malacai pointed out a story on biz.yahoo.com about all the awards that Red Hat has been getting. Plus, their recent (pending) acquisition, Cygnus, also seems to be getting a wall's worth of plaques. Maybe we should think about giving Red Hat some kind of special award for "Most Awards Won by a Linux Company in 1999." One thing's for sure: Red Hat has done lots to promote Linux in general, and deserves strong applause for their efforts no matter which Linux distribution you personally prefer.

Bartmoss writes "Intel and the venture capital firm Apax are investing 12 million Euro in SuSE. Read the press release online. Looks like they want to open up new offices in parts of Europe, start moving into the Asian markets, and do the fashionable IPO thing. "

Kelly McNeill pointed us over to a new article: "Browsing through ZDNet's feedback a while back, I lighted on the now standard debate on the merits of Linux and related Operating Systems versus those of Microsoft Windows NT. One thing eventually got me thinking. In every posting that claimed success with using NT, the factor that was claimed as guaranteeing success, was never NT's 'superior' technology, which has been Microsoft's line all along, but instead the time spent in doing things right. In other words, the reason why some companies could claim success with their deployment of NT was good old elbow-grease/sweat equity. "

antigen fiend wrote in to note that Debian Weekly News has a bit about a recent debate about a Debian port to the FreeBSD Kernel. There are several comments relating to licensing, ease of porting, and other relevant topics. Its definitely an interesting project, with a lot of political and technical snags. Any thoughts?

Andreas Spengler asks: "Can anyone confirm that in the newest development kernel version 2.3.23 Linux seems to be able to address 64GB of physical memory? Has anyone tried this out?" If this has happened, then it is a good thing.

JayZee writes "The guys at Shugashack have word on John Carmack's plans now that Quake3 is finished. He's going to be looking into cyberspace virtual realities, and even better he's going to be working on open source projects like glx much more! " Well, that's a nice mix: Free Software projects and realizing cyberspace realities, combined with a man who can make them happen.

wally@smug asks: "I work for a company that is developing a computer-based hardware product. For the O/S, we are (of course) using Linux. The GPL issue is this: the hardware and software are set up for a specific set of tasks, and users fiddling with the software setup would be a bad thing (and a potentially huge source of returns of "faulty" products). So users will not have an account or root password given to them (as it's not required to use the product). However, it's still Linux, and it's still under the GPL. So, we are distributing the Linux binaries, and so there has to be access to the source and we'd like to avoid having to distribute a Source Code CD with every system." Are there other options that might work? Would a visible web page with links to the source code be sufficient?

UuCon writes "On LinuxPR.com there is announcement about Co-Founder of Linux Today, Dave Whitinger has announced LinSight. A "Powerful, artificially intelligent network of websites will provide world-class service to the Linux community." Funny thing that the first member of the team listed is Elton Wells, who has "left his position as Program Manager of Developer Tools at Microsoft to join LinSight". "

Structured Audio writes "Kenwood America (the speaker maker) has moved from Pick to Linux for its enterprise resource planning apps. This Techweb article explains why Kenwood chose Linux over NT or a commercial Unix." ERP and financials are among the most important areas for Linux and open source to shine if they are to be accepted by the corporate world.

Jah-Wren Ryel writes " Vnunet is reporting that IBM has a version of Linux ported to their S/390 mainframe architecture waiting in the wings. Apparently there are two versions, one that runs under VM (a kind of meta-os, sort of like VMware) and one that runs on the bare hardware." An "anonymous source" and "speculation from analysts" story. Nothing official from IBM. Please read and judge accordingly.

krshultz writes "Salon has a piece on Red Hat's aquisition of Cygnus Solutions. It mentions concerns that shareholders might see more dollar signs in proprietary software, and there's an interesting bit about the future of things like gcc." I didn't know gcc had a steering committee. It's nice to see its developers concerned about what all this will mean to the community.

calibanDNS writes "SuSE has a news article on their web page announcing a new partnership with VA Linux. Apparently SuSE will help develop a software load for VA systems. " Co-development is set to start in December and will mean that SuSE will be an option on VA systems.

jazzman45 writes "3dfx has released glide v3 as open source. There's the link to the driver's page. It has support for XF86 v4 and it's DRI structure! I found a link to someone's screenshots of Q3Arena in Linux. "

Donald "I fixed Rob's X Key" Becker wrote in to report from that other conference that is happening right now: Super Computing 99. Reports and picture of the freebies, the parties, and a somewhat surprising extra little sponsor.

Neil99 wrote to us with the news that Mandrake has announced Jean-Loup Gailly will be joining them as CTO. He's the author of gzip, and co-author Zlib. Very interesting - makes you wonder where they will be going next.

nick++ writes "I was browsing iwin's site (iwin is a German company who is supposedly making some formerly-slashdot-mentioned Amiga-compatible machines), and found Xetos. According to iwin, 'Xetos is an operating system based on a Linux kernel which was extended by many components and features.' For example, '...there is a special Amiga mode included which allows you to use most of your older Amiga software.' I wonder if any of these "extensions" are GPLed?" Also, does "based on" mean we're looking at a kernel fork? Or is this just another new Linux distro? If anybody out there has tried Xetos, please let us know what it's like. Thanks.

We all know about Mozilla. It's one of the major 'poster children' for the entire Open Source concept. Build 9, Build 10, Build 11, and so on. Someday there will be a Mozilla that will run without crashing, and we'll love it. Someday. Then there's Opera's Linux - and BeOS, Mac, EPOC and OS/2 - ports. Over the last week we've had 100+ readers submit the news that (proprietary shareware) Opera for Linux is close to beta release. But there's another potentially exciting Linux browser in the works that has hardly gotten any publicity. (continued)

Jsutin asks: "Does anyone have a working FreeS/WAN implementation talking to Checkpoint Firewall1? I've searched through a lot of Linux archives, FreeS/WAN archives, sent people email, and last but not least asked God to help me. And unfortunately all has fallen through! I've run across a few threads here and there that say it can be done but no documents explaining how to do it. I'm trying to push Linux as a VPN gateway for remote offices and would be greatly appreciative if anyone reading this has any suggestions?" "

xjamie writes "Red Hat has more changes under their hat. CNet is running a story saying Matthew Szulik will replace Bob Young as Red Hat's CEO." So we went and bothered Bob at the LinuxToday booth. The deal is that he is going to be the Chairman, and focus more on the Open Source aspects of the business, and Matthew is gonna be more concerned with the next quarter's bottom line.

Well, now it's official. Red Hat buys Cygnus for $674 Million. (Short story here.) I'm sure we're going to see lots of attention from the media in the following hours. What do you think?