malacai sent us a press release that finally gives some good details on Red Hat's impending IPO. 6 Million Shares. $10-$12/share. The Week of August 9 (no surprise that its during LinuxWorld). The symbol will be RHAT.

drix asks: "Like many I'm running a Linux gateway between my home network and cable internet connection. Naturally, I'd like it if my Linux server, 4 Win 98 boxes, and iMac could do a nightly backup. The problem is I only have one tape drive, which is, of course, situated in the server. So my question is what software exists that, a) runs on Linux, b) exists in a client server form, where the server runs a "backup daemon" that each client connects to to backup its respective hard disk each night, and c) has clients available for Windows and optionally Mac? I guess the analogous NT ware would be Seagate Backup Exec, which runs on an NT server and polls NT workstations nightly for any changed files, and then uses delta file compression to zip those changes to the server's tape drive. I don't need anything that complicated, but I must have the basic ability to move the files."

Matthew Pavlovich, head of the new LiViD project, has released source code (from an anonymous source) to allow CSS unlocking on DVD drives. This means people with DVD drives (only IDE at the moment, SCSI soon) will be able to copy the raw, encrypted, MPEG off the disc. Once this software is refined, all that will be necessary to watch DVD movies under Linux will be a hardware decoder or a special software decoder (which would have to be non-free).

st. augustine asks this question which I'm sure many of you still in dorms might find useful: "I'm going to be moving into a very small dorm room in a few months and every square inch of space is going to be at a premium. I'd like a small Linux box and I want decent price/performance -- a year or two ago a Cobalt Qube or Corel Rebel.com Netwinder looked okay, but paying $1000 for one of these puppies just doesn't seem reasonable when you can get an AMD box that's twice as fast for $400. Only problem is that the AMD box is the size of a refrigerator, and I'm going to need that space for a refrigerator. Any suggestions?" Ah, yes, I remember the days of living in closets dorm rooms. Does anyone have any pointers?

RelliK asks: "I have a small LAN at home, 4 workstations and a gateway sharing a cable modem. My workstation is running SuSE 6.1 and the gateway is running Debian 2.1. Both machines are using the 2.2.9 kernel. The problem is that telnet and rlogin from my workstation to the gateway is slow to the point of being absolutely unusable. It takes several seconds for a character to appear on the sccreen after I type it. FTP is also jerky: It transfers files fast, but it appears as though it's constanly "hitting speed bumps", so to speak, especially when it's about 95% done. I've tried everything I could think of to fix the problem, but no luck. I'd *greatly* appreciate it if any of you could help me." Now this just sounds downright strange. Does anyone have any ideas as to what's causing this? Click below for more.

BogoMips sent us an interesting tidbit running in Performance Computing currently. Jon "maddog" Hall explains some of the benchmarking issues associates with the DH Brown reports, as well as the ubiquitous Mindcraft tests. Very well written article, IMHO.

EvilNight writes "There's an interesting article up on Salon that makes a few comparisons between Red Hat and Microsoft. Interesting reading. They also touch a little on the squabbles between LinuxCare and Red Hat. " A very good article. Covers a lot of the issues, and clearly.

Kelly McNeill sent in a pointer to this article by Todd Burgess. Here's a quote from it: "The concept of Linux for the Masses is an honorable goal but one that must not be taken too lightly. The purpose of this article is to point out several of the current limitations in Linux and what should be done to create a usable system." You might want to hit the links at the bottom of the article and check out some of Todd's earlier writing on the subject of Linux usability. You may not agree with him, but his opinions are always backed by sound thinking and are well worth reading.

A fair number of you probably voted in the recent poll about Borland exploring Linux development. As the other article touched on, they are looking to hire people, and are running a poll to test the waters. However, the prior poll's server got slashdotted, and they missed a lot of people's comments. If you didn't make it at first, head over again and make your voice heard.

Philipp Rumpf writes "SuSE began shipping the first official version of their SuSE distribution for Compaq's (former Digital's) 64-bit Alpha architecture this week in Germany. " I'm glad to see SuSE finally expanding into non-x86 platforms. With any luck, it'll be available in the states soon.

MaxAttack asks: "I wanted to look into setting up a PPP server and things to keep it running smoothly but i couldn't find any infomation...like FAQs on setting up Linux to use a borax line, setting up the server itself, setting scripts to check track of users time on, kicking users off after certain times, and security for it. I'm just looking for some basic infomation to get started on a PPP server couldnt find anything good, Any help on this would be great.."

hooligan writes "This is an annoucement from Adaptec for support for their new transfer speed for Linux. Check the press release."

Stormix, a Vancouver-based start-up, has announced the release of Stormix Linux v0.99 Alpha r1, their first public release. The new distro is based on Debian, and uses dpkg as its package management system. It seems they have some new ways of going about things, and even an interesting project called SAS. SAS allows developers to write a program once and have a text-based and a GUI interface. Thankfully, they have stated they will release all of their software under the GPL (or a "related" license).

Borland is currently running a poll to test the demand from the Linux community for porting their development tools. What with the Code Warrior folks, and all the IDEs coming around, it's a good signal of interest in the community. As well, Inprise is looking to hire a Seniuor R&D Engineer (for porting Delphi), as well as a Linux Developer Relations Mgr.

I found a nameless submission in the submission box that asks a fairly good question: "I'm installing Linux for the first time on Intel hardware (I've installed Linux for PPC and BSD for Intel and 68K) but I am confused on how the swap partition should be handled for optimum performance. The Linux Installation Guide says I should have my swap at least as big as my RAM and that the swap partition should not be bigger than 127MB. Also a "rule of thumb" answer I got from my BSD using friends is that my swap should be twice the size of my RAM. Since I have 128MB of RAM should I have two swap partitions? Also how will swap drive performance affect system performance? Would a Fast SCSI (20MB/s) swap drive be any different than a Wide SCSI (40MB/s) swap drive? There seems to be little information on how to 'tune' Linux swap for machines with 100+ MB RAM."

PugMajere submitted the following: "I've been looking into using SSH and rdist to distribute around 2 gig worth of data to about 1000 machines nightly. Rdist (v6.1.5) would be perfect for this, as it automatically forks to send data to multiple machines, but it isn't totally free software. The problem is with SSH. To use SSH with rdist you need the server side of SSH on each of the machines that are running the rdist server. The licensing fees for this are simply astronomical for this kind of application. While researching all this I noticed that Red Hat includes rdist (6.1.5) in its distribution. I also now know the rdist license terms. Rdist isn't free to use in a commercial setting if it involves another company. So, if you have two companies running Linux, that are collaborating on some project, and sharing some of the data using Linux and rdist, they owe Magnicomp money. My real question here is: Does anyone else realize this? How many other packages have similar arrangements that are going to cause major headaches in the future?"

Sm@rt Resseler has published an article about what Lotus will port to Linux in the near future. Among their products are Domino 5.0.3 with connectivity to Oracle 8.0x and IBM's DB2, Sametime 2.0 (Realtime collaboration software), and Quick Place 2.0 Collaborative Program (scheduled for the first half of 2000). Unfortunately, Lotus is not planning to port either their Notes client or SmartSuite Millenium edition to Linux, which is a sad thing. (/me thinks that a petition could help us to get those client ports.)

JediGeek writes "The BBC signed a deal to use BMC Software's Patrol product suite to manage computers running Linux. The BBC said it would use BMC's Patrol for the next five years to improve the availability, performance and recoverability of its core applications and data. The article can be found at Yahoo "

Thanks to LinuxPR for this one. It seems that the Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts have opened web-based registration for this October's Atlanta Linux Showcase. According to the press release, the first 100 registrees receive an OS Wars (it's a spoof of Star Wars) shirt. They also announced that Jeremy Allison, one of the key Samba developers, will be giving the keynote. The full text of the press release can be read here.

Lost in the Corporate Maze writes "SUSE rides the Linux Cash Cow!. I guess someone asked SUSE to "Show me the money!". What's the breakdown between US and World sales? Where is this revenue coming from? Enquring minds want to know. " We mentioned this before, but its interesting seeing to appear in a major pub. Amusing step in the rivalry between the major distributions. This is getting fun, but its also further proof that Linux is getting bigger.