Black Parrot writes "Linux Today posted a link to this collection of case studies of Linux in the enterprise. It makes interesting reading, and will be a good advocacy reference for when your boss comes around asking whether Linux can really do the job. "

Spud wrote to us with an interview with ESR. Fairly standard material - why Linux is better, and why the Open Source idea works. It's good to see ESR back in the swing of things again, tho'.

Andrew Hutton wrote me with some interesting news about his Ottawa Linux Symposium. It seems that they now have some prizes to give away, including 2 Netwinders, and a bunch of User Friendly hats, plus a few copies of Civ: CTP. He says that with any luck, anyone who registers before July 1st should have a 1 in 20 chance of winning a prize. Also, it seems there now is an IA-64 talk, a Mozilla talk (our friend Mike is a busy man, it seems), and of course, Alan Cox's keynote. If I get lucky, I'll be giving a tutorial while I'm there (if I'm there). Stay tuned and check the website for further details.

EvilNight asks: "How do you get an IDE CD-ROM changer to work with Linux? I know the kernel has support for these devices but I have tried to use them in the past and have had no luck (with the NEC 6x4). I am planning a fileserver which needs to have the ability to serve up 20 CD-ROM discs and I really want to use Linux for it. SCSI changers are easy to set up (increment LUNs). The cost of SCSI changers is a bit high though (about $190). The IDE changers are very cheap ($85). I was looking at the Nakamichi 16x5 IDE changer. Has anyone had any luck getting it to work under Linux? Will the discs switch on demand or do you need to switch them by running a command? How does it handle an access conflict such as trying to read discs 2 and 5 at the same time? I would greatly appreciate any advice that you can give me."

Rounding out a week with a lot of Red Hat news, def con cyber has written a good piece describing what a lot of you have been talking about: changes in Red Hat over the last few years. I think that this one sums up quite well a lot of the email I've been getting regarding RH. As a side note, the Slashdot feed on their portal site has been blatantly deleting all stories about them. They say that the SEC is requires this of them, so all I can say is that if you want uncut Slashdot, get it here. But then again, you probably were anyway... *grin*

Chmarr asks: "I'm trying to get a GNU/Linux box (Red hat-5.2) running with two differing ethernet cards (rtl-8029 and rtl-8139). While the box works just great with one or the other of the cards (using the ne2k-pci and rtl-8139 drivers, respecively) I run into problems if I try and use both cards simultaneously. The rtl-8139 driver loads, finds the 8029 card, complains and gives up. I'd love to be able to control how the PCI driver problems for cards, but the old ISA method (io=0x6100 irq=5 on insmod) doesnt work for PCI: it complains that the symbols aren't available. Does anyone know how to force a PCI driver to look at a particular address?"

Eric asks: "Does anyone have some information for people learning how to setup a GRE tunnel with linux? I know there is kernel support, but that's about as far as i've gotten, I can't seem to find any info on the web about how to setup a GRE tunnel. And major and minor number for making a GRE0 device would be gladly accepted."

knarf noted a story linked from LinuxToday about Red Hat's IPO called Red Hat's Charity Case at Andover News. Several people noted that the story has many errors. Fortunately knarf has written a pretty good summary of what he considers wrong about the article. Several of them are a bit extreme, but many are good points. If you read the original, this is a good rebuttal worth reading.

Wil Mahan writes "Salon has a short article with some interesting details about the upcoming Red Hat IPO. It gives a brief overview of the S-1 filing, including potential "risk factors", such as the threat of being squashed by Microsoft. The full text of the filing is also available (warning: 1.5 MB of legalese). "

Miguel de Icaza , GNOME Guru, and candidate for most hyper human being in the history of humans being, has written an essay discussing Red Hat and the beating that they have taken within the Linux Community. This is worth a read.

Gryphon writes "PC Magazine has published a pretty level-headed 8-page review of the Linux 2.2 kernel. Mostly a features review, compared to Windows NT. I think this is pretty significant, considering a lot of Windows users (including me in years now past) read that magazine! "

Several people have written in lately to note that LinuxHQ has moved to Kernel Notes. But the plot thickened recently when LinuxHQ sprung back to life looking quite similiar to its predecessor, but with a different license. Kernel Notes is GPL, copyrighted by the LinuxHQ Project, but the "New" LinuxHQ is copyrighted by ECS and not GPLd (as well as not crediting the creator of the nice logo up top). Can anyone clarify the confusion for us all? I'm getting a lot of questions about this and a lot of it smells pretty fishy.

cpt kangarooski writes "Well, an enterrising reporter over at Salon has found that certain blue comments in some Linux source code may make it eligible to be censored in Australia. Take a look here " Mmm...fun with censorship. Congrats go to Jamais Cascio (known as cynical around here), Slashdot reader, and author of the Salon article.

Vox wrote in to send us a link to a feature that appears over at Linux Today. The article is called Linux is not Red Hat and describes the fears that a growing number of the old school Linux users have been expressing lately. Specifically it talks about MetroWorks deciding to only support Red Hat for their CodeWarrior for Linux release.

The first of the big Linux IPOs is here: Red Hat has announced they have filed for an initial public offering. Details are sketchy, but the word on the street is that the stock will be very difficult to get ahold of. Now, when's the VA IPO? :)

The folks at ZD are hosting the Open Source Forum in Texas June 30 - July 1 in Austin, TX. LUGs get special rates-so if you are interested in going, click below. Hot. That's what Austin on June 30 makes me think.

After many months of discussion and flaming, Debian has chosen a new logo. The new "swirl" graphic can be seen here, and the results of the vote are here.

Principal Skinner writes " The main feature on Userweb has a pretty good exposé of Linux, the open-source movement, and trends in OSes. Heavily slams NT on reliability, scalability and TCO, as well as raising questions about whether Windows2000 is The Answer. Also talks a bit about Novell and its products. "

bpdlr writes "A recent survey carried out by the Microsoft Exchange Forum in the UK shows that 20% of NT/Exchange admins in UK enterprises see Linux as a potential alternative to NT, up from 0% in six months (it's a PDF file, see page 4). Compare that with only 29% sure they will upgrade to Win2000. "

Software in the Public Interest, Inc. is now formally a 501 (c) (3) non-profit organization, meaning that all donations are now tax deductible. SPI is the umbrella organization of several free software projects, primarily Debian, but also GNOME, Berlin, and the Open Hardware project. They (Disclaimer: I am a Debian developer, and thus associated with SPI) claim to hold the Open Source mark.