Matt Welsh sent us a link to a Salon story on Why Linux Needs Help. It features a lot of truth, and poses the simple question, can free software geeks write software for dumb users? Has a spiffy penguin graphic and a lot of good points (most of which aren't new to us, but they are well written).

SFraser sent us a link to a pretty decent critique of Mindcraft's benchmark which claimed NT was faster. Monday's story about the tests here on Slashdot about the report was one of the most active Slashdot stories ever.

sean dreilinger writes "Hotel franchisor eyes low cost, stability of Linux, but says the OS has its drawbacks. Cendant Corp., the world's largest franchisor of hotels, is rolling out Linux servers at about 4,000 hotels to run the company's hotel management software. " It's on the server side, but still a large rollout, nonetheless...

BonesBro writes "Netgem is releasing a new set-top internet appliance (remember WebTV?) with a twist...this baby runs on Linux. Among other things, it claims to support 640x480 resolution with no onscreen deformation. Shipdate is give as Q4, but no price was listed. Check out the press release. "

Mike_Miller writes "The lastest Mindcraft Study claims that Microsoft Windows NT Server is 2.5 times faster than Linux as a file server and 3.7 times faster as a web server. Their white paper shows that NT beats Linux on every test. " Anyone have a critique?

chrisd writes "Anyone folowing the blowtorches being wielded lately in the Linux community might want to check out this saturday Wired News article featuring some commentary on the latest from Eric and Bruce."

agermain writes "VARBusiness magazine is featuring a cover story on Linux in its April 12 issue. It details Linux's growing acceptance in small business and how value-added resellers and consultants can profit installing and integrating the OS for their customers. Also online is a Q&A with Linus Torvalds, the Wizard of OS, plus a pretty funny profile of Torvalds by the two reporters who interviewed him. The online Linux page rounds out the package with recent stories for resellers and useful Linux links. "

jgalun sent us a ZDNet article about Linux Hackers going from the underground to Linux Day Jobs. They talk about VA Research, SGI, LinuxCare and assorted other companies that many of us lust for employment at. They don't mention BSI though *grin*.

scenic writes "A Washington "Think Tank" has a report complaining about the new "Assessing Microsoft" conference. In particular, they have an issue with the OSS remedy that many, including Nader and Love, have proposed (i.e. opening up the Windows source code). There is quite a bit of stuff concerning Linux (about a quarter of the long article) and why OSS and Linux are temporary phenomenons created by "media interest in identifying a viable competitor to Microsoft." "

An anonymous reader sent us a link to Ace's Hardware and suggests checking it out. The site looks pretty good- similar to Tom's Hardware, but with some other different stuff. Check it out.

Scott Stevenson writes "A News.com article describes a study which dings Linux for poor SMP support, access to only 1 or 2GB of memory, and lack of clustering. Of course, it doesn't say anything about NT's uptime issues on a per-machine basis." Also says that hard data isn't available on Linux being reasonably crash proof.

An anonymous reader sent us a fairly positive article about Linux but written primarily from the perspective of a Mac advocate. Talks a lot about KDE, the usability issues and similiarities between Mac and Linux advocacy.

Well, I seem to be the Santa Claus of conference exhibit-only passes today. As the title would make obvious, we've got fifty free LinuxExpo passes. The conference is in Raleigh-Durham, May 18-22. Click below if you want address information and such.

sallgeud sent us a CNN story that poses the age old question is commercialism good for Linux? Its a pretty good summary type article of the issues. Talks about the fears of a single distribution taking control, tag-along software, and has several Linus quotes.

Zyber writes "Red Hat is sending 6 geeks to the beach where they will live in a luxury beachhouse. The contest involves locating the Gnome footprint throughout their website. While on vacation you will have to maintain a geekworld website as well as being "videotaped, photographed and documented for the world to see". Hmmm. Female geeks? " Don't we wish.

A member of Clan Anonymous Coward asks: "Does anyone know HOW to get these things to boot Linux? I have done a WWW search and found mailing-list messages that say it can be done. I have tried with Linux 2.0.36 off an LS 120 disk and all I got was continuous screenfuls of binary numbers scrolling off the screen. As far as I can determine LILO boot block did not even start execution. I tried formating the disk as /dev/hda and /dev/hda2 and both gave me similar results. The /dev/hda2 attempt had 'linear' in lilo.conf. Do I need a later version of lilo?"

Couple of interesting developments in Linux hardware lately. The Linux Store is selling super cheap linux boxes. news.com has a story about them where they proclaim that they will only be advertising on sites like Slashdot and Freshmeat except that Scoop doesn't even had ads, and I'd never heard of them before reading that article. An actual advertiser (Penguin Computing), however now has a 8 CPU Xeon Box that runs Linux (of course). First 8 CPU box I've seen running Linux (which I didn't even know could do 8 way SMP. Although I've been told of 32 and 64 chip linux boxes in development by other companies. No I can't name names).

jsparkes asks: "I haven't been able to find definitive information on mounting FAT32 filesystems in linux. It seems like it was implemented by Gordon Chaffee, who has this Fat32 homepage. It seems that it was added in 2.0.34 and should also be in 2.2.X. Does it work? Is just like an ext2 fs, or are there limitations? I'd like to dual boot linux and win98, but if I can't use my large FAT32 partitions, it would be pointless. (I have a 10G win98 drive, and will use a 1.2G for linux..)"

Couple of new Linux Portals to mention: An anonymous reader sent us a link to LinuxStart- a yahoo-ish Linux focused site, and FaKe wrote in to send us JustLinux.com. EmilEifrem sent us Earthweb's newly announced OpenSourceIT, which isn't a portal: More like a better designed LinuxWorld, with a cheesier name. It Debuts with the standard ESR and RMS profiles. All of these sites look pretty decent- its pretty excellent that Linux can support this much content. Anyone else remember when it was just Me and Scoop? We've come a long way. Very cool.

weink writes "Debian is in the process of getting their logo in order. The vote will take place in about a week. After the logo contest at GIMP, here are the options. " I am so happy that I have my Debian box running again. apt is so good for lazy sysadmins. Oh, and I vote for Raul's design. Super smooth.