PhiberOptik asks: "I recently got a BP6 board, with onboard ULTRA66 controllers and ran into a problem with my Red Hat 6.0 installation. It seems that Red Hat Linux will not support the controllers, which my main hard disks are hooked up to. So far as I know, no Linux distros exist with ULTRA66 support, and BeOS or Solaris 7 won't recognize them either. Are there any updates or distros which support this new technology?"

A Nameless Slashdotter submitted this question: "IP Masquerading (NAT under FreeBSD) is straight from the Gods. Yet it has a few very large drawbacks, such as inability to do DCC or ICQ file transfers, or play games over the internet on one of the Masq'ed machines, even with the "irc" and "quake" masquerading modules loaded. Someone give me options to solve this problem, be it another operating system, a firewall setting, a program or setup!"

Magnus Huckvale asks: "We'd like to kit our new flat out with a MP3/Linux stereo system, with a set of stereo speakers in each room. Does anyone have any experience with fitting more than one soundcard to a Linux box? Is it possible to synchronise MP3 players outputting to different cards? What other capabilities can we build in given the hardware? What (cheap) soundcard would do? PCI or ISA?" While this is an interesting question, I think it would be easier to wire both sets of speakers to one soundcard rather than fiddling with two (and the headache involved in getting both to work properly). What do you all think?

kmb asks: "I recently bought a Gateway PC with an integrated Creative Labs Sound Blaster AudioPCI 64D sound card. Apparently Gateway is the only vendor to use this particular card and also apparently it differs in some sometimes significant ways from the other SB AudioPCI 64 cards. I've looked at a few web pages, but this is my first time trying to do anything with a PC sound card and besides which, most of the info I've seen is Windows-specific. I'm running RedHat 6.0 and ended up installing the ALSA-project sound drivers because I wasn't having much success with the OSS drivers. I've gotten some apps to record, but the card still isn't acting the way I expect it to. (For instance, I'd really like to get Slab 3.0 working, but even though I can see the VU meter picking up the sound input, when I go to record I get nada.) So, does anyone have configuration and/or driver tips or specs or anything about this particular card?"

Desperado wrote in to tell us that according to This InfoWeek Story, the 6.2 release of SuSE is scheduled for August and will have new/updated packages including IBM's ViaVoice, XF86 3.3.4 and VMware 1.0.

nestea` asks: "OK! I want to know if it is possible to burn Video CDs from Linux with cdrecord or some sort of recording software. As I understand it Video CD is not like normal CDROMs and can not be read the same way (according to www.mpegtv.com). The MpegTV site is my main source for Linux VCD info. Ideas?"

dayeight wrote in to tell us about Linux Mandrake's new DiskDrake GUI Disk Partitioner and resizer GTK Based replacement for FIPS or Partition Magic- it looks like a promising for the free world.

An anonymous told us that they recieved a little surprise in their inbox from Red Hat today: The NC boys have reserved a chunk of shares to be purchased on E*Trade by contributors to the open source comunity before the masses get their chance to super inflate them. Very cool on RHs part (even tho I didn't seem to make the cut *sniffle* :)

dpg writes "CALU '99 (Conference of Australian Linux Users) is over, and there is a web page up with lots of neat stuff (audio and lots of pics of your favourite Linux icons, including Raster, Federico, John "maddog" Hall, Paul Russel, Andrew Tridgell, etc, etc) Enjoy. " They even have an icecast going! I personally look forward to reading some of the conference papers.

fatherdatabase writes "After a slight delay, Oracle finally releases a port of 8.1.5 for Linux. Requires a (free) technet account. Check it out here. " It's a free download, but they do require e-mail address, etc etc. Have fun.

IsleOfView wrote in with prove that there will never be a shortage of new distributions. This one is called stormix and its based on Debian, but has assorted advanced installation tools.

NoWhere Man noted a story on CNet that that talks about Red Hat and their plans to Create a full blown Linux Portal. They note the fact that RH has job openings in San Fran, as well as the trivia that they recently hired 20 (!) people from Atomic Vision. They note that RH will be competing more directly with VAs Linux.com, and of course, yours truly.

Chuck Milam writes "Red Hat has announced Red Hat Europe. Interesting--I wonder if they're going to give SuSE a run for the money? " Looks like they are opening a German and UK office, and have announced that Colin Tenwick (of Sybase) will be in charge.

weezer writes "LinuxToday has a nice little article about a Dataquest study that claims that Linux will account for about 24% of the server market by 2003. "

hfcs writes "Just browsing the Red Hat Careers page, and a good number of their open positions are listed as being in San Franscisco. Just a couple of weeks ago, all positions were listed as being in RTP, NC. Hmmmm.... "

Computer Associates looks like it has finally released it's UniCenter Managment Framework for Red Hat Linux. Other distros to follow soon, and you can order a free CD from CA.

Nils sent a release to the Debian Announce mailing list proclaiming that Linux Laptops Ltd is up and running, and (surprise!) they're whole deal is reselling Laptops with Linux Pre-installed. And they're shipping them with Debian as their distribution of choice. Pre-installed portables are still a hole in the Linux hardware realm, hopefully this will work out.

Full details on this page at Linux Today, where Alan Cox says, "A lot of updates here. I've not chased down the lockd bug reports yet, nor the umount nfsd bug that is trapped by the SLAB debugging. This mops up most of the stuff while I've been occupied elsewhere. Chances are given the number of updates there will be a few glitches in it. Have fun testing."

drdestructo asks : "I am looking to serve files and printers from a Linux machine to Macs, Linux clients and one Win98 machine (stuborn users!). I need somthing that will work with all three platforms. To the best of my knowledge, MacOS has yet to be infected with SMB, so I think that's out. What else might I use to solve this headache. Right now our solution involves a frightening ftp solution. We currently have printers connected locally to different machines, and use PDF for cross platform compatiablility. There has to be somthing better than this. Please help." To my knowledge there ARE commercial SMB clients available for the Mac, like DAVE. Also, there are Appletalk clients available for Win32... COPSTalk being the one that sticks in my mind the most. Anybody else have any suggestions?

Christian Winebrenner writes "RedHat seems to have seen the new licensing terms on rdist (background story: Pseudo-Free software...) and decided that the best solution to the problem is to recommend that users DOWNgrade to the previous version. Their RH 6.0 errata page offers the solution of ditching rdist 6.1.5 in favor of 6.1.0. Who knows how long it will be until we find that distributions will be riddled with "holes" from out of date non-free-for-commercial-use software? "