Kristian Köhntopp writes "IGEL Systems, a german maker of embedded and thin client Linux systems, is promising DM 30.000 (approx. US $20.000) for the development of a functioning X11 RDP-client, German Linux Magazin reports. The resulting program will be made available under the GNU GPL. The english translation follows."

Nils sent in a few Debian announcements this morning including links to Software in the Public Interests new web pages and and Open Letter from Corel thanking the Debian guys for their NetWinder port.

Klas Elmby writes "I have completed the building of a MP3CD player for my home-stereo. I hope this could inspire/help others to do the same thing. It is based on a Matrix Orbital LCD-display with keypad interface and ... yes, linux. " Now that is what I want for Christmas! The RIAA needs to back off so we can all buy these things. With 9 gigs hard drives. Imagine not having to rummage through mountains of CDs to find that perfect track. Update the other link died fairly quickly. Klas has since moved the pages here.

Now I can selfishly abuse Slashdot and pose my own Ask Slashdot! I need a new scanner, and it (duh) needs to work under Linux. There's a lot of scanners listed as supported by SANE, but what have folks used, and what works good? Color, Flatbed, 600DPI, Cheap. Update looks like I'll need a SCSI PCMCIA controller too. So feel free to throw out suggestions on that too...

Barry Roberts sent us a link to an upside article which I guess is yala (yet another linux article) although this one has a few interesting quotes. Check it out if you're interested.

Pacific HiTech is to enter the US market. Currently it has has more than 50 percent of the Japanese Linux market, making it the second largest Linux distribution worldwide. Interestingly Pacific HiTech has been successful in the chip corporate market, and includes as customers the Japanese Broadcasting Corp., HSBC Securities Japan Ltd., and the Otsuka Shokai group, one of Japan's largest office supplies and systems integration firms. I'm also guessing that TurboLinux 3.0 is to be released soon. Any Japanese capable readers care to confirm? The first link was found in LWN.

Anas Nashif writes "There is an effort in germany to build the biggest linux cluster in the world and present it in a LIVe TV show this december. More info in German but babelfish will the job for you ;) "

Tom Minchin writes "Red Hat 5.2 is about to be released. The directory has appeared on the mirror sites (locked down of course) and official RedHat dealers have pricing and are taking orders."

Norm J, who I had the pleasure of seeing again at ALS, dropped a line to let everyone know that the Linux Resouces Wish List has opened it's doors. This is a project to convince ISVs that porting their software to Linux is a must do, and convince the companies that it is worth the time to port it. So, head over, vote, and add your software to the wish list.

Rich Payne writes " Alphalinux.org is now open. The hope of this site is to provide a comprehensive resource for the Alpha-Linux community. " Nuts, with a URL like that, I was hoping it was a dairy products distributor or something. *grin*.

EETimes interviewed Linus recently. Nothing terribly new, but nice to see more mainstream press attention.

branvanman writes "Cahners In-Stat Group Expects Linux to Gain Popularity within the Telecom Industry" Apparently this is related to the fact Linux is more stable than NT.

sune writes "It seems the big bad bit-bucket has swallowed x11amp, no information is available yet (more info will be available soon according to the homepage.) " update: Thanks to D Hall Stevenson for alerting us to the fact the site was cracked. In fact x11amp is going to be GPL'd and converted to GTK.

haaz writes "Applix is looking at doing a port of Applix Anyware Office to Linux for PowerPC processors. Please send a message saying "I want Applixware!" (or something to that effect) to iwantapplix@linuxppc.org. The market is a lot bigger than people realize on PPC, and if there was a really good office package, e.g. Applix, we'd have hundreds, if not thousands more people in Linux full-time, and they could drop the Mac OS completely. "

Adam Glass wrote in to say "Stuart Anderson, Chairman of the Linux Standard Base Written Specification Subcommittee, recently spoke at a meeting of FLUX -- Florida Linux User Xchange. The discussion was wide-ranging and informative, giving a clear picture of the LSB project's purpose and implementation. A transcript can be found here. "

Ladies and gentleman, both Hemos and I arrived Safely back in Holland yesterday afternoon. After spending all night catching up on 3 days of reply required email, writing a paper, and finishing all my homework, I finally now have a chance to sit back and write a summary of the whole event as best as I can muster. So it that link and read on if you're curious.

Andy Tai writes "Printer makers are working together to define a single universal printer driver. Called the Universal Printer Driver Format, it will replace the 3000 printer drivers in existence. UPDF will allow the characteristic of each printer to be described in a text file, residing in the printer itself." S: This effort is 2 years old (not related to Intel's initiative) if you look on their website. It looks pretty open from their IPP pages, including specs and apparently joining is free. Looks to me like an area where Linux participation may be beneficial for Linux and the PWG by providing early widespread testing (if printer manufacturers release descriptions for existing printers in file format before actually including them in their newer printers).

David Raufeisen writes "Opera Software has had an ongoing project to port its lightweight web browser to non-ms operating systems such as Linux,macos,BeOS and OS/2. In their latest status report they noted that the Linux and Macos teams have failed and they are shifting the project to another team, Delays suck.. I personally can't weight to try out their web browser in Linux.. I used it heavily in windows before and it is superb. "

An anonymous contributor wrote to us that "An employee of SAP (the company that created R/3, a software comparable to Baan and Peoplesoft, loved by managers), wrote at de.comp.os.unix.discussion: "There is a company-internal version of R/3 for Linux". " This goes towards supporting Oracle's view about Linux, and not HP's. Could someone find the message for us on dejanews? I tried but failed.

Don Krause asks: "One of my department heads approached me and stated that he 'needs NT server and IIS4.0+ active index' to produce a searchable database for our field service engineers. I'm sure this can be accomplished using Apache on Linux, but I haven't located an acceptable search engine. Any suggestions?"