suwalski writes: "I have a question for all of the mklinux Gods out there. At work I'm forced to use HP-UX, which is all nice and good, but I prefer Linux. I went looking around and found that mklinux is supposed to run on HPPA (which is the type of CPU my HP-712/100 has). I haven't been able to find any useful information on how to go about this, and I'd be very happy to hear comments and tips from anyone who uses Linux on HP's regularly."

dhammabum asks: "I've just installed a machine with a copy of Red Hat 6.2. I thought I would use the squid RPM that comes with the distribution to save time, etc. All went well until it tried to set up delay pools as this configure option had not been set in the RPM. So I then had to stuff around for quite some time working out how the RPM differed from the distribution. It even turned out the install options they used were broken -- they had to link a directory to get it to work! This begs the question -- why not have the configure options included with the RPM, say in /usr/doc, so that when one has to change something you simply add or subtract whatever you need to change, rebuild the package and reinstall?" I've always wondered why source-handling package managers like dpkg ^[?] and RPM ^[?] haven't implemented such schemes, allowing users to pass flags to configure and preserving them for the next time the package needs to be built. Does anyone have any ideas as to how such a system would best be created? Are there package managers that already do such things?

Logik writes: "It appears a bunch of guys over at http://www.geocities.com/tivohack/ have hacked the tivo to add a second hard drive. It appears they run Linux on a 50mhz PowerPC chip. They've even open sourced the kernel." Tons of great ways to void your warranty, and information about the guts. Also talks about how to add disk space. (Huzzah!) I'm also hearing rumors of MP3 playing on the boxes as well.

Inforum writes: "From the Ericsson Web site: 'Ericsson and Red Hat announced a strategic initiative to develop a new range of consumer products and services for home communications. They will develop consumer products combining existing industry standards, such as Java, and the latest open source technologies, such as Embedded Red Hat Linux. The products will also support existing and evolving standards such as broadband networking and Bluetooth ...' Then I wonder: what will happen to Symbian?"

MaxVlast asks: "I was browsing around Helix Code's site looking at their interpretation of GNOME when I found the program that they claim is 'the next step forward in GNOME applications,' Evolution. I was startled and upset--this program is, from what I can tell, a direct transfer of MS Outlook to Linux. It's bothered me for some time that the two major file and desktop managers for Linux are all clamoring to look more like Windows than their competitors, and in the scuffle, are missing some very effective paradigms (like Miller columns). Do people think it is good that Linux seems to be shooting for the 'looks like Windows, but without all the features' market? The popularly available apps seem to say so." Please pause for a moment before saying "But you've done this already!". Before the question was "Do new GUIs exist?", the answer to that was a resounding yes, but now the question is "Why do our applications still look the same?", even across platform boundaries and for two different applications?

DickBreath writes: "It looks like SuSE 7.0 is released. See http://linuxpr.com/releases/2272.html. Now I wonder how soon it will be on my local bookstore's shelf." cloudmaster points to this description -- in German, there for the babelfishing adventurer -- of the new release. In addition to the ever-evolving SuSE logo, you'll find there that SuSE is branching ala Red Hat and others into Personal and Professional versions; the Personal comes with "three easy to understand handbooks" intended to guide new users, one of which is all about system configuration.

From July 19th through 22nd, the Ottawa Linux Symposium 2000 provided hardcore technical seminars, conferences and demonstrations to a crowd of over five hundred. Like last year, there were no booth babes, no tradeshow floor with T-shirt giveaways and hype. OLS is all about the tech, and made no apologies.

Thorkild writes: "The subject says it all. They just opened up the directories on the mirror sites." If you can't find it without me telling you where it is, then you shouldn't be running a Beta Red Hat 7.0 ;)

Here are the answers to the questions we asked Ian Murdock, original Debian instigator and current President/CEO of Progeny Linx Systems.

Several Debian Developers have submitted this, and I'm sorry for the delay. I just didn't want to rush something like this: Joel Klecker has passed on. I never knew his real name, but as Espy, he answered lots of dumb questions for me on IRC over the years. The Internet makes connections between people from around the world, but from opposite sides of a dozen routers, many things... like Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy aren't readily apparent. I've attached a more complete comment about this from SquadBoy if you follow through. The Debian 2.2 release will be dedicated to Espy. The dedication also is attached.

EMR asks: "From a previous e-mail I sent to intervideo, I was told that LinDVD should be out in "Early June". Well, it's mid july and they just have the press release from March on their web site. Yesterday I e-mailed them again with their status and got this in Response. 'LinDVD has been released to certain OEMs in the market. If you are interested in obtaining a version of LinDVD, you will need to contact your favorite OEMs and see if a version of LinDVD is currently available.' Does anyone know of any OEMs that might have this? and how to contact them?"

Frank Carlos writes: "IBM released Linux-based applications technology based on the Bluetooth specification called BlueDrekar, which is a reference implementation of and a set of interfaces for the Bluetooth protocol stack. You can get the Transport Drivers for BlueDrekar(TM) Middleware at the developerWorks Open Source Zone."

CaptainZapp asks: "A customer of mine runs a ~30 GB data warehouse on a Sybase SQL Server Database. Now their business requires a mirror of this database in a different location. An offer by a reputed U/X vendor for the hardware turns out to be about five times as expensive as when you get a reasonable x86 box, with the necessary amount of disk space and, say, 1 gig of memory. What does the esteemed Slashdot community think: Is Unix capable of handling a database of this size and what other terrible pitfalls do you foresee?" He's not worried about "mission-critical" here, he's just wondering if it's possible.

_EternaL_ writes: "What could be more fun then hitting the eject button on your floppy drive, and swapping out your root file system? You say you don't wanna partition your hard drive to play with Linux? That's no excuse, install to your superdisk! Now there's a solution for anyone interested in getting a feel for Linux that doesn't have the space or time to install Linux on a hard drive, but has a Superdisk drive! Folks out there might be interested in knowing that installation to an internal ls120 (ie: SuperDisk) is possible. It took a bit of work, but thanks to moomonk it's fairly easy. You might wanna check out the basic howto over at electricgod.net. If that's not working out for you, you can also try over at dokks.com!"

FWMiller writes: "Theres a bunch of new screenshots up on Samsung's new PDA, the YOPY. This thing looks really slick, emulating the Windows CE user interface quite closely." The images are in a tgz, and they look real. They demo an addressbook, and MP3 player and other apps that apparently would ship with the nifty Linux based PDA. I still haven't seen a ship date (or an english version of the software for that matter ;) so I'm not holding my breath too hard. Although after playing with Kurt The Pope's Jornada, I'm dying to see what they can do.

qbasicprogrammer writes: "Security Portal has a review on the security of Red Hat, SuSE, TurboLinux, and Caldera Linux distributions." Debian and Slackware are absent, but its a decent piece.

Daniel Quinlan writes: "The Free Standards Group is publishing a beta release of the Linux Development Platform Specification (LDPS) which tells third-party software providers how to best achieve binary-compatibility across different Linux distributions (well, at least until the Linux Standard Base is done). It's important to note that third-party software providers include not just the large vendors like Oracle and IBM, but also anyone who creates a binary package for use on more than one version of a single distribution."

Gark writes: "There's an interesting article at Upside Today that talks about the Bayonne project, which has the potential to change the telecommunications industry the same way that Free Software has changed computing. It's interesting that the project got its start when a proprietary software developer was going out of business, and decided to GPL their source code, thereby creating new business opportunitites." The article talks a lot about Open Source and the Net, compared to the Telco industry and its history of proprietary systems. It's a good read.

Fawking DSL writes "``NetBSD can be intimidating from a Linux user's perspective. However, as the Linux user base grows, more people are finding their needs aren't being met by traditional Linux distributions. NetBSD is ready to step up to fill this niche. While Linux and NetBSD share many characteristics, there are some key differences.'' Check out this article at BSD Today."

How secure do you feel? Occams Razor points to "A great interview with [Jay Beale,] the Lead developer, about the Linux Bastille project." Beale talks about the direction that Bastille has taken, and seems fairly pragmatic about the Linux security model and computer security in general. A nugget: "... to fully secure a system, you really have to grind it into dust, scatter the pieces to the wind, and hope that Entropy does [its] part. Since you can't do this, you make tradeoffs."