On the mailing list yesterday, Linus announced the current plan of moving the kernel into the pre-2.4 Kernel stage. In hopes of moving in that direction, he'll be "calming things down". Obviously, we won't see 2.4 before the end of the year, however, the current aim is to have it out Q1 of 2000.

Noise asks: "It's not easy to find information on drivers for network cards or modems. I installed Linux on a notebook (works great!), but have not been able to find the drivers for my PCMCIA "combo" card. In particular, I am using Red Hat 6.0 and have a 3Com 10/100+56k modem card (model 3CCFEM556B). Where can I find drivers for these types of cards? "

Matra DataVision has decided to LGPL a set of components that currently earns 3.5 million dollars a year, cost 75 million dollars to develop and has been sold since 1995. Why? Because they hope to sell services to the scientific market that currently uses its own proprietary technology rather than commercially sold components -- a market they value at 450 million dollars. Where's the source? It will be available from opencascade.org on December 20th. Commercial support is at opencascade.com. Some screenshots are available.

TheFitz writes "CBS is running a story about LinuxCare receiving some heavy backing. Also mentioned in the story is the potential for LinuxCare to go public with an IPO. " Several comments from Sifry and a few other tidbits about the company. Worth a gander if you're curious about Linuxcare.

demachina writes "Xybernaut, a maker of wearable PC's featured in Slashdot a couple months ago, has added Linux support. They say Linux "provides a stable platform that works well in a network environment" and it "requires far fewer computer resources than competing operating systems and allows for increased efficiency" " This one has a wrist mounted screen among other things. I'm totally going gargoyle.

karrde writes "Yahoo Biz has a story here about CoSource.com being bought out by Applix. Seems the president of CoSource will still control it, along w/ controling the Linux division of Applix. "

Hans Reiser apparently was offended by us mentioning ext3 and not mentioning his own FS. Under most circumstances we don't care, but he says "ReiserFS version 3.5.12 at is faster than ext3, it is stable, it is on our web site, and SuSE's." Anyone wanna try this out and do some benchmarking? I'm curious.

Bruce Perens writes "In August, I accepted the president's position at Linux Capital Group, a business incubator and venture capital firm specializing in Linux. This is explained in my open letter to the free software community on the group's web site. My firm has announced its first investment, in Progeny Linux, a company headed by Debian Founder Ian Murdock, which will produce a commercial version of Debian in cooperation with the Debian developers. We will be starting and funding several other Linux companies. We now intend to show other businesses by example how to succeed while being a good citizen of the free software community."

An anonymous reader sent us a pretty cool press release where you can read about University of Michigan students protesting their schools enterprise agreement with Microsoft buy arranging with Red Hat to give away 500 CDs, and helping students install it. Often stuff like this slips through the cracks, but this one is pretty smooth. This is the sort of stuff I like to see

bendawg writes "I was reading the 2.2.13ac2 patch summary on Freshmeat, and I was intrigued by the mention of ext3. I tried to find more specific information on this to no avail. Does anyone know what new features this filesystem is supposed to have? Also, anyone know the status of SGI's XFS journaling filesystem? " Yes, I know 2.2.13ac2 is old, but I have yet to hear ext3 mentioned in the geek conversations I participate in. What new features does this next iteration give us over good ol' ext2?

Sarge_97 wrote to us with the latest from Alan Cox ^[?] 's diary. With Red Hat's movement into Europe, and the creation of Red Hat UK, he'll be closing Building Number 3 and going to work for Red Hat UK. This is, of course, no change in what was actually going on anyway.

real bio pointed us to Juggernautsearch which actually looks interesting. Its GPLd. It can index 800 million pages every 3 months and deliver 10 million pages a day on a Pentium II. So I guess if you want to run your own Altavista, you can.

acoustix writes "CNET.com is running a story on seven different Linux distributions. Corel Linux and Red Hat 6.1 Deluxe came out on top. " I noticed a few technical flaws, but its a decent article as a whole.

JeffRC wrote to us with a new machine from Gateway that looks remarkably like the Cobalt Qube. The device apparently runs Linux, with Apache and SMB. Update: 12/08 02:15 by H :Well, I am an idiot. If you remember, I had posted a story that GW and Cobalt would be teeming up - I guess this is the fruit of their alliance.

noom writes "Dell and Redhat have extended their strategic alliance", with Dell agreeing to install RH Linux on all of it's PowerEdge servers and Redhat agreeing to provide support. Sheesh, that was unexpected. "

ragnar! writes "National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded $500,000 to support a new parallel computing facility for Bartol. The "major research infrastructure" (MRI) grant will support a parallel system based on 100 linked processors, each of which will run at speeds up to 600 megahertz, connected by fast Ethernet hardware - very similar to the Avalon-Beowulf Cluster, developed by the Los Alamos Center for Nonlinear Studies and Goddard Space Flight Center. "

mackga wrote to us about the new LinuxToday Counter-FUD site. Good site to get information and destroy detractors -maybe we should link to it The Linux Myths and see who comes out next.Update: 12/04 11:52 by H :Also, thanks to Rik van Riel who pointed the The FUD Counter site.

There are over 500 Debian maintainers today, up from 100 only a few years ago. Wichert Akkerman has been Project Leader for this brilliant, sometimes unruly (but always interesting) gang since February. Monday you posted questions for Wichert. Today you get answers. (Lots more below)

Tap noted that SuSE.com notes that 6.3 of the distribution should be released sometime today. Features include NEW X-windows installation, KDE 1.1.2, Star Office 5.1a, and XFree86 3.3.5. It should appear on the ftp site soon, and the Alpha release ought to follow shortly.

Shortly after their IPO, Red Hat's Bob Young had a book published, written by he and Wendy Goldman Rohm (who, I should add, I had a drink with at @ ALS, and is a very nice woman) about Red Hat, and what Linux is trying to do. Click below to get the full story - and thanks to Malcolm Tredinnick for his indepth review.