Chuck Milam writes "Red Hat has announced Red Hat Europe. Interesting--I wonder if they're going to give SuSE a run for the money? " Looks like they are opening a German and UK office, and have announced that Colin Tenwick (of Sybase) will be in charge.

weezer writes "LinuxToday has a nice little article about a Dataquest study that claims that Linux will account for about 24% of the server market by 2003. "

hfcs writes "Just browsing the Red Hat Careers page, and a good number of their open positions are listed as being in San Franscisco. Just a couple of weeks ago, all positions were listed as being in RTP, NC. Hmmmm.... "

Computer Associates looks like it has finally released it's UniCenter Managment Framework for Red Hat Linux. Other distros to follow soon, and you can order a free CD from CA.

Nils sent a release to the Debian Announce mailing list proclaiming that Linux Laptops Ltd is up and running, and (surprise!) they're whole deal is reselling Laptops with Linux Pre-installed. And they're shipping them with Debian as their distribution of choice. Pre-installed portables are still a hole in the Linux hardware realm, hopefully this will work out.

Full details on this page at Linux Today, where Alan Cox says, "A lot of updates here. I've not chased down the lockd bug reports yet, nor the umount nfsd bug that is trapped by the SLAB debugging. This mops up most of the stuff while I've been occupied elsewhere. Chances are given the number of updates there will be a few glitches in it. Have fun testing."

drdestructo asks : "I am looking to serve files and printers from a Linux machine to Macs, Linux clients and one Win98 machine (stuborn users!). I need somthing that will work with all three platforms. To the best of my knowledge, MacOS has yet to be infected with SMB, so I think that's out. What else might I use to solve this headache. Right now our solution involves a frightening ftp solution. We currently have printers connected locally to different machines, and use PDF for cross platform compatiablility. There has to be somthing better than this. Please help." To my knowledge there ARE commercial SMB clients available for the Mac, like DAVE. Also, there are Appletalk clients available for Win32... COPSTalk being the one that sticks in my mind the most. Anybody else have any suggestions?

Christian Winebrenner writes "RedHat seems to have seen the new licensing terms on rdist (background story: Pseudo-Free software...) and decided that the best solution to the problem is to recommend that users DOWNgrade to the previous version. Their RH 6.0 errata page offers the solution of ditching rdist 6.1.5 in favor of 6.1.0. Who knows how long it will be until we find that distributions will be riddled with "holes" from out of date non-free-for-commercial-use software? "

malacai sent us a press release that finally gives some good details on Red Hat's impending IPO. 6 Million Shares. $10-$12/share. The Week of August 9 (no surprise that its during LinuxWorld). The symbol will be RHAT.

drix asks: "Like many I'm running a Linux gateway between my home network and cable internet connection. Naturally, I'd like it if my Linux server, 4 Win 98 boxes, and iMac could do a nightly backup. The problem is I only have one tape drive, which is, of course, situated in the server. So my question is what software exists that, a) runs on Linux, b) exists in a client server form, where the server runs a "backup daemon" that each client connects to to backup its respective hard disk each night, and c) has clients available for Windows and optionally Mac? I guess the analogous NT ware would be Seagate Backup Exec, which runs on an NT server and polls NT workstations nightly for any changed files, and then uses delta file compression to zip those changes to the server's tape drive. I don't need anything that complicated, but I must have the basic ability to move the files."

Matthew Pavlovich, head of the new LiViD project, has released source code (from an anonymous source) to allow CSS unlocking on DVD drives. This means people with DVD drives (only IDE at the moment, SCSI soon) will be able to copy the raw, encrypted, MPEG off the disc. Once this software is refined, all that will be necessary to watch DVD movies under Linux will be a hardware decoder or a special software decoder (which would have to be non-free).

st. augustine asks this question which I'm sure many of you still in dorms might find useful: "I'm going to be moving into a very small dorm room in a few months and every square inch of space is going to be at a premium. I'd like a small Linux box and I want decent price/performance -- a year or two ago a Cobalt Qube or Corel Rebel.com Netwinder looked okay, but paying $1000 for one of these puppies just doesn't seem reasonable when you can get an AMD box that's twice as fast for $400. Only problem is that the AMD box is the size of a refrigerator, and I'm going to need that space for a refrigerator. Any suggestions?" Ah, yes, I remember the days of living in closets dorm rooms. Does anyone have any pointers?

RelliK asks: "I have a small LAN at home, 4 workstations and a gateway sharing a cable modem. My workstation is running SuSE 6.1 and the gateway is running Debian 2.1. Both machines are using the 2.2.9 kernel. The problem is that telnet and rlogin from my workstation to the gateway is slow to the point of being absolutely unusable. It takes several seconds for a character to appear on the sccreen after I type it. FTP is also jerky: It transfers files fast, but it appears as though it's constanly "hitting speed bumps", so to speak, especially when it's about 95% done. I've tried everything I could think of to fix the problem, but no luck. I'd *greatly* appreciate it if any of you could help me." Now this just sounds downright strange. Does anyone have any ideas as to what's causing this? Click below for more.

BogoMips sent us an interesting tidbit running in Performance Computing currently. Jon "maddog" Hall explains some of the benchmarking issues associates with the DH Brown reports, as well as the ubiquitous Mindcraft tests. Very well written article, IMHO.

EvilNight writes "There's an interesting article up on Salon that makes a few comparisons between Red Hat and Microsoft. Interesting reading. They also touch a little on the squabbles between LinuxCare and Red Hat. " A very good article. Covers a lot of the issues, and clearly.

Kelly McNeill sent in a pointer to this article by Todd Burgess. Here's a quote from it: "The concept of Linux for the Masses is an honorable goal but one that must not be taken too lightly. The purpose of this article is to point out several of the current limitations in Linux and what should be done to create a usable system." You might want to hit the links at the bottom of the article and check out some of Todd's earlier writing on the subject of Linux usability. You may not agree with him, but his opinions are always backed by sound thinking and are well worth reading.

A fair number of you probably voted in the recent poll about Borland exploring Linux development. As the other article touched on, they are looking to hire people, and are running a poll to test the waters. However, the prior poll's server got slashdotted, and they missed a lot of people's comments. If you didn't make it at first, head over again and make your voice heard.

Philipp Rumpf writes "SuSE began shipping the first official version of their SuSE distribution for Compaq's (former Digital's) 64-bit Alpha architecture this week in Germany. " I'm glad to see SuSE finally expanding into non-x86 platforms. With any luck, it'll be available in the states soon.

MaxAttack asks: "I wanted to look into setting up a PPP server and things to keep it running smoothly but i couldn't find any infomation...like FAQs on setting up Linux to use a borax line, setting up the server itself, setting scripts to check track of users time on, kicking users off after certain times, and security for it. I'm just looking for some basic infomation to get started on a PPP server couldnt find anything good, Any help on this would be great.."

hooligan writes "This is an annoucement from Adaptec for support for their new transfer speed for Linux. Check the press release."