Dave Whitinger, formerly of LinuxToday fame, now from Atipa wrote in to tell us that "Soros Private Equity Partners, TA Associates, and WR Hambrecht + Co. have invested more than $30 million in Atipa Linux Solutions. " Also, if you haven't seen Dave's Linsight service, you should check it out. I've been wanting to hack something like that together for years, but now I don't have to ;)

Toucan Sam writes, "This could be of some interest to those who see the Linux community as being reserved for the first world exclusively." This doesn't just apply to Africa, but it's good to see that some people are thinking internationally.

Charles Connell writes "Before heading home for the weekend (and tearing myself away from Slashdot), I thought I would respond to some of the comments made about my recent Linux article. First, thanks to everyone who posted or e-mailed a response. The vast majority of comments were friendly and thoughtful. I especially liked the reader who wanted to paste the article in every programmer's cubicle. *grin* More substantially, here are some specific responses to major points raised by Slashdot readers. "

jschauma writes "I just saw on freshmeat that Linux 2.3.46 is out - thought I'd share the news. Freshmeat also has the changelog online. " One step closer to 2.4.

naasking writes, "A new desktop project has been started by former Apple and AOL employees. Their goal is to create a graphical environment for Linux that "your mother could use." The company doing it is called Eazel. " It also is supposed to be based on GNOME. CT: Several people noted that this shell is destined to be the GNOME 2.0 shell/file manager.

Anonymous Coward writes "At http://www.the-times.co.uk/interface/dailyextra5.html is news of a voice-operated Linux handheld computer to be announced at CeBit next week. Sounds cool!" Oh yeah. Until someone shouts out, "ARRR-EMMM ARRR-EFFF STAR!" Then we'll see who's laughing.

I was pointed over to an editorial that is currently running on freshmeat. The author of the editorial takes issue with the current state of package managers for Linux and proposes a way to fix inadequacies. Here's a sample of the solution: "The solution to the problem seems to be to extend the autoconf approach to package systems. This requires providing the necessary tools, standards, and guidelines to software and/or package authors to enable a single source package to produce a wide variety of binary packages for the various platforms and packaging systems."

Charles Connell sent in an article that he wrote following the onslaught of flames he (and even his boss) got following articles that were critical of Linux. I've said many times that Linux's worst enemy is the army of angry, self-appointed advocates: they don't write code, but they have a lot of pent up anger that often gets directed in the wrong places. Anyway, read the article and talk amongst yourselves.

Hacksworth writes "LinuxPPC, Inc. has released their first boxed product of their distribution of Linux for PowerPC computers. " Congrats to the guys working there. A lot of hard work has been put in over at LinuxPPC and it's nice to see the progress.

buckrogers writes "Bloor Research has finished a year long study that shows that Linux is more reliable than Windows. In the study Linux failed once for four hours because of disk drive issues while Windows failed 68 times for "hardware problems (disk), memory (26 times), file management (8 times), and a number of odd problems (33 times)" for a total of 65 hours. I like the category "odd problems." "

Anonymous Coward writes "Looks like a good lineup of speakers. Should be fun again this year." It takes place July 19-22. I was there last year, and had a fantastic time. Highly recommended.

Beta Master writes "CNet reports that sales of Linux for servers are higher than sales for any other operating system except WinNT. IDG marketing group statistics are included. Full story here."

Bryan Mattern writes "I went to do an FTP install this morning and noticed RedHat 6.2beta on the FTP mirrors. There is no official word yet from Red Hat, but I'm downloading it right now. Might be nice to check out if you can grab it. " Update: 02/09 06:32 by H :You can also grab it from SourceForge's mirror.

Guylhem Aznar writes " After some restructuring of the Linux Documentation Project (LDP) we feel ready to serve the Linux community from our new home. The LDP has collected and produced numerous documents such as guides, HOWTOs and mini-HOWTOs, FAQs pages, and more. " Continues in article body...

Maschendrahtzaun writes "After the green chameleon has been the mascot of the SuSE Linux AG for such a long time, we finally want to give it a name. We are therefore announcing a name competition for our chameleon.

The competition will begin in New York at the Linux World, which was staged Feb. 1, 2000 through Feb. 4; the final decision will be revealed at the CeBIT 2000, at the end of of February 2000 in Hanover. From all suggestions which we receive SuSE will select the most funny or best fitting ones, which will be presented to the public on our Web site. From these suggestions the public will then be able to choose the winning name. One of the suppliers of the name which gets the most votes will be invited by SuSE to the largest European Linux event, the "LinuxTag in Stuttgart". SuSE will also draw further winners from the hat, who'll receive a current version of SuSE Linux as well as the newly-named cuddly green chameleon. " Ya know, 'Rob' has a nice ring to it...

ZDNet UK reports that people who voted for best Linux distribution at the LinuxWorld, chose SuSE. Congratulations SuSE! (and if I might add a comment, please improve the GUI installer, maybe even release a beta version before going gold).

GauteL writes "Sigurd Rinde, a typical desktop user, talks about how Linux can replace Windows for everyday use. He talks about word processing, presentations, Web editing, accounting, calendars, etc. Read more here."

Soko writes "Linux-Mandrake has joined SUSE, Red Hat and Caldera in porting their distribution to Alpha and SPARC architectures. The announcement was originally found on freshmeat and talks about getting help from Alpha Processors Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. MandrakeSoft has ported its latest popular version of the Linux operating system, Linux-Mandrake 7.0, to the above processors. "

Chris Halsall writes "Based on the great feedback generated by the posting of my Web Browsers under Linux article on /. and LinuxToday last month, WebReview has published an unplanned follow-up article covering four more browsers.

By Popular Demand: More Linux Browsers "

BigDaddyJ writes "I saw over on The Gadgeteer that Samsung has developed a PDA design that uses Linux. It has a color display and can play MP3's as well. Check it out here. You know you want it... but right now it appears they're still looking for suppliers. " Neato. Strange that the title for the Web page refers to it as a "Samsung USB PC Camera".