thefullmonty writes "Yahoo! News is reporting that Royal Dutch/Shell is going to install the world's largest Linux supercomputer. Shell's Exploration & Production unit will use the supercomputer, consisting of 1,024 IBM X-Series servers, to run seismic and other geophysical applications in its search for more oil and gas. The article goes on to talk about how larger companies are moving towards Linux and some of the advantages of making such a move. ."

Taco Cowboy asks: "In the embedded market, the smaller the better, and I've scoured the Net in my own personal search for the tiniest Linux kernel available for the embedded market, and so far, the best I can come up with is one that claims to have a 143K footprint! (Sorry, I have NOT tested that product, so I won't know if the claim is valid or not). Is there anyone out there who knows anything smaller?"

If you haven't heard yet, another version of the Linux kernel has hit the mirrors. This is the first release to the 2.2 tree in quite some time, so it's probably worth updating on those machines which can afford a reboot. There's a whole bunch of changes, most notably the backport of USB code from the 2.4 tree, so all those neat-o USB devices you get over the holiday season won't be gathering dust.

Kenneth J. Hendrickson writes: "I attended the 2nd Real-Time Linux Workshop this year on November 27-28, 2000 in Orlando, FL. It was held in conjunction with the 21st IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium. RMS was the Keynote speaker. It was a fantastic event. I have published a report on it at the site of the Melbourne (FL) Linux User's Group." Thanks, Kenneth! This is a well-linked, informative report, and it shows how nicely GNU/Linux (RMS was the keynote speaker) can seep into what has traditionally been a heavily proprietary, expensive field.

[CRiMSON] asks: "Does the open source model support big business? When those 90,000 POS terminals have a problem, who do they turn to? It's hard to tell your manager, that 'there no fix for the problem yet, but it's expected in the next pre-patch release.' Big businesses like accountability, someone they can point a finger at and say 'Make it work'. For Linux would you have to point to many people... Or in some way could one hold Linus responsible?" There are companies that offer support for Linux and there are several other options where, if accounting is a must, you can get it. Support can be purchased with the system, either separately or included in the contract, or you can hire in-house IT staff to make any necessary modifications that you require. What companies out there offer Enterprise-Level Support for Linux and do any of you readers out there have any experiences you would like to share?

ChrisKo writes: "Article on how IBM is going to start offering software for Linux" Specifically DB2 and WebSphere. Talks about other Linux related stuff too, and says that Linux is the #2 OS. Not sure who's #1.

Stu asks: "I've been thinking about giving my faithful old PowerMac 7600/120 a little boost, and also thought it would be nice to give Linux a go, especially to try out the GIMP as an alternative to Photoshop. I've noticed over the past year or so quite a lot of distibutions have popped up which install in an MSDOS partition and can be launched from within Win95/98 or MSDOS, like WinLinux and many others. I'm shying away from repartitioning my HD and installing LinuxPPC as of now, but I'd like to kinda dip my toes in the water before I take the full plunge, so my question is: Does anything similar to WinLinux and those other distros exist for the PowerPC platform, i.e. can install in an HFS+ partition alongside MacOS?"

kernelInit.D asks: "I love Linux, but there is no way I am going to get the DBA's excited about having to recompile the kernel to install Oracle. Why can't Linux have something like Solaris's /etc/system file, where I can tune the OS without going through the hassle of hunting through source to make performance changes?" This is a good point, there are several parameters in the Linux config which could be moved to a file which the kernel consults at boot time. Are there technical or design limitations that have prevented its implementation?

mirko writes "After some time with almost no news about it, Doctor Dobb's journal finally choosed to break the silence and to deliver quite a comprehensive article (also available here) about the forthcoming Debian Hurd ^[?] operating system."

pmccallick writes: "Wired is reporting that Red Hat just closed its SF office. The article goes beyond stating the facts to suggest that RH's business model is flawed." To be fair, the article also quotes an analyst who points out that Red Hat "has $320 million in cash on hand, that it consistently meets quarterly revenue expectations, and that its gross margins are improving."

A reader writes: "This editorial has been just published on freshmeat: 'After full integration of the RPM ^[?] patches into APT ^[?] , it will have the potential to become the standard package management frontend for Linux, shortening the gap between distributions and reducing incompatibility across distributions for at least one important system administration tool. (...) The temporarily-forked version of APT is already fully functional and actually works. Conectiva Linux 6.0 -- the first RPM-based distribution to support APT -- currently ships with it, and has some repositories that are available for use with APT.' It can be downloaded here."

Xeno noted a story making the rounds about a Pro Linux Virus. Well, they're calling it a vrisu, but its a trojan. Its a flash thingee embedded in emails. It mails itself, and then renames zips and jpegs to have have a Pro-Linux message. Very bad advocacy, but when I turn off Dad Mode, I gotta laugh about it.

The folks at Newsforge have got a story up regarding Applix exiting the Linux desktop market. Applix has been making ApplixWare for the desktop market, but has found the competition from the free office products to be too rough -- but they are continuing to work on the server-side versions. I've been contacted by VistaSource, the company that is owned by Applix, doing Applixware - they want to make it clear that while they are focusing on serverware, they are not doing away with the desktop completly - but that development will continue on both desktop and server versions.

Keith Whitsitt wrote in to say that Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, is writing his autobiography. Published by HarperCollins, co-authored by David Diamond, entitled "Just for Fun:The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary". The article is pretty funny, talking about how it will reflect Torvalds "Quirky irreverent personality" as well as how it will be about business, Linus, and Linux. Hell I'll read it, but isn't Linus a bit young for the autobiography? I keep pitching my epic space opera about alien robots who infest our planet and live off celebrities dryer lint to various publishers, but nobody wants to publish a book written by a leader of mexican food, and starring a hero named Litmus VanCenturfuge and his sidekick Pipet Jerks. I keep telling them my parents would buy copies. I bet Linus will sell copies to people besides his parents.

Stef Hoesli writes: "Adobe, who gave us a smoothly working beta version for Linux of their fine word processor, will not release FrameMaker commercially on Linux. They sent out an e-mail to beta testers with the sad news. "

Mayank points to this interview at FreeOS.com with Red Hat CTO Michael Tiemann, in which Tiemann discusses why the Hat shipped a development kernel with their 7.0 distribution, journaling filesystems, the openness of ecos, and the competition (no, not that competition). It's a good read, though it would be cool to see the same questions addressed at even greater length. Guess everyone has a time limit, though;) [Updated by timothy:] I flubbed, that should read "development snapshot of gcc," of course, not "development kernel." Stop hitting me.

InfoSec asks: "We run a great deal (read all) of our current business on Linux, and we have found that tape backup is far too unreliable for our purposes. We have used Quantum DLT 7000s (two of which died), and we have two VXA drives (11 hours to restore three tarballs). Is there a better solution?"

srl sends in this query: "I'm on a project team for Reefknot, which is building an open-source/free shared calendar server. This is not a replacement for Evolution; this is a server that any iCal-capable client can talk to, to do group scheduling and event planning. It may also include project-management features. In short, we want people to have a free alternative to MS Exchange's calendaring features. We are in the pre-alpha design stages, and we want input from end users of calendar software. This might be you, it's definitely your boss. So, we want to know: What does your enterprise calendaring software do that you like? What do you hate about it? Why? What features should we implement to be competitive with existing commercial software?" We've recently talked about Exchange, and calendaring functionality is one of the reasons that it keeps finding its way into the enterprise. If you've ever wanted an alternative, now is your chance to speak up.

BigWhale asks: "I used to follow things that were happening on the Old School demo scenes a few years ago, then after a failed hard disk, I moved on and lost track. So, for old times sake I started poking around a little bit. What's happening with the scene, is it still alive? Indeed it is. Coding style is much different with DirectX, and hardware accelerated demos, but I'm 100% Linux oriented right now and I want to start a Linux Demo project. SDL by Loki Games is pretty neat, but is this the only thing that one could use to write a demo, what about ClanLib? How is with the sound support, I know about Midas and MikMod, is there anything else? I checked www.scene.org and there is one link there regarding Linux, but it's not working. So my question to /. is where would an old school demo coder, that wants to work with Linux, look for resources or scene hangouts?" I've watched demos ^[?] (small multimedia shorts) on just about everything from the Amiga Desktop to DOS and now Windows, does Linux have a similar subculture?

Sitting at your average Linux box is becoming simpler by the day, but the complexity and volume of information that that machine is likely to transmit and recieve is only getting greater. Reader Martin Barry contributed this review of Linux Routers. This book promises to unravel that complexity for the reader willing to trade some time and effort for a custom solution to their own routing requirements.