Non-Newtonian Fluid writes "There's an article over at ZDNN that claims RMS is "immature politically" and "insists on a reward for [himself]" for claiming Linux should be called GNU/Linux. Furthermore, in a lengthy talkback article, Slashdot and the Linux community as a whole are accused of the same arrogance. Perhaps this merits a discussion of the way our community deals with outsiders.... " Now, before everyone turns on the flamethrowers, let's think about the matter-is this true? The problem with most of these situations is that they do have some inherent truth to them. The question, of course, is how much?

A verbose member of Clan Anonymous Coward asks this difficult question: "My university has a problem. We have lots of autonomous departments managing their own computing infrastructure, lots of autonomous users managing their own computers and a very large network population (in excess of 20k people). Of the systems which are not managed by "professionals" about 10% are linux. How should the university tackle the problem of people keeping their boxes up-to-date whenever it has little control on the box owners? Using tools to identify problems (e.g. nmap, satan, etc) is the easy part. How do we then get hundreds of different computer owners to update their systems when they didn't know what they were doing in the first place? How to we do this in a climate where the resources are not available to employ herds of new computer support staff to assist these people?"

slim sent us linkage to a detailed guide to installing Linux on an iMac. " There are comments about LinuxPPC R4 and R5, but its come a long way. If those iMacs were a few hundred bucks cheaper I still think they'd be fun thinnish linux workstations. And the pretty colors.

Todd Bradshaw wrote in with an excerpt from Linus' chapter in "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution". Linus' number one rule for keeping the kernel healthy is to avoid new system interfaces.

Phaid writes "As if you weren't already being flooded about this, linux 2.2.4 is out. Here's the official Announcement from The Man Himself. There's a small problem with BSD Process Accounting that can be easily fixed with the patch. " You know the routine-go get'em.

Langston01 writes "According to LinuxToday, a pre-beta of Slackware 4.0 is out. " I remember Slackware. Wow, its been years since I used it. I still need a Debian 2.1 CD. Or a T1.

Dirk Elmendorf asks: "A company I work with is looking at using Oracle as the database backend for a number of large scale intranet applications. They would prefer to go with Oracle under Solaris. I voted in favor of Oracle under Linux. They think that it isn't stable. Can anyone out there provide me proof or testimonials that will help me choose Linux?" How does the Linux version compare with the NT and Solaris versions of Oracle?

Patrick Dunn writes "On ZDNET's Smart Reseller they have a story about Red Hat maybe being a mini-Microsoft by it's business practices." I'd guess that the 2 most common conspiracy theories that pop into my mail box are 1. MS-Linux and 2. Red Hat becoming the next MS. What do you think?

An anonymous reader sent us linkage to a ZDNet UK Article written by Martin Butler of the The Butler Group. The article doesn't say much new, it really just says linux is just the "New Thing" (Just like windows was so many years ago) and that it will factionalize when money becomes involved. And its already started to happen. My take? Bring it on! As long as a base system of kernel, libs, and utilities is compatible accross distributions, divide all you want. Debian for Hackers. Red Hat for Suits. Slackware for loons. And the 28 other assorted distributions for whoever wants them. Its about options, and as long as we adhere to a minimal set of requirements, everyone will be happy. Am I crazy?

Gracchus writes "SuSE has announced they will release the Euro edition of ver. 6.1, with the expected inclusion of the Linux kernel 2.2.3, XFree86 3.3.3.1, KDE 1.1 and GNOME 1.0, on April 12th, with the North American version scheduled for May release. This page is in German, but you non-Deutschlanders can get yer translations at Babelfish . Watch "permissions" get translated to "Permian eating ions"! Can I get fries with that? "

Well, starting this morning, DELL are starting to sell Linux pre-installed on selected workstations, dell asks for additional 99$ for the installation. Full report from News.com is here. Speaking of pre-installing, IBM just told Info-world reporters that they will keep selling Linux servers, but they will "wait-and-see" about selling Workstation pre-installed with Linux. Am I the only one who thinks that IBM need to learn about selling from Dell?

Stephen Williams writes "LinuxToday reports that Bowerbird Computing have released a new open source license called the New Copyleft License. Seems to be aimed at people who want to sell their free software, rather than charge for support." At the rate these licenses are proliferating, soon there will be one license for every app. Does anyone besides me think this is getting crazy?

Jim Hill wrote to us about the Puffin Group & Hewlett-Packard, a popular story today being on both MSNBC and in the public section of the Wall Street Journal. It's an interesting business case story for Linux and major corporations-send this out to your bosses to show them it can be done. And if anyone has a HP icon, send it my way. Update: 03/18 02:36 by J : For interested parties, the Puffin Group website.

An anonymous reader was the first to let us know that ftp.redhat.com has something new- Starbuck, aka Red Hat 5.9, aka Pre 6.0. Hopefully this thing will be on the mirrors.

mattdm writes in with this query: "I'm trying to get PAM (on Red Hat Linux 5.2) to work with Kerberos. Has anyone done this succesfully? I'm using pam_krb4 from this URL. It works to authenticate people perfectly, but it doesn't save a TGT or set the proper environment variables. This is pretty important to getting Linux officially supported at the university where I work, so any help would be great." Update: 03/17 06:48 by C :The link posted above doesn't work, but you can go here to browse through their PAM files. Thanks to tjrw for the link. Update: 03/18 04:38 by C :The original link has now been fixed.

Hygelac writes "ESR has written an article for Linux World dubbed "Halloween V". It's basically a reaction to Ed "The Sheriff of Nottingham" Muth's statements in a PCWeek article. Nothing earth shattering, but somebody had to do it, right? "

Surplus Baggage writes "Caldera is planning to release the beta of OpenLinux 2.2 at Novell's BrainShare conference. It's the first distro to be based on a 2.2.x kernel. ZDNet has the story. " I've been reminded by people that Stampede has the first 2.2 out. As well, SuSE 6.1, out in a couple days will have a 2.2 based distrib. /me slaps own face.

NEC, the world's second largest semiconductor manufacturer, believes that the sucess of Linux would allow another microprocessor architecture to be established in the PC market. If Linux becomes mainstream, the basis for microprocessor competition would be cost/performance and not architecture. Although NEC might design its own processor architecture for Linux, it's more likely that they use the existing MIPS architecture. In related news, Justsystem will port its Ichitaro word processing program to Linux, and offer in July ATOK, a program for Japanese-language input.

peter royal writes "MegaCar is a high-class Brabus 5.8 outfitted with a 153kbit/s wireless internet connection. It is 16 9.6kbit/s GSM modems in parallel, with a Linux box acting at the router." Just when you thought you'd seen everything.

Red sent us a link to a Linux article on CNN. Take it with a grain of salt- the author makes some good points and tries to slice through the hype. Dwells on a trying to explain what source code is. He basically dismisses Linux as hype and buzzwords.