Chris DiBona wrote in to send us this summary of Linus' talk over at the BALUG. Lots of pictures and a good summary of the talk. Worth a gander.

Alan Hodgkinson asks: "I would like to setup a bunch of Linux boxes without keyboards and monitors. The systems must be accessable/controlable via their serial ports, including the ability to send them a hard reset. Sun Sparc hardware has this feature. You can remove the keyboard and the system will boot and send all its console output through the serial port. You can even reset the machine by sending a break to the serial port. Is there any hardware available for PCs that will provides this functionality? (And that works on a wide variety of PC hardware). ISPs must face this problem. What do they do? Tips anyone?"

Skeezix writes "Linus says that he aims to make kernel upgrades more incremental instead of cramming tons of features into each major upgrade. The net result? The next major kernel upgrade might be out by Fall." I still haven't worked out all my kinks with 2.2 yet, at this rate 2.4 will be out before I sort it out!

Andrew Dvorak wrote to us with Andrew Leonard's latest Salon piece about the in-progress Mindcraft II testing. Interesting reading-and the difference between the OSes is evident-Linux sent hacks, MS marketers.

ulissesr asks: "Hi there! I just bought SuSE Linux v6.1 featuring linux 2.2.7 and had no problems installing it. My problem is my ISDN adapator, which is a pcbit-d by Octal! I just haven't found a way to get it to work with the new kernel or could it be the new ipppd verion? Can some good soul point me to a dial-up script for ipppd with PAP authentication?"

Bathmat wrote in to send us a story on new Linux Telephony. I'm sure most of you realize that this is an area where Linux still tends to lag behind certain other OSs. This one is about White Pine who is apparently hooking up with Red Hat to provide this stuff under Linux.

VA Linux Systems has been selected as a Fortune Magazine "Cool Company". You can get the whole scoop on the Fortune site. The article talks about some of the people that have been been hired in by VA recently for the Linux Labs as well - with Jon "Mad Dog" Hall being one of them.

DJ Jose wrote in to note that the Compaq Itsy is making the PR rounds again. We've mentioned this a few times in the past (seems that every few months it gets some new publicity). For those who haven't been here all along, Itsy is a tiny little butt kicking Linux box that I lust after and occasionally have erotic dreams about. But lets not talk about that now.

After many months of hacking, Alan Cox has released what is likely to be the last 2.0 kernel. He writes in his diary that we will only see 2.0.38 if there is some sort of security hole. For those who don't know the drill by now, you can download the kernel from any kernel.org mirror.

Gerr asks: "I'm looking into building a project that uses S-Video output to display a simple menu system onto a television/monitor (or going through a stereo to display output to a device). Are there any Linux projects currently working on S-Video or anyone in the world of Linux hacking who has some technical information about displaying information via this protocol? "

dfn_doe asks: "Is there an easy way to replicate a very large Linux install across multiple machines using a CDR as the transfer medium?? I have 9 boxes that need to have about 9 gigs of Web, Database, and other information spread across two drives and 10 partitions and I REALY don't want to do it manually. Any utilities? Any suggestions? In case anyone is interested this is for serving a large distributed database to a secure Web Server." Using a CDR? That's odd, if you have a newtork, you should be using that to automate installation as opposed to burning loads of CDs (not to mention the installation). What do you all think?

muadib wants to know about the following: "Given the current discussions on tuning, I am trying to find out if there are any performance monitoring applications for Linux. I don't mean things like xload, xosview, etc which provide only a small amount of data. For anyone who's done benchmarking under NT, I mean something like their built in perfmon utility that lets you view and capture just about any statistic on your system or on a remote system. Capturing is the specific functionality I'm looking for b/c I'm working on a Linux device driver, and it would be nice to have historical data of CPU utilization, interrupts/s, etc. so that I can compare complete system perfomance between code revisions."

Denovous writes "WYSE is apparently producing a new Linux thin client based upon the Slackware distribution, instead of Java as originally planned. The client can be started without a network, as the OS resides in 8.5 MB of memory. Check the article out here "

Vamphyri writes "An ABC News correspondent says the ``Linux market will, as promised, now be dominated by RedHat's commercial success.'' which he goes on to say is a good thing. The full story is here but way down at bottom of page. " It actually offers one quite interesting comment: Red Hat netted 10 million last year, and devoted 20% of that to R&D. The IPO will raise almost $100M. If they continue that trend, they will put $20M into Linux, GNOME, and more. Interesting.

John Campbell writes "Linux 2.2.10, the next in the stable kernel series, is out. It's about a 300k patch, and it contains the fix for the DoS bug recently reported here (if you've already patched it, don't let patch back the fix back out... you are using patches, right?), as well as assorted other stuff. The new kernel patches can be found, as usual, on ftp.xx.kernel.org, where xx is your country code. "

juniorboy sent us JP Mogenthal's latest piece from Internetwork, this timing cautioning people about Linux and along the way tries to get at the root of why people are switching.

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."