Joe Barr writes "I ran across a curious website recently: OpenLindows.com. The name alone intrigued me. It gave rise to speculation about a weird mix of free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech alternative to the $99/year Click-N-Run software subscription offered by LindowsOS, the most Windows-like/proprietary Linux distribution out there. This is a report on what I found, and perhaps even more importantly, what I didn't."

grahamlee writes "It may be a case of 'do as we say, not as we do' over at the Santa Cruz Operation. The Netcraft statistics meter says that for the last year, SCO's web site has been served by Apache on Linux. Indeed, it's been more than a year since the site was ever served from a SCO Unix machine. So what is the possible reason for this? Your humble author suggests that SCO found themselves requiring a multithreaded web server, and as SCO UNIX is based on an ancient version of The UNIX spec it just couldn't cope ;-)." Read on for one of the strangest-yet turns to the SCO story, and several merely insipid ones.

RabidChipmunk writes "Mandrake 9.2RC1 is out. Go get it with bit-torrent and speed up my download. I like the idea that posting to Slashdot could actually speed up a download. It seems so wrong." If you're on a slow pipe, don't underestimate the throughput of the postal system. Mark Walker writes "Mandrake Linux 9.2 RC1 is appearing on mirrors as I type this. We're currently downloading it from Mandrake, for http://www.budgetlinuxcds.com."

TekPolitik writes "Blizzard's attempt to shut down the multi-platform freeware RTS, FreeCraft appears to have backfired. There are now two replacement projects - Project Inferno and Stratagus. The new sites are making some effort to catalog all the games that use the new engine. Stratagus lists Wargus, Aleona's Tales and RoboVasion. Project Inferno lists ShadowConflict." The Stratagus FAQ page constructively explains: "Stratagus aims at being a generic realtime strategy engine, with no special focus on Warcraft2."

thorgil writes "Guessing about the linux-2.6.0 release date is hard, but here is a new angle (pseudo-scientific): I made a graph (gif) based on errors/warnings from John Cherry's (OSDL) compile statistics for linus' linux bitkeeper tree. My guess is around 12th October, 2003. What is your guess and more important, why?"

What Can You Expect From A University Named "UH?" writes "Eric S. Raymond responds to Darl McBride's charge that he's drinking IBM's Kool-Aid in SCO's fight against Linux. The main thrust: Yes, there is an alliance against SCO, but, like the Open Source movement itself, it arises from lots of folks spontaneously striving for a common goal. 'It's beyond me how [you] can have the gall to talk as though we need funding or marching orders from IBM to mobilize against you. IBM couldn't stop us from mobilizing!' "

tyen asks: "While it's not dead yet (shades of Monty Python), Internet postage on Linux appears to be missing. The biggest player's software is Windows-only, and the other players mimic this requirement. You would be amazed how many businesses will dedicate a computer to printing off postage and shipping labels, why pay an annoying Microsoft tax for such an appliance application? Besides, these Windows-based solutions are heavily GUI-centric, and any integration into Linux-based automated processes would be unacceptably brittle. Has anyone successfully set up their business to print off e-postage from Linux or any other Open Source platform?"

man_of_mr_e asks: "With all the recent brouhaha about Blaster and Sobig, there's been a lot of talk about how poor Windows security is, especially compared to the Linux we all know and love. But is this really true? The website defacement archive at Zone-h shows that Linux accounts for 61% of the defacements in the last 24 hours (note, this figure changes, so it might be different when you view it). An analysis of the last few weeks of their archive shows a similar percentage of exploited Linux systems. Note also that the 'Unknown' category is rather high, and certainly contains at least some Linux systems, further increasing the percentage. Why is this? Are we just deluding ourselves about our own security? Could there be a Linux 'Blaster' just waiting to happen?" While "defacements" don't necessarily mean "root level break-in", sometimes getting your foot in the door is enough. If this happens, wouldn't Linux then be just as exploitable as Windows? Are there other reasons why the likelihood of a "Sobig" or an "ILUVYOU" would be lower for Linux than Windows?

An anonymous reader writes "Marcelo Tosatti has officially released another stable 2.4 Linux kernel. 2.4.22 was released early this morning and includes a lengthy list of fixes. It follows the last stable kernel in this tree, 2.4.21, by a little over two months."

An anonymous reader writes "Welcome to Compiling sources and managing packages, the first of four tutorials designed to prepare you for the Linux Professional Institute's 102 (release 2) exam. In this tutorial, we'll show you how to compile programs from sources, how to manage shared libraries, and how to use the Red Hat and Debian package management systems."

prostoalex writes "UK-based Imagination Technologies announced the first port of Linux to multi-threaded DSP architecture. The port is done for Imagination's META core that it licenses out to those needing a generic DSP architecture. According to the company, 'META can run Linux on one hardware thread while running real-time DSP tasks on the other threads. META can also re-allocate MIPS on the fly so that each thread can be delivered the guaranteed share of processing resource and response time that it needs, while never clocking the processor faster than is required.'"

magellan writes "Sun has released screenshots of its upcoming Mad Hatter Linux desktop. Mad Hatter includes GNOME, StarOffice, Evolution, and Mozilla. Sun has made minor modifications to Gnome to make it more familiar to Windows users. Sun's Mad Hatter, along with SuSE's new push on the desktop, could make Linux on the corporate desktop and laptop a bigger reality."

f-matic writes "Dave Phillips' Linux Sound website has been updated (for the first time in a while) with lots of new software links and news from the recent BYOL conference, plus links to some interesting Linux multimedia articles. Seems like things are getting pretty interesting in the linux audio world, with a Supercollider port in the works, not to mention February's Linux article in the prestigious Sound on Sound magazine."

Anonymous Coward writes "The current survey question over on the eham site shows that around 40% of Amateur Radio operators that responded to the survey are using Linux/Unix as an operating system in some form or other. Part of the ham radio charter is to 'experiment and innovate'...seems the tradition is alive and well in ham radio. Some of the comments are interesting as well ...What's Amateur/Ham Radio? See www.eham.net/newham/"

Primer writes "Icculus has done it again: The Linux port of America's Army: Operations version 1.9 is now available. This latest version features many improvements in the interface, punkbuster, and a new map. The file weighs in at a hefty 504 megs, but luckily there are plenty of mirrors, plus a very well seeded torrent. Get it while it's hot!"

libertynews writes "KPLUG President Kevin Pedigo has just announced his latest project -- RPMPAN, an archive of CPAN Perl modules in RPM format, generated nightly."

viewstyle writes "eWEEK has got a review of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 Beta, code named Taroon. It now has the new Red Hat Bluecurve interface. New important stuff includes: logical volume management and access control lists in the file system. The access control list feature is something that has been in Windows and Solaris for some time. If you're interested, you can download it here."

Mark Tobenkin writes "Are corporations exploiting the Open Source community? The Linux Public Broadcasting Network has video interviews with Ian Murdock (of Progeny and Debian fame), Martin Roesch (author of Snort), Jeremey White (CEO of CodeWeavers), Bradley Kuhn (FSF), Mike Balma (Linux Business Strategist for HP) and others on the evolving OSS business models. The interviews center around whether integration with proprietary products endangers the Open Source effort or increases consumers' freedom to choose."

FrankoBoy writes "CRN has an interview with SuSE CEO Richard Seibt in which he claims such things as 'Linux means two companies: Red Hat and SuSE, and nobody else.' Another example of this kind of corporatespeak can be found in another interview he did with ZDNet last week. DistroWatch has an article about all this in its current weekly newsletter."

fr0z writes " Ernie Ball is a company that makes guitar strings. After being raided by the BSA in 2000 without warning and fined $100,000 for a few unlicensed copies of software, CEO Sterling Ball vowed not to give another cent to Microsoft and within 6 months, according to CNET News, had the whole company switched to Red Hat Linux, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, and other free software."