A reader sent us the latest installment in the Metcalfe and Peterely debate that started roughly one week ago with doubts about Linux from Metcalfe, and a response from Peterly. In this round, Metcalfe repents a bit, and also brings up the current hot topic: How the Linux community reacts to questions. Short, but interesting reading, and again raises the point: Read the Linux Advocacy How-To if you have any questions.

Nathan Laredo (the A/V guru from the expo who had 4 MPEG decoders in his machine running simultaneously) wrote in to say that he's "hacked out" full read/write/rewrite functionality for the Panasonic LF-D100 series of Panasonic DVD-RAM drives under Linux, and the diff is available at OPN. He says he's used the driver to copy three unencrypted DVDs, and that you probably don't want to use ext2 on the drive (though it can be done "painfully").

Vertigo1 asks: &nbsp "I have a Cable Modem with RoadRunner. I have a Dual Pentium 200 machine (w/two NIC's), running Red Hat 6.0 w/the latest errata updates. I am going to setup a firewall w/ipchains. I have a Citrix (ie Terminal Server) behind the firewall I want to connect to from the Internet and an FTP server also. How do I set up IPChains to forward to the Citrix server (which uses tcp port 1494) and then to an internal FTP server (tcp port 21 and ftp-data). I understand how ipchains works and have read thoroughly the IPChains-HOWTO, but I still cannot connect to the Citrix server from the Internet. Please help!" This is a common misconception. IPChains are good for configuring what gets in and out of your network on a packet level, but this is a redirection problem. Anyone know where you can find a a good port redirection program on the 'net?

Deuteron asks: "Hi! I work for an ISP and we're about to deploy wireless net access and need a way to limit people to the bandwidth they pay for. We're planning on starting out with offering 128k, 256k, and 1M links. The wireless hardware itself (Breezecom if you're interested) will handle the 1M part for us. The tricky part is the lower speeds. I've done some extensive checking and haven't found any IP or MAC address based shapers as of yet. Can anyone point me to some free or extremely low cost solutions? Any leads would be greatly appreciated!"

oneeyedman writes "Maybe this will give support to the people who think that Linux is a communist plot. Salon has an item about an article called Anti-Microsoft 'subculture'" that ran in the China Youth Daily. In this reading of the situation, Linux users are angry peasants rising with pitchforks aimed at Microsoft's "hegemony." "

richard writes "CNN has an interesting article on companies racing to support Linux. " Talks about HP, IBM, LinuxCare and a few other odds and ends. Slanted somewhat oddly, but it ends on an (again mixed) high note.

SuSE has formed SuSE Labs, an effort to contribute to free software projects. The press release (which can be mangled by Babelfish for all you non-German speakers) mentions projects like XFree86, KDE, and ISDN4Linux which SuSE has already worked on, and says that they will be working on them in the future, as well as other projects like ALSA. This seems pretty cool - I know Jaroslav (the ALSA guy) was hired by SuSE awhile ago.

mediageek writes "Targeted at non Linux users, James Hills has written an editorial which tries to explain open source, why there are different distros and general Linux pros & cons. " This is a good one to pass on to your bosses/parents/friends - heck, all of the unwashed. *grin*

Code-Fu writes "NetWare is nowhere. That's the word from Lotus Development." You can read the rest of the story here. This involves Lotus bringing Domino to Linux, and will probably mean Linux being used in more business settings. I like it.

Matts Kallioniemi writes "Toshiba just now put up a Linux support page. Quite a change from two months ago when they refused to even think about Linux. Now if I could only get a Libretto ff 1100, but Toshiba Sweden are not importing the Libretto any more. :-( "

A reader sent us a recent BusinessWeek article interviewing Red Hat's Bob Young. More indepth then most of them usually, I learned some of the odder tibits about Red Hat interesting, including the toliet in the first apartment and other such stories.

F1reF0x wrote to us with an interesting story on Linux Today about kha0S Linux-a distribution primarily based on creating the most secure distribution possible. You can check out kha0s.org. Due to the United States "interesting" crypto laws, 0.99-pre4 is not currently availible on the FTP site.

El Jefe writes "Just saw on the Debian news site that a new debian book is coming out, including a CD. The whole thing will be GPL'd, btw. "

Anonymous Coward writes "Go check out this benchmark of Linux vs NT in a real life-situation. C't makes a pretty good point here, showing Linux/Apache to be ahead of NT in performance in daily life! Also compliments the Linux community for its responsiveness: "Emails to the respective [Linux] mailing lists even resulted in special kernel patches which significantly increased performance. " This is the C't benchmark that's been bouncing around lately-translated into English, for all of the German-impaired out there.

Kewlname writes "Namesys released Reiserfs for GNU/Linux. The specs and the press release " To think - we get this and beta journaling code in the same week (I hope!). Anyway, I don't know how applicable it is to Reiserfs, but Theodore Ts'o has a paper in the 1998 Linux Expo proceedings about how one might go about introducing B-trees into ext2. It might be interesting to compare this to the design of Reiserfs.

Ethelred Unraed writes "At Linux am Mac, there is an article written by Larry Kollar, an MkLinux developer, as a rebuttal to the erroneous tidbit at Mac OS Rumors claiming that MkLinux was dead (as Apple had ceased active support). Kollar's article seeks to explain just what IS going on, and where MkLinux is headed. " It's interesting to note that Apple isn't the only one to stop development on MkLinux - as we reported before, The Open Group also has ceased development. The article explains that the user community has been maintaining the port since then.

We've been alerted to the upcoming Linux Demo Day. It's July 23, and the aim is show the world writ large how cool Linux really is. Currently there are 33 LUGs, and numerous corporate sponsers - click-thru to sign up.The actual event is Sept. 12-13 - corporate sponser deadline is July 23.

Our friends at Linux today started today to broadcast in MP3 format, and they need "beta" testers to get some feedback. (you'll need mpg123 program or the latest RealPlayer G2, or X11amp/XMMS to hear it)

John Lazzaro writes "Found this linked from Dave Winers site, an analysis that puts numbers behind the oft quoted "Linux + Apache will saturate any reasonable Internet link given static pages" It basically assumes the mindcraft tests are accurate, and then tells you what it means. Most interesting is the comments about MSs online tech support, the hardware they use, the results of the benchmarks, and the fact that static content is practically irrelevant.

TheInternet writes "The head/subhead of the article sum it up very nicely: 'Can Linux crash Windows? That's the goal of the upstart operating system. Installing it, however, is just too difficult for most of us.' Note that 'crash Windows' means 'overtake Windows' in this context. It's a stretch. " Pretty typical piece.