We all know about Mozilla. It's one of the major 'poster children' for the entire Open Source concept. Build 9, Build 10, Build 11, and so on. Someday there will be a Mozilla that will run without crashing, and we'll love it. Someday. Then there's Opera's Linux - and BeOS, Mac, EPOC and OS/2 - ports. Over the last week we've had 100+ readers submit the news that (proprietary shareware) Opera for Linux is close to beta release. But there's another potentially exciting Linux browser in the works that has hardly gotten any publicity. (continued)

Jsutin asks: "Does anyone have a working FreeS/WAN implementation talking to Checkpoint Firewall1? I've searched through a lot of Linux archives, FreeS/WAN archives, sent people email, and last but not least asked God to help me. And unfortunately all has fallen through! I've run across a few threads here and there that say it can be done but no documents explaining how to do it. I'm trying to push Linux as a VPN gateway for remote offices and would be greatly appreciative if anyone reading this has any suggestions?" "

xjamie writes "Red Hat has more changes under their hat. CNet is running a story saying Matthew Szulik will replace Bob Young as Red Hat's CEO." So we went and bothered Bob at the LinuxToday booth. The deal is that he is going to be the Chairman, and focus more on the Open Source aspects of the business, and Matthew is gonna be more concerned with the next quarter's bottom line.

Well, now it's official. Red Hat buys Cygnus for $674 Million. (Short story here.) I'm sure we're going to see lots of attention from the media in the following hours. What do you think?

MauricioAP writes "the new benchmarks from mindcraft, or the NT vs. linux, aren't good for Linux, especially for RH guys. Check this out." Reliability and "bang per $$" aren't addressed by this test or the results might have been quite different. But within the limited parameters, which may or may not accurately reflect real-world conditions, it looks like Mindcraft has been quite fair. (Please read carefully before judging.)

NoWhere Man writes "PCWorld has a "here's how" article on how to get the most out of your Linux box. It's basically a very extensive and userfriendly step-by-step instruction on how to recompile your kernel to make it smaller and more compact." Kernel recompilation and optimization is old hat for experienced Linux people, but articles like this, especially in "non-Linux" publications, are necessary to help new Linux users become more adept. Kudos to PCWorld for running it!

Xiong Jiang sent this to us from Beijing. We're running it exactly as he wrote it, without a single word changed: The curiosity from the world on Linux and China is so high these days. :) Yes, I am a Chinese and I am curious on other parts of the world, particularly, the Linux world, as you are never the less curious on China. :) These days the business of Graphon Corp. with some China companies makes a tremendous fuss on slashdot and LinuxToday." (More --->)

bgarcia writes "There is a PR Newswire story stating that Red Hat and RSA Security have signed an agreement to include RSA's BSAFE SSL software in Red Hat Linux Professional Edition." And Wired tells us Red Hat is coming out with with a new version that improves large system performance and speeds crash recovery. (Click below for more)

Kelly McNeill writes "When I first started touting Linux as a soon-to-be superior alternative to Microsoft Windows, almost no one at my company had even heard of the product. Nearly two years later, it's difficult to find a computer magazine that does not extoll the virtues of Linux. However, these praises are often laced with caveats: Linux is a "server OS", that it's difficult for novices, that it's "not ready for the desktop". To some extent these concerns are simply due to a reasonable fear of the unknown. "

Isaac-Lew noticed a bit from LinuxToday about a Fisher Price Childrens Game that actually has a Linux version. Then again it also has a DOS, a Windows 3.x version, an OS/2 version, and a PDA version, so they've either really go their bases covered, or there is a mistake. Regardless, its interesting to see such a name brand releasing a Linux port of childrens software: there sure isn't much of it right now, thats for sure. Unless you count Emacs (insert rimshot here).

waldowaldo asks: "I have looked high and low for a good way to back up a server hard drive to CDs, but cannot find anything. There are good programs for collecting files and writing them to a single disk (such as cdrecord), but nothing for multiple CDs (that I can find). Anyone seen anything that'll do this?"

Percival asks: "For both noise and power-consumption reasons, I would like to build a silent linux box (i.e: no hard drive, no CPU fan, no PS fan). In my case, I need the box to IP masquerade as well as serve small print jobs through samba, but I can see many uses for a silent linux box. I would like to learn how to build a linux bootdisk that would load everything necessary into a ramdisk. The bootdisk HOWTO is very helpful, but it does not really address building a permanent linux system on a floppy, being aimed at rescue and tool disk creation. (The particulars: 2.2v Pentium MMX CPU with large heat sink, small, low-power PS, floppy disk, motherboard, two NICs, HP LaserIIp). Would I be better-off going with a diskless system (I would rather not have to rely on another linux box to boot)? Is this a pipe dream? "

yesthatguy writes "Tonight's episode of Jepoardy! featured a question in the "Tech Business and Industry" category that asked which operating system was made by Linus Torvalds and can be obtained for free. The answer(question), of course: 'What is Linux?' An interinsting point I noticed...the kid (Teen Tournament) that gave the answer, pronounced the name wrong. Jeopardy usually will not give credit to a mispronunciation... " Please! No pronunciation holy wars! But that is pretty cool. Ya know you've hit the big time when you get a question on Jeopardy.

webmaven writes "Eric S. Raymond reacts in this LinuxToday story to the recent press regarding the Chinese government oficially adopting Linux. He dismisses the story as untrue, and furthermore states that the principles of the PRC are incompatible with the voluntary cooperation that is the spirit of the Open Source movement." But it's not just China. Apparently Cubans like Linux too. So read Eric's essay and decide for yourself whether this is good, bad or all just hot air. Comments?

A member of the voiceferous Clan Anonymous Coward asks: "I am finding that on my 64meg box that Linux is using the swap file even though it looks like there is plenty of RAM, but it is used by the disk(?) cache. For example, 4.8M of swap is used when the disk cache is 20M. What can be tuned to reduce the disk cache size? Sample /proc/meminfo info follows: total:64569344 used:57200640 free:7368704 shared:32337920 buffers:3235840 cached:20496384 used-swap:4837376"

Anonymous Coward writes "There's a press release out that says Red Hat and Oracle are teaming up to take on e-commerce. They have outlined bold initiatives to add support for IA64, a journaled filesystem and high avaliability. Even more they say it will include Motif, but they still say all additions will fit with the GPL." It's basically Oracle 8i teamed with an "optimized" version of Red Hat. Sounds nice. This joint product could have major impact on the e-commerce software marketplace if it works as promised. Claimed shipping date is mid-December.

Cy Guy writes "YAHOO UK is reporting that the People's Republic of China will be naming Linux as its "Official Operating System". The story is repeated with more details and notes that government officials are "enthusiastic about the community ethos behind the open source community." The story also links the announcement to the recent deal with Graphon Corp for Linux Server-based computing software. " I dunno how I feel about this. I think having a state bird is silly enough.

mystik asks: "What would be a good printer for my linux system? I bought an HP712C for a great price, but was disappointed to find out that HP made the Protocol propriatary, and unanable to work without some siginificant hacking of my linux system. Hopefully I can get some good printers cheap... " Well, this is a rather broad question. It would help if folks would recommend several different printers covering as many of the printer classes (ie dot-matrix, bubble-jet, ink-jet, and lasers) as you can.

Ok guys, this is purely a rumor, but its one that I've heard from several points on the globe so I'm gonna share it: Vulture Capitalist writes "I just got out of a meeting with Matthew Szulick and it appears as though Red Hat has inked a deal to buy Cygnus. In related news- we also understand that some people at Red Hat were so upset with the acquisition and it's corporate implications that they have decided to resign from their Sr. management (founding) positions. After the failed acquisition attempts with both Linuxcare and TurboLinux- this should prove to be a very interesting deal. I'm personally looking forward to the annual report! " Again, none of this is any more than rumor, but I've caught wind of it from several spots so I figure its worth sharing. What's interesting is that Cygnus has more employees then Red Hat, and actually generates more revenue.

Christopher Cashell writes "I've often heard it said that linux has the potential to be an ideal CAD platform, and the only thing holding it back is the lack of commercial quality CAD software (a la AutoCAD). Enter QCad, an easy to use 2D CAD project that began as a splitoff from CAM Expert. It was initially released with a 'free for non-commercial use' license, but this has recently been changed to the GPL. It's an excellent program, and earned 5 out of 5 Penguins on Tucow's Linuxberg review." CAD could/should be a "killer app" for Linux on the engineering desktop. I had a conversation a few months ago with an editor at Machine Design magazine about Linux - and how a good CAD app might set off a wholesale migration to Linux by design engineers.