wikinerd writes "Mandrake Linux seems to make good money for Mandrakesoft! According to its financial data it made more than 5 million Euro in revenue with the ending of the 2004 financial year. The financial result for 2004 was close to 1.4 million Euro, while in 2003 it was about -2 million. This means that Mandrakesoft is now back to profitability. Those who are interested enough can read the Mandrakesoft announcement."

munehiro asks: "As an addicted GNU/Linux and Mac OS X user I recently tried to install binaries and libraries on a Linux box using an approximation of the elegant and clean approach known as the Mac OS X bundle (everything about each app or lib under a different directory) as opposed to the Linux standard approach 'everything under a common prefix' (normally /usr or /usr/local) with applications and libraries mixed in the standard subdirs bin, lib, share and so on, and found administration life much easier. What do other, more experienced readers think about the problems and improvements related to dropping the current Linux approach for a 'bundle-like' one in Linux distributions?"

Ridgelift writes "Linux Weekly News has made their annual 2004 Timeline available free to the general public. " Much happens in the Linux world over the course of a year. 2004 saw ongoing legal and political fights, new distributions, big releases of major applications, a new mode for kernel development, and more. This timeline is our attempt to separate out the most significant developments of the year and present them in a concise and enjoyable format. It continues an annual LWN tradition; it is the seventh in the series.""

Joe Barr writes "NewsForge is running a story this morning on a personal hardware/software backup solution for your Linux desktop (NewsForge is owned by Slashdot's parent OSTG). The solution doesn't require a SCSI controller, or tape drive, or the ability to grok a scripting language or archiving tool to work, either. It's based on point-and-click free software. Plus it includes a dead-parrot joke by Linus Torvalds."

Chillybott writes "CNET reports that Red Hat is trying to bolster more support for the Fedora project by giving the users more control over and input into the development process. The article states that they have made their CVS repositories visible and hints that soon members of the Fedora community will be able to act as distribution maintainers. Seems like a good idea to me, although their choice of acronyms for their conference leaves something to be desired."

datadriven writes "Bluefish 1.0 was released this week. I've been using it for about a year and a half and find it to be about the closest thing I've found to Homesite, which I used before switching to Linux. According to the website the new version features 'A new, very extended manual, better gnome and kde integration, much improved bookmarks, many performance improvements.'"

Dr. Manhattan asks: "My PDA was stolen on a business trip, and I'm looking for a replacement. I've enjoyed Palms for their simplicity and long battery life, but I'm not afraid to program and I'm considering something that can run Linux. However, my budget is rather limited; $150 is all I can spend. Relatively obsolete tech is fine, but I'm looking for: good battery life (my old Palm could run for weeks on a charge; I'm hoping for double-digit hours), dual expansion slots, all of the onboard hardware solidly supported by Linux. Does such a beast exist in my price range?"

An anonymous reader writes "According to an article at LinuxDevices there's a new fanless digital entertainment center reference design based on Linux and the MythTV open source DVR (digital video recorder) software. The 'Royal Linux Media Center' runs ESG's Royal Linux OS on a Transmeta development board based on its Efficeon chip. Linux has been increasingly popular in DVRs and PVRs, with examples including TiVo (of course), HP's recently unveiled Linux media hub, i3's Mood box, Interact-TV's Telly, Siemens' Speedstream, VWB's MediaReady 4000, Amino's AmiNet500, Sharp's Galileo, Dream-Multimedia-Tv's Dreambox, NEC's AX10, and Sony's CoCoon, to name a few."

norburym (Mary Norbury-Glaser) writes "If you own the first edition of this book, then it's probably dog-eared and well thumbed-through, so now's a good time to upgrade to this extensive volume, Practical Guide to Red Hat Linux: Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, second edition. This book covers Fedora Core 2 (2.6 kernel) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 3 (2.4 fork version with 2.6 kernel features) and includes Fedora Core on four CDs, which comprises the complete release. Mark G. Sobell accomplishes what many fail at: he has successfully crammed a huge amount of information into one volume in a compact, perfectly readable manner. This second edition serves two audiences, the end user and the administrator, and consequently combines two topics that easily could have filled separate books: Fedora Core and Enterprise Linux." Read on for the rest of Norbury-Glaser's review.

Omniscientist writes "We've all been there: Our system is on the edge of death and we need to either fix it or retrieve important data that still remains hidden away in its dying clutches. LinuxDevCenter has a funny article on a heroic tale of a sysadmin relying on Knoppix to save the day. I for one, always make a boot disk in case of problems, but Knoppix can turn a bad day into a good one for just about anyone. Perhaps every administrator should have a Knoppix CD on reserve."

jd writes "In what looks to be a split that could potentially undermine efforts to assure people that Linux is secure and stable, the developers of the GRSecurity kit and RSBAC are getting increasingly angry over security holes in Linux and the design of the Linux Security Modules. LWN has published a short article by Brad Spengler, the guy behind GRSecurity and it has stoked up a fierce storm, with claims of critical patches being ignored, good security practices being ignored for political reasons, etc. Regardless of the merits of the case by either side, this needs to be aired and examined before it becomes more of a problem. Especially in light of the recent kernel vulnerability debated on Slashdot."

fsck! writes "Jake Moilanen provided a series of four patches against the 2.6.9 Linux kernel that introduce a simple genetic algorithm used for automatic tuning. The patches update the anticipatory IO scheduler and the zaphod CPU scheduler to both use the new in-kernel library, theoretically allowing them to automatically tune themselves for the best possible performance for any given workload. Jake says, 'using these patches, there are small gains (1-3%) in Unixbench & SpecJBB. I am hoping a scheduler guru will able to rework them to give higher gains.'"

Anonymous Coattails writes "Summary from the advisory: 'Locally exploitable flaws have been found in the Linux binary format loaders' uselib() functions that allow local users to gain root privileges.'"

linuxsecurity.com writes " This brief article outlines the history and story behind Linux Netwosix, a security-focused distribution that is still in early stages of development. Vincenzo Ciaglia, its Italian founder, gives the Linux community an update on how the project has progressed after 11 months."

An anonymous reader writes "A startup has created a unique Linux-based home music distribution system based on secure peer-to-peer wireless mesh networking technology. The system can route the same or different songs, sourced from any connected computer, to as many as 30 audio output devices simultaneously. Sonos is showcasing its technology this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas."

Sammy at Palm Addict writes "According to the New York Times, Hewlett-Packard is to offer a new digital media hub based on Linux," excerpting "Hewlett-Packard will introduce a new device this fall meant to record and play back television as well as organize digital media, including photos, music and video, the company said yesterday. Hewlett already offers similar devices based on Microsoft's Windows Media Center Edition. The device, called the HP Media Hub, will be based on the Linux operating system." Since HP also sells self-branded iPods, it would be great if they'd make such a box iPod friendly.

An anonymous reader writes "This series on embedded development shows you how to migrate a project prototype from x86 to PowerPC. This initial installment explains the realities and rationale of the project: it introduces the robotic submarines that were the start of the project (and where they came from), and describes the Linux/GCC development environment and the bare-bones Kuro Box PowerPC development board."

musichead writes "Bill Boswell (writing for redmondmag.com) has posted an interesting article on configuring Linux clients to utilize a single sign-on and play nicely in a Microsoft Active Directory network. The article focuses on Fedora Core 2 (and the Core 3 beta), but he has examples and instructions for SuSE Linux 9.1 Professional, Mandrake 10.1 and Xandros Desktop 2.5 on his website."

joestar writes "Mandrakelinux' line of products has just been updated with two new products which are dedicated to the corporate world: Mandrakelinux Corporate Server and Mandrakelinux Corporate Desktop for x86 and x86-64 architectures. According to Mandrakesoft, these products focus on reliability and security, and will be maintained for five years. In my opinion, this release really says much about new Mandrakesoft's strategy and business. Press release here."

brunotorres writes "I've interviewed Martin Michlmayr, Debian project leader. In this interview we talked about the upcoming Debian release, Sarge. An excerpt: 'We heard for years that Debian is hard to install and the old installer wasn't very easy to maintain or advance, so we we decided to throw the installer away and start from scratch. The new installer is much more modular, which makes it easier to maintain and extend.'" Reader ron_ivi points out that new Debian/Hurd CDs are available. Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSTG.