's in a format that's hard to read or put in a spreadsheet. Does anyone know of a reasonablly good, free system for taking a hardware inventory of a bunch of networked systems? It's important that it be easy to install on the client machine and not have a huge number of dependancies. It would be particularly useful if it automatically decended through the various /proc trees and returned as much info as possible for disks, USB, graphics cards...etc." Inventory control is a big thing in corporations these days. A simple program that's able to collect hardware information from the Linux boxes on the network would be yet another feather in Linux's cap.

Jens Lönn writes: "Linux seller MandrakeSoft has had to delay shipment of its newest version of Linux because of problems in moving manufacturing to the United States. Mandrake Linux 8.1 is available as a download, but the first CDs of the product were supposed to ship by the end of September. "Getting 8.1 production up and running in North America has been a slow and expensive process," the company said in a e-mail message to those who have ordered the CD." Since Mandrake makes certains things so easy (smooth installation), I hope they soon get their newest release again on Walmart shelves across the U.S.

Whoops. A nasty bug affecting symlinks made it into 2.4.11, and Linus has ditched that "sorry excuse for a kernel" in favor of the new and improved 2.4.12. :) See the (short) changelog or list of mirrors, as usual.

Eugenia writes: "Linus Torvalds gives an interesting interview to OSNews.com, talking about everything people are wondering about his personal opinions on several matters: on the GNU/Linux naming, the GUIs currently offered for Linux, the kernel 2.6, his plans for hot-plugged devices & drivers, Microsoft, FreeBSD and the future in general."

the_2nd_coming writes "Red Hat has announced a legislation alert for the SSSCA. They are collecting comments to hand to lawmakers. Get those comments in while you can, but make sure you give them some thought."

stygian writes: "Linux 2.4.11...need I say more?" Of course you do. You need to point people to the mirrors and changelog, at a minimum.

WCLPeter asks: "One of the things that I like about Linux is that once it's set up properly it tends to stay that way. I have had experience using Linux as I've set up a firewall for my xDSL line, but that was a while ago. Like all things, if you don't use it often, you forget how to use it. Which is what has happened to me. As I prepare to install a Slackware 8.0 ISO so I can play some Loki games I bought I wondered: Is there a Unix cheat-sheet?" If you were going to create such a cheatsheat, what commands would you have in it? Of course, you can't get all of the Unix commands on a single sheet of paper, but probably enough of them to at least get a new user confortable with navigation and file operations.

An anonymous submitter sends in a link to a quick reference guide of various devices and gadgets that are in some way running Linux. Cell phones, set-top boxes, web pads, internet radios, and some miscellaneous gizmos (definitely take a look at the "other" page).

friday2k writes "There is a nice Article on Newsforge describing how the German Government moves ahead on looking into Free Software solutions for government agencies. And you need a standard, secure, email client for this." Basically, they are funding some good secure e-mail - but making sure that it works with stuff like Kmail.