Chrome Void sent us a link to this page. It is purely speculative and rumour based, but it discusses Intel's upcoming Merced platform, and a rumour of an "Official" Intel port to the new line of CPUs. Read it if you're curious.

I was sent in this story by several people but the first was Robert Herrmann. This place speaks about a Linux/Pilot port. It's rough, but it'll probably smooth out if the project gains some intertia.

Oh boy. A new kernel. Major updates include IPv4 and IPNG (IPNG) updates, AX.25 updates, ELF header files for all platforms, updates for almost all 3Com cards, and a few Alpha boot fixes.

In the last several months, several new Linux news sites have sprung up. While Officially I recommend you still visit Slashdot every 14 seconds, but sites like Linux Weekly News sent in by Shane provide even more news on the Linux front, and everyone likes that.

lilo wrote in to tell us about another nasty hole in the devel series of kernels. He writes " Ultima (Marc Santoro) at irc.linpeople.org has discovered a security hole in Linux 2.1.x which is fairly novel. It has to do with IP fragment expirations, and does not affect production kernels. He's made the patch available and it's on the LinPeople security page. He'll be providing the exploit in a couple of days and it will be posted in the same place."

Max Lingua writes " a new (development) version of dosemu is avaible from S.u.S.E. at suse.com And - what's more - Hans Larmen (one of the project developer) has mailed me letting me know that a know stable (even) version should be out in the fist quarter of this year."

It's impossible to accurately say how many Linux boxes are out there. Estimates range from a half a million to 10 million. TBTF has an interesting writeup in their latest issue using various estimates to guess at how many boxes there are. Alessandro Russo recently sent me an email saying we should make a small kernel patch that sends some sort of registration information to a central server occasionally. Such an idea has amazingly complicated issues (forging? dynamic IPs? bandwidth? privacy?) associated with it, but is certainly interesting. Back when I first installed slackware I remember it telling me to send email somewhere to track installations. Various other Linux Counting Projects have been underway, but maybe it's really time to get into doing this. Linux Installations potentially outnumber MacOS! Let's prove it.

Joe Vigneau and Bill Broadley sent us info about Cobalt Microserver's brand new workgroup server. It's a 133mhz RISC box that runs Linux, has all the normal servers (www, email etc), and costs under $1000. And it supposedly fits in a 7" cube!

Everyone's favorite guy, Linus, threw 2.1.85 on the fire early this morning. Some of the improvements in the kernel are: documentation updates, SCSI driver updates, ham radio updates, and the addition of the System V filesystem. Guess where he put it

Debian is going to be used to design AMSAT Satellites. That's almost as cool as the impending release of Debian 2.0 which features LIBC6. 2.1 will have a new replacement for dselect.

I laughed out loud when I heard this. Mike Perry of linuxos.org fame writes the following

"Not only is this great Linux PR, not only is this www.linuxos.org PR, not only is this #LinuxOS PR, but it is Zummy PR! For those who do not frequent #LinuxOS, Zummy is an AI Q/A bot that apparently just passed the Turin Test (that is,to carry on a conversation with a human in a subject that that human posseses knowlege about, without that human realizing that the program is not human). This article from Sm@rtReseller January 26, 1998 (pages 82, and 83) quotes Zummy and one other channel member as Linux consultants. In the author's defense, he may have done this deliberately to prevent people from harassing or K-lining Zummy."

Skip wrote in with a link to The Linux Clothing Project which aims to make Linux T-Shirts for people. The slogan is 'fear the penguin' (which sounds vaguely familiar to a slogan I came up with awhile back). Oh, and don't forget to check out Bright Eye Productions the LCP's major competitior. We're taking orders for Black Shirts with the logo I designed, and more sizes now.

It's great to see that RedHat Linux has won InfoWorld's Product of the Year in the Operating System catagory for a second year in a row. And if that doesn't surprise you enough, the award for Best Tech Support was given to the Linux User Community. I bet a large number of readers of Slashdot deserve a part of this award. I know I'm amazed at the number of Linux Developers and Users that I can email and get help back within days. I only wish I could better help everyone that emailed me. Congrats to RedHat, and to Everyone Out There who made the other award happen. Let's make 98 even better.

It's another micropatch. Mostly just a Makefile update and some filesystem fixes. Go get it.

Linus released 2.1.83 to the world just minutes ago. It is an extremley small patch, 4kb compressed. The main addition is the documentation update for the Digiboard. Go fetch

Everyone's favorite operating system received more positive press over at The Irish-Times. Christopher Blizzard was the first of several to send in the story. Chris says there are a few inaccuracies and no real revelations, but it's always swell to see the positive press.

Wow. An MSNC article on Linux. Everyone should go and read that, just for the sheer juxtaposition of interests. Thanks to Christopher Carlson for this one.

James S. Blachly wrote in to talk about something that has been brought to my attention before, but you all should read this. He writes "The latest buzz on the linux-kernel mailing list is the copying of the Linux Logo, the Penguin. Apple is using the penguin as the new logo for Quicktime. An image can be seen either when installing the new quicktime 3.0 drivers or at www.apple.com/quicktime/. Apple is shamefully capitalizing on other peoples creativity. The linux penguin logo is originally by Larry Ewing. His terms of usage may be found here."

The similarities are extremely strong, but let's be honest, most cartoon stylized penguins look the same. "The Wrong Trousers" features a Tux-Like Penguin, and I seem to remember some old Warner Bros cartoons with somewhat similar birds as well. And it wouldn't surprise me if whoever created the Quicktime logo just didnt know. Only in the last 6 mos has Linux really become enough of a mainstream fixture that we would expect major companies to worry about conflicting mascots.

Stampede has joined the ranks of available Linux Distributions. Stampede aims to be easy for the new users as well as powerful for the power user. Ships with KDE as well. Thanks to Bob Grabowsky for sending the info.

You know the drill guys:download kernel, compile kernel, run lilo to install it, reboot, redial, download next kernel...