A person known as "Barry the Suit" wrote in to tell us that he has seen the Red Hat Road Show (eg, the time when the top dogs go try to convince guys with mega bucks to buy lots of their stock when the IPO happens). He wrote a summary of the event which is actually quite interesting- tends towards the financial side, but since Red Hat is the first Linux company to make this lonely journey, its really interesting to follow it. Hit the link to read the report.

Non-Newtonian Fluid writes "The Register has an interesting article which explains exactly how Linux could rise up and defeat M$ by taking advantage of the Easy PC specification and Micro$oft's own inability to keep pace with the demands of new hardware. " The article also mentions BeOS and other possible Windows competitors. A good "makes you think" piece.

Bowie J. Poag writes "First it was "The eligibility profile will have no bearing on your ability to participate." Then, it was "Sorry! you failed the eligibility profile since you dont have half a million in the bank and 20 years trading experience. Bye." Now we've come full circle, thanks to a great deal of flames from the community.. E-Trade is backing down and letting us in. "

Anonymous Crow writes "I was wondering how many other people out there are in the same situation: I was lucky enough to get "invited" to participate in the Red Hat IPO, but after I opened an account and moved my money I was told that I'm ineligible for the IPO... because I have no stock-trading experience. I opened an E-TRADE account for this purpose, and moved $1400 there to buy Red Hat stock. When I attempted to place my "indication of interest" (which is how you get into an IPO on E-TRADE) I had to answer a bunch of questions stating I'm not an employee of a stock-trading firm, not an employee of Red Hat, etc. And, by the way, how much stock I own and how ofter I play the stock market. After answering these questions the E-TRADE oracle apologized nicely and informed me of my ineligibility. Now, those of you that do this often are probably chuckling at my naivete, but honestly: I'm a linux geek, not a stock trader. Isn't it ridiculous to "invite" a bunch of linux geeks to buy Red Hat if only experienced traders are eligible? And shouldn't Red Hat have known better? " (I've had at least a dozen people contact me with exactly this problem)

Wonko42 writes "The subject pretty much says it all; Red Hat is now selling its new E-Commerce server for $149.99. The server is packaged with several other programs, including the Netscape Roaming Module, Squid proxy, and Webalyzer web server log analyzer. And of course, it's built to run on Red Hat 6.0. "

According to a company press release published today on Yahoo!Finance, TurboLinux is now the top-selling Japanese computer operating system. Not just the top-selling Linux distribution, but the top-selling OS, period, with sales almost as great as those of the Windows 98 commercial release and the Windows 98 commercial update combined. If only new commercial OS sales, not upgrades, are considered, things look even rosier for TurboLinux, which claims 24.09% of total market share as opposed to 13.25% for Win98 and 10.23% for Macintosh.

Joseph writes "Red Hat looks like it put those Atomic Vision folks to work with a new site design. More hype before their IPO?" I'm just glad to see a simpler, more elegant design.

Tekmage hooked us up with an Interview with Alan Cox called "Number two -- with a bullet" that is currently running over at the Ottawa Citizen. Its a nice piece- as always, Alan is super cool. Nice picture of his "Unconventional Appearance" too ;)

PhiberOptik asks: "I recently got a BP6 board, with onboard ULTRA66 controllers and ran into a problem with my Red Hat 6.0 installation. It seems that Red Hat Linux will not support the controllers, which my main hard disks are hooked up to. So far as I know, no Linux distros exist with ULTRA66 support, and BeOS or Solaris 7 won't recognize them either. Are there any updates or distros which support this new technology?"

A Nameless Slashdotter submitted this question: "IP Masquerading (NAT under FreeBSD) is straight from the Gods. Yet it has a few very large drawbacks, such as inability to do DCC or ICQ file transfers, or play games over the internet on one of the Masq'ed machines, even with the "irc" and "quake" masquerading modules loaded. Someone give me options to solve this problem, be it another operating system, a firewall setting, a program or setup!"

Magnus Huckvale asks: "We'd like to kit our new flat out with a MP3/Linux stereo system, with a set of stereo speakers in each room. Does anyone have any experience with fitting more than one soundcard to a Linux box? Is it possible to synchronise MP3 players outputting to different cards? What other capabilities can we build in given the hardware? What (cheap) soundcard would do? PCI or ISA?" While this is an interesting question, I think it would be easier to wire both sets of speakers to one soundcard rather than fiddling with two (and the headache involved in getting both to work properly). What do you all think?

kmb asks: "I recently bought a Gateway PC with an integrated Creative Labs Sound Blaster AudioPCI 64D sound card. Apparently Gateway is the only vendor to use this particular card and also apparently it differs in some sometimes significant ways from the other SB AudioPCI 64 cards. I've looked at a few web pages, but this is my first time trying to do anything with a PC sound card and besides which, most of the info I've seen is Windows-specific. I'm running RedHat 6.0 and ended up installing the ALSA-project sound drivers because I wasn't having much success with the OSS drivers. I've gotten some apps to record, but the card still isn't acting the way I expect it to. (For instance, I'd really like to get Slab 3.0 working, but even though I can see the VU meter picking up the sound input, when I go to record I get nada.) So, does anyone have configuration and/or driver tips or specs or anything about this particular card?"

Desperado wrote in to tell us that according to This InfoWeek Story, the 6.2 release of SuSE is scheduled for August and will have new/updated packages including IBM's ViaVoice, XF86 3.3.4 and VMware 1.0.

nestea` asks: "OK! I want to know if it is possible to burn Video CDs from Linux with cdrecord or some sort of recording software. As I understand it Video CD is not like normal CDROMs and can not be read the same way (according to www.mpegtv.com). The MpegTV site is my main source for Linux VCD info. Ideas?"

dayeight wrote in to tell us about Linux Mandrake's new DiskDrake GUI Disk Partitioner and resizer GTK Based replacement for FIPS or Partition Magic- it looks like a promising for the free world.

An anonymous told us that they recieved a little surprise in their inbox from Red Hat today: The NC boys have reserved a chunk of shares to be purchased on E*Trade by contributors to the open source comunity before the masses get their chance to super inflate them. Very cool on RHs part (even tho I didn't seem to make the cut *sniffle* :)

dpg writes "CALU '99 (Conference of Australian Linux Users) is over, and there is a web page up with lots of neat stuff (audio and lots of pics of your favourite Linux icons, including Raster, Federico, John "maddog" Hall, Paul Russel, Andrew Tridgell, etc, etc) Enjoy. " They even have an icecast going! I personally look forward to reading some of the conference papers.

fatherdatabase writes "After a slight delay, Oracle finally releases a port of 8.1.5 for Linux. Requires a (free) technet account. Check it out here. " It's a free download, but they do require e-mail address, etc etc. Have fun.

IsleOfView wrote in with prove that there will never be a shortage of new distributions. This one is called stormix and its based on Debian, but has assorted advanced installation tools.

NoWhere Man noted a story on CNet that that talks about Red Hat and their plans to Create a full blown Linux Portal. They note the fact that RH has job openings in San Fran, as well as the trivia that they recently hired 20 (!) people from Atomic Vision. They note that RH will be competing more directly with VAs Linux.com, and of course, yours truly.