Over on NewsForge, Roblimo has taken a look at Sun's new StarOffice 6.0 (due out in April for retail purchase), and comparing it to OpenOffice build 641C. I installed StarOffice on a new Toshiba laptop, and since my Mandrake 8.2 ISOs are still trickling in, have StarOffice 6.0 running instead under Windows XP. (I have just a few additional notes on this, below.)

An Anonymous Coward writes: "A guy from IBM's Linux Impact Team in Brazil has written a guest column on Linux and Main describing how applications should integrate with Linux. It's Red Hat-centric, but there is a lot of material about the FHS and LSB that most users probably don't know."

Just saw in Red Hat's FTP's - Redhat 7.3 (codename:skipjack) is available for download. There aren't lots of changes there, but you'll find that RedHat 7.3 comes with KDE 3.0 (rc3 is on this beta), you'll need to remove the Ximian Gnome before upgrade, and in general - read the release notes before testing this release. As always, don't try it on your main Linux partition, and use the mirrors. Annoucment is here (thanks to Linux Weekly News)

phalse phace writes "Yahoo! News is carrying a ZDNet News article which reveals that Mandrake has decided to change its policy regarding its Mandrake Club. Previously, Mandrake stated that all membership levels would enjoy the same benefits. But since Mandrake Linux 8.2 will include StarOffice 6.0 and Sun is charging for it, they decided to only allow the download of SO 6.0 to Silver members and higher."

LiquidPC writes: "In this whitepaper on Linux Scheduler Latency, Clark Williams of Red Hat compares the performance of two popular ways to improve kernel Linux preemption latency -- the preemption patch pioneered by MontaVista and the low-latency patch pioneered by Ingo Molnar -- and discovers that the best approach might be a combination of both."

Grok writes: "CodeWeavers' CrossOver Plugin allows Linux users to use software and browser plugins that where once only avaliable on Windows. Version 1.0 was released in late August 2001 to much media furvor, while the release of version 1.1 arrived without much fanfare. Despite the lack of attention by the news media, the new version of CrossOver is a more exciting release than the orginal. The reason? Microsoft Media Player Support. Finally, every major plugin on the internet, along with several obscure ones, are now supported under Linux. (Full Story)"

Frank writes: "There's an interview over at developerWorks Linux Zone with Linus's latest lieutenant Marcelo Tosatti. He talks about what it takes to be the maintainer of the Linux kernel, what his plans are for 2.4 and his favorite hack." If you missed it, you may also want to visit the answers Marcelo gave to Slashdot readers.

Jester998 writes "Linux Mandrake 8.2 is out! Check out the official annoucement or head off to your closest mirror to grab the ISO images. The release is bound to be amazing, with the return of kernel-secure, a 65MB minimum install, hotplug device support, encrypted filesystems and more!"

JigSaw writes: "Lycoris Desktop/LX (formerly known as 'Redmond Linux') is viewed by many as the new big distribution in the "Linux on the Desktop" arena. OSNews features an extensive review of the latest Lycoris and outlines the good and the bad things of the distro. In short, Lycoris seems to suffer from the general GNU/Linux situation to not be ready to power a true desktop-oriented, easy to use distribution yet."

GonzoJohn writes: "If you've ever been stuck on the freeway with a flat tire and no jack, you know what it's like to have a Linux system crash and not have a boot disk. And although nearly every Linux distribution company asks you make a boot/recovery floppy when you install Linux for the first time, many users skip this important step. Out of the boot/recovery disk concept was born the Mini-Linux distribution." Read this article on Linux Orbit, with a brief intro to some of the mini-distros available.

Anthony Boyd writes: "At pclinuxonline.com, they are running an uncomfirmed story that Mandrake 8.2 will be released on March 18th. And of course, SuSE Linux 8.0 is going to be released in mid-April. Features for SuSE appear to include KDE 3.0 and a whole lot of games. Features for Mandrake appear to be a super small install and, well, stability. Sounds great to me."

Milo_Mindbender writes: "Over the weekend I was attempting to improve my CD ripping performance and discovered RedHat 7.2 was running my Ultra/ATA 100 hard drive in a very slow non-DMA mode. After a fair amount of searching for how to fix this, a trivial change (look here) improved drive performance from 3MBs to 38MBs! FSCK on my 40gb partition went from over 5 minutes to under 1! This issue wasn't documented in RedHat's manuals but it effected a number of boxes in our office so I'm betting many other people in the world have the same problem. This made me wonder how many other common Linux tuning snafus there might be that a lot of people are probably missing. Do you know of any?"

neuroticia writes "linuxsecurity.com has an interesting article on data hiding and recovery: "On a 4GB Linux partition, the block size is typically 4K (chosen automatically when the mke2fs utility is run to create a filesystem). Thus one can reliably hide up to 4KB of data per file if using a small file. The data will be invulnerable to disk usage, invisible from the filesystem, and, which is more exciting for some people, undetectable by file integrity checkers using file checksumming algorithms and MAC times. Ext2 floppy (with a block size of 1KB) allows hiding data as well, albeit in smaller chunks.""

hezron writes "Red Hat VP, Howard Jacobson, sent a mass email explaining their acquisition of ArsDigita's assets. Here is the press release concerning the acquisition." The press release is actually a quick FAQ about the purchase - Howard does a good job of explaining the purchase and the reasons for it. Howard's a smart guy, and I hope that the purchase of AD will mean a longer life then how AD's past management was handling it.

robstah writes: "Bart Bunting, a Debian developer has won two gold medals in the 2002 Paralympics games. This story at Debian Planet has more information. I think we should commend Bart for his excellent achievement and wish him luck for the future."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "KernelTrap has posted an interview with kernel hacker William Lee Irwin III (aka "wli"). He is one of the developers helping to implement a reverse mapping feature into the Linux kernel. (Rik van Riel, the lead of this effort, was interviewed by KernelTrap earlier.) From the interview: 'For regular kernel hacking, rewrites aren't going to get anywhere, those who wrote the originals will scream bloody murder and those who have to call the stuff are terrified they'll have to deal with new bugs in unfamiliar code. But as a crutch for getting around not quite being able to read things it's fine. Maybe someone will come after me for saying so as there are bound to be frivolous rewrites of all kinds of things after any kind of public statement like this, but if people get off their butts and stop duplicating everyone else's merges of $VM + O(1) + misc garbage to write some actual new code, it's worth the flames.'"

GizmoDuck writes "I'm working in a computational chemistry lab, and we find ourselves using memory and CPU hogs like Amber and Gaussian. The CPU hogging isn't a problem, thanks to Condor, but when submitting one of the jobs that request (and pretty much require) all the physical RAM in the machines, Linux promptly starts swapping so hard that the mouse pointer in X stops moving, NFS and NIS halt, and things don't get back to normal for five minutes. I've tried toying a bit with the settings in /proc/sys/vm/kswapd to no avail. I've done some poking around on the 'net looking for answers. Faster disks and swap partitions at the beginning of the drive aren't really an option at this point. I haven't found a good solution yet. I was wondering if the /. community has any input on how to keep the system from locking during periods of necessarily high swap activity?"

Many people wrote in with this news: "Mandrake Linux today reports having a short-term money crunch. They call for users to become members to help float them through the short-term viability issue. Membership dues are the preferred method over budget/project cuts."

einer writes "Things look mighty bad for Loki employees. From this article it appears that some of them haven't seen a paycheck since late 2000. Perhaps the most telling part of the article is contained in a parenthetical near the bottom of the page: "A single employee is listed in creditor filings as being owed almost $350,000 in unpaid salary and in expenses the company incurred using the employee's credit card."" there's a lot of not-so-happy-stuff in this article.

b-side.org writes "As a fine testament to how quickly linux is absorbing technology formerly available only to the computing elite, an LKML member posted a 23 second kernel compile time to the list this morning as a result of building a 16-way NUMA cluster. The NUMA technology comes gifted from IBM and SGI. Just one year ago, a Sequent NUMA-Q would have cost you about USD $100,000. These days, you can probably build a 16-way Xeon (4X 4-way SMP) system off of ebay for two grand, and the NUMA comes free of charge!"