Linus Torvalds (and David Diamond) wrote this book; chromatic wrote the review below. It may be hard to say much new about Linus and the results of his 1991 inspiration to loose his kernel on the world, but this book is historically informative, with copyrighted Torvalds humor to boot (I snorted in parts) and fun facts about growing up in Finland. And for a multimedia extravaganza, you can even listen to some conversation between Linus and co-author David Diamond.

OberonX writes: "Blockman Trading has released the alpha version of Runix, which is a working verion of Linux 2.4 kernel working with PS2. [ed. note: for the original Playstation, though they plan on porting to the PS2 also.] You can read an article about it at zdnet and you can download the 26MB file here. The final version is expected to be released by October while office software for PS1 is due by the end of the year. Pretty neat stuff..."

where_is_my_mind writes: "IBM, NEC, Fujitsu and Hitachi agreed to join forces to speed up development of Linux apps. Check it here." Another submitter sent in a Japanese story which said they were specifically working on building banking applications.

lyberth writes: "Finally after almost too much waiting Yellowdog Linux has released the newest linux distro for the wild and wonderful ppc platform. An awsome new installer, support for most of the new mac hardware, and the first distro to include Xfree 4 for the ppc, as standard makes this pretty sexy distro. The press release can be found here."

Several readers who declined identification have pointed out that this "article over at Interactive Week discusses J.S. Wurzler Underwriting Managers, one of the first companies to offer cracker insurance, charging clients 5 to 15 percent more if they use Microsoft Windows NT in their Internet operations. As insurance companies live and die by their statistics, this is a pretty significant move. The article also has interesting information about tech turn-over in Windows vs. open source shops." However, note that Wurzler is not the only company offering anti-cracking insurance, and the Big Names haven't yet followed this lead, even though they're apparently watching intently. Maybe "treating employees nicely" is at least as important a factor to consider.

Nikato Muirhead writes: "Need I say more?" and points to this page at LinuxToday which says that Mandrake is preparing a beta -- for PPC. Considering the price of a used-but-decent G3, this sounds fun to get in on. (E-mailing sympa@linux-mandrake.com with "SUB cooker-ppc" in the body will start you on the road to beta-testerhood.)

joestump98 writes: "JWZ (of Netscape and Mozilla fame) has put up an extremely interesting article about using ThinkNic diskless workstations as internet kiosks at his new club, DNA Lounge. Very cool stuff!"

Patrick Mullen writes: "The Duke of URL has just posted a Distribution Round-Up. The article covers information on many of today's (and yesterday's) popular Linux distributions as well as links to many distribution reviews -- and aims to arm Linux users with the information to choose the distro that is right for them." It's pretty much required that Slashdot publish one of these every few months.

John Jasen writes: "Join the kernel of the month club! Order yours now!" See the Changelog, I would link to the mirrors but I doubt they're updated yet, so just head to kernel.org.

Guillem Cantallops Ramis writes: "In Bulma (Balearic Islands LUG) we've done real benchmarks this time: Mongo benchmarks (designed by Hans Reiser and used to test ReiserFS, slightly modified by me to support XFS and JFS), kernel compilation benchmarks, and a small "database simulation" benchmark. You'll find everything in english this time, with benchmark results and interesting comments by Dr. Ricardo Galli (Universitat de les Illes Balears, UIB). Have fun... and switch to a journaled filesystem now!" The previous article was here.

Steven Haryanto writes: "This one's from Indonesia. InfoLinux did an email interview with Hans Reiser, in which he explained about the ReiserFS project plan and the new Namesys business model. Mr. Reiser told me that Namesys recently received $600K funding from DARPA to include encryption in ReiserFS v4.0." Dig this quote: "We are going to add plugins in our next major version, and we hope that plugins will do for filesystems what they did for Photoshop." Mmmm -- encrypted, compressed, journaling, extensible filesystems. Reiser also touches on issues of international software development and how programmers can achieve fame.

rcriii writes: "Kevin Reichard is announcing the end of Linux on the desktop over at Linux Planet . Having spent the past couple of weeks fighting with Star Office and Netscape, I'd say that he has a point. Let the flame wars begin." I'm still not sure it was ever born in the first place ... although I happily run Linux on all of my desktops. But I'm not exactly the desktop of corporate America either.

An AC submitted this sad news: "NewsForge has a couple of articles on a management shakeup and more at French Linux distribution Mandrake. The CEO, CIO, CTO and others, including most of the IS team, have been let go. Others have taken voluntary pay cuts or cuts in their work hours. Ouch!" Several of the slashdot staff are big Mandrake fans; I hope they can keep going in the face of adversity.

Chanc_Gorkon asks: "anyone know of any EMWIN software for Linux? EMWIN stands for Emergency Managers Weather Information Network. Weathernode is a free as in beer client for windows that can accept this info. EMWIN will pick up National Weather Service alerts usually before the TV and Radio people say anything. I searched both Freshmeat and Google and saw nothing but maybe embryonic projects, not ready even for developer consumption. Further info can be found at the NWS's EMWIN page. It seems, to me, that this would be a nice thing to have on Linux since Weathernode eats resources. This program even can retreive NEXRAD images and animate them."

Delrin writes "This article on Zdnet reports on how Linux is slowly becoming an important player in the high-end graphic design industry. The latest upcoming movie "Shrek" a perfect example. Dreamworks and others are turning to linux for a large portion of their work, turning away from the likes of SGI and Microsoft." The movie looks visually astonishing: I'm definitely checking it out asap. Hopefully the story can live up the credits (Mike Meyers, John Lithgow, Eddie Murphy) and the visuals (the trailers blow away much of Toy Story 2).

Wakko Warner writes: "According to this article, a new Linux worm named "Cheese worm" has been spreading lately. The difference between this and other Linux worms is that Cheese worm attempts to fix backdoors added by other worms, removing malicious code and user accounts and scanning for other infected systems on the network. Now if someone would only release something like this for Outlook that turns off VBScript..."

EconomyGuy writes "Looks like the some big players all got together to respond to Microsoft's recent claims about the GPL. CNet is running a story about it, or you can read the response right here. If names like ESR, Linus, RMS, and Perens can all agree on something to say, then Microsoft's plan to split the community just might back fire on them."

We've run several stories about Eazel, and recently posted word on its recent financial troubles and likely shutdown. Gramps writes "Eazel is indeed shutting down but the good news is that Nautilus development will continue. It's all in Bart Decrem's email to the gnome-hackers mailing list. It's been a great ride. Thanks, folks." (Read more.)

irregular_hero asks: "I'm curious as to the experiences of other users about Redhat's much-publicized Red Jat Network support offering. I was initially impressed by the product, which seemed to offer a central console for application of updates. However, in recent weeks, I have become somewhat disillusioned with the service. This morning marked the 12th time I have been unable to even log on to the service in the past 2 months I have used it. I get various errors: 500 Server Errors, pauses of interminable length, and even empty pages. This morning, a new error occurred. Once logged in, all of my painstakingly prepared system profiles had disappeared. I can only hope that they will reappear soon." Sounds like there might still be a few bugs. Irregular_hero's bug-list continues, below. Have any of you found workarounds to these problems? Do you have others to add to the list?

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Linux 2.4.3 now holds the world record by performance with IBM's DB2 in TPC-H. TPC-H is a decision support benchmark consisting of a suite of business oriented and ad-hoc queries and concurrent data modifications. This is way cool as the world record was held by SQL Server 2000 on Windows 2000 before." Caveats: this is only in the 100GB (smallest) category, and all but 2 of the other entries are several months old. Even so;)