option8 writes "I have added a page of some of the miscellaneous comments that appear in the Linux Kernel, version 0.01 (ca. August, 1991). Linus turns out to be quite the jokester, leaving all kinds of non-sequiturs and irreverent one-liners in the code, many of which survive today in the latest developmental releases. I thought to archive these and share with those people who aren't the types who go diving through ten year (gasp!) old code for kicks. Enjoy."

Bocaj writes: "LinuxOrbit.com has news from VTech on their plans to upgrade the Helio PDA to Linux. But thats not the interesting part: Quote: Programs chosen by VTech/Helio for special attention will receive incentives that include special donations to the Linux Open Source Foundation in the name of the developer of choice, or a cash grant for further development of Linux programs for the Helio OS or other Linux systems, open to the developer's choice."

An anonymous reader writes "A Debian General Resolution for removing the non-free section from Debian archives is being discussed by Debian Folks and the debate is turning into a flamefest. The proposal is aimed to clarify the position of Debian toward Free Software and the fact that non-free is not (and has never been) a part of the Debian System. But this would exclude packages such as Netscape, the JDK or pine of the Debian archives and opponents argue that the proposal breaks the section 5 of the Debian Social Contract. Here's where it started." Since I'm not a Debian Maintainer (hey, but a few of my old apps are in there, can I vote? ;) I've only got an opinion. I think Debian users should be able to install things like Netscape and Pine too, but I think they should be told the implications. The reality tho, is that if it gets yanked from non-free, other servers will pick it up. Maybe that is the hint that the non-free section is different from Debian's goal. Some people use Debian because it's better, not because it's the most free.

graner asks: "I've just got one of those nifty Motorola StarTac (model ST7800W) phones. Has anyone every tried to enter in a bunch of phone numbers? It sucks. With the optional data cable you get a CD that has some software from StartFish called TrueSync that only works on Windows boxen, but it does allow you to "sync" the phone with several different apps (outlook, etc.). Does anything exist that will allow you to do this under Linux? I've been all over the net and found a lib that lets you work with a GSM phone, but from all I can tell it won't work with this type of phone. I'm not opposed to firing up a serial sniffer and start hacking, but I hate to reinvent the wheel. Does anyone have any info/pointers/links or anything that resembles useful info? "

gavinroy writes: "According to an e-mail I received from the kind folks at Sendmail, Inc., the Linux Kernel versions 2.2.15 and below have a SUID security flaw. "This problem will affect programs that drop setuid state and rely on losing saved setuid, even those that check that the setuid call succeeded." Sounds like a good reason to go 2.2.16 to me - grab it." The sendmail advisory is also online, as well.

m0rph asks: "My company is building a Linux web cluster solution. We are currently discussing using Open LDAP for user authentication (for ftp http etc). I have been reading recently about the NDS port to Linux. This has raised some questions to me. In reading the NDS-Linux How-To the document states the you can use NDS in conjuction with Open LDAP. Being new to directory services I am wanting to know how does NDS differ in function from Open LDAP or other directory services? Is anyone using this same sort of method for authentication? and if so what are you using? why would you use a directory service like NDS with Open LDAP? also can someone can reccomend good documentation or a book that you have had good results with? "

salty dog writes: "Linux now supports Ultra ATA/100 HDDs, initially funded by SuSE Linux. Get the driver from: [www.linux-ide.org]." As you either know or have probably guessed, ATA/100 is the successor to the ATA/66 hard drive interface standard. And as the linux-ide.org site puts it, "Again Linux Beats MicroSoft to Future Technology Standard!" 'Nuff said.

Patrick McGouirk asks: "I work in a mixed-OS house, and need to have both Windows NT and Linux installed on my laptop. While everyone in this situation knows about the Linux+NT mini-Howto, I was installing SuSE 6.4 this weekend and accidentally did something that seems to have created an alternative solution. I installed NT as usual (hda1, primary) then installed SuSE (hda2, primary) + swap, as well as a third shared FAT32 partition (hda3, primary). I put lilo on hda2, but while fooling around with YaST2 I made hda2 active by accident. When I rebooted lilo came up with the choices of Linux or NT, which I have switched back and forth several times this weekend with no apparent problems. While in theory I knew that both Linux and NT care less about which partition is active (as long as it's a primary), It never occured to me until now that you could actually change the active partition to dual-boot. My question is this. Does this seem a safe method of dual-booting? If so this solves the basic problem of everytime you update Linux you needed to copy the new lilo to NT's root drive. It also makes Linux your primary OS!" I'm running this one for all of the Linux/NT folks out there who didn't know about this trick.

Frodo writes: "It seems that Mandrake 7.1 has started to appear on various mirror sites. No news on Mandrakes homepage so far." Update: 06/06 08:36 by CN : Alix from Linux-Mandrake just emailed me to tell me there's an official release note available now on their web site.

On May 23 we requested questions for Greg Lindahl, chief designer of the new NOAA Forecast Systems Laboratories massive Alpha Linux Cluster. Here are his answers. Fascinating stuff for people interested in big-time parallel computing.

TurboLinux, a company best-known for its eponymous international-centered Linux distribution, laid off people across the board today in an effort to do some belt-tightening. We received an anonymous submission about the reasoning and details behind these layoffs. In the interest of 'keeping it real,' I immediately contacted TurboLinux and spoke to their VP of Marketing, Lonn Johnston, to get the story straight. The original submission we received, as well as my conversation with Lonn, is below.

appletnc from linhardware.com points us to their article about Athlons and Linux. They're trying to sort out the compatibility problems rumored to exist with the boards and chipsets. He says "Despite SuSE's Athlon workaround and RedHat's (in)compatibility note, etc.) and rumors, we have not seen many reports of problems by LhD users. Are Linux users actually experiencing problems with Athlon motherboards? Given that the outstanding price/performance value of the Athlon, the question is how well do Athlon motherboards work under Linux?"

Check out the Red Hat press release running at LWN, or the news article at techweb about Google's 4000 Node Linux Box. Both articles are basically Red Hat commercials, but there's some interesting bits like the fact that they have a terebyte index of 300 million Web pages, and that they might expand their cluster to 6000 nodes in the future.

prac_regex asks: "I'm both lucky and unlucky. Unlucky that im in an NT proxy environment, but lucky that I am able to use Linux at work for all of my work requirements. I can talk to the file servers via Samba and get email from our exchange server via kmail, but for things that require talking to servers outside the proxy, I fail for nearly everything but web-browsers. My question is what solutions exist to communicate to the NT servers for applications that may or may not have proxy settings? Even things like xchat --with-socks I cant get to work. the NT server simply seems to ignore me. I know microsoft does make things difficult for everyone that doesnt use windows, but Im sure people have solved this. My goal in the longrun is to get the proxy off NT but in the meantime..."

This CNET article, found at the new and itchin'-for-eyeballs AlphaNews site run by the AlphaLinux folks, says that Alpha Processor International (API) will be producing specialty boxes delivering streaming audio and video starting this Fall. "Alpha Processor's new machine will consist of a collection of smaller, two-processor Alpha computers, each running its own copy of Linux but the whole system acting essentially as a single large server," says the article, pointing out too that there already are Alpha-based dedicated streaming boxes from Network Appliances. Anything that increases Alpha production seems good to me, if it drives down the price of being 64-bit. Wonder what distro all those CPUs will be running ...

Stunt Pope asks: "I'm looking for general opinions on Penguin Computing's Blackfoot 2500 series racks. Pro's or con's, anecdotal evidence, rants, raves, particularly using RAID1 and RAID5. The price seems competitive and I'm wondering how they hold up under production environments in terms of extended uptimes and hardware reliability. "

alexhmit01 asks: "So my friend's father bought a new set of machines for his office from Gateway, and they included with it this little cube called a Micro Server, which he gave to his son. Naturally, the first thing that we did was crack it open, and saw that it includes a PCI slot (some expandability, currently has a modem that we'll yank), and 10 GB hard drive. We're flipping through the manual, assuming that it is an NT machine when I notice they talk about SMB shares, so I'm assuming SAMBA. I get to the back and see two documents, the BSD license and the GPL. We check out the specs, it runs a 64-bit RISC processor (I'm assuming Arm), and Linux 2.0! So how many IT people have gotten one of these and decided to actually put it to use? Any suggestions? "

Chris Cheney writes: "Linux 2.4.0-test1 is out with a note from Linus for more details. Why does all the cool stuff come out after potato is frozen? " With Linus being gone for three weeks, Alan is likely to maintain a 2.4.0-ac series. It's getting closer...

Anton asks: "This is a question about Linux failover in business situations. We are a growing B2B company; our product runs on Apache/Linux. We contracted professional services to properly set up our network. After all the hellishly expensive CISCO hardware had been set up it turns out that for our servers to be configured for failover, each one needs two dual-port NICs configured for one IP connected to two different switches, furthermore the driver needs to intelligently switch the ports when the active port fails ... We've never heard of such beasts for Linux and a net search revealed nothing. Our consultant however claims that 'Linux is biting itself in the foot' for not supporting that, and that other industrial strength OS's like solaris in fact do support this. Has anyone run into this before or have other ideas? " [nik suggests]: Take a look at Polyserve Understudy, which might be an alternative. FreeBSD and Linux versions are available (and bundled with FreeBSD 4.0).

petard writes: "CNet is holding an OS death match between Corel GNU/Linux and Mac OS 9. An advocate of each is invited to answer the question of which is better on the desktop in the areas of Installation, Interface, Applications, Hardware Compatiblility and Internet Support. At first I thought it was flamebait, but the article is reasonably well done and highlights genuine strengths and weakness of each OS." It's really easy to say, 'Yeah, well, wait for Eazel,' but this comparison is a hard reminder that people think about the here and now, not just the soon.