Nils Lohner announces that " On Sunday, August 16, 1998, Debian will turn a proud 5 years old. There will be an IRC party on irc.debian.org (also irc.openprojects.net) channel #debian on Sunday August 16 at 20:00 UTC. Please join us for the festivities!" Click below to read the whole deal.

Ed-Da-Man sent us an excellent article on the Linux Community. This is one aspect that seems to be neglected far to often by journalists mentioning Linux- sure, it's a great OS, but the free software community (usually!) rocks, and are willing to help folks. Anyway, it's great positive press for linux. Not the usual stuff in any case.

Brian Daniels writes " NASA's created a Beowulf to investigate the data seized from computer criminals. The article is short on technical detail, but Linux and the cost advantage of Beowulf vs supercomputers is mentioned. One wonders about exaggerations though - does the average computer criminal really have "hundreds of gigabytes of data", and where was he keeping it? "

Brock wrote in to tell us that LinuxPPC is now released. Comes with KDE, The Gimp, Netscape, and all the fixin'z you'd expect in a modern *nix. If you got the hardware, you know what to do.

muggles writes "news from the corporate front: i received email this morning from John "Maddog" Hall stating that an Alpha server is being donated to the Debian Project by the Compaq Computer Corporation. John himself is making a personal donation of an extra 64MB of true-parity memory for the box. the server will be a development platform for the Debian Alpha distribution. much thanks and regards to both John Hall and Compaq for the support of Debian and Linux! muggles ( muggles #debian / mark@debian.org ) "

So many people submitted this story that I wonder if any readers might not know about it yet, but here it is. Debian and Red Hat are now collaberating to produce Linux Compatibility Standards (LCS) Erik Troan (Red Hat) and Dale Scheetz (Debian) are managing the project. I've attached the press release, so click on if you want more.

Joseph Pranevich has written in to talk a bit about one of those features that might be slipping into Linux 2.2, the Frame Buffer Console. It's a nice summary of what it is, and why we might (or might not) want this feature.

Yoav Cohen-Sivan wrote in to tell us that Marc Ewing has posted his take on the Qt License. The final result is that Qt will not be included with future versions of Red Hat's distro.

InterBase Software Corporation, a subsidiary of Inprise Corporation (FKA Borland), has announced it will release the next Linux version of its database, Interbase 5, on August 14, 1998. According to Jim Weil, president of Interbase, there has been a tremendous demand for their recent freeware offering of Interbase 4.2.

Eaglemoon sent us a link to MITs Orca-1 Submarine which apparently is run by an onboard linux system. It just won a contest that involved deploying a marker at the deepest point of a lake, while running unattended. Oh, the places Linux will go... automated subs, automated cars, the space shuttle. Ain't it cool?

Albert Strasheim writes "Just a quick update on the status of the Linux T-shirt Competition. So far I've received 42 entries, and they've all been posted here and here. There's still 5 days left to get entries in so move, move, move! :-) After the competition and voting the t-shirts will be on sale @ $18.00 each, including international shipping and handling. Mastercard, VISA and Amex cards, and bankdrafts, will be accepted. " A lot of the designs won't work as t-shirts, but I did see a couple of really sharp ones that will. Several other ones looked inspired by my DFtP shirt too :)

Chris Story was the first to give testimony that 2.1.116 is out. We've got a fairly stable kernel running off 2.1.114, and things are getting cleaner. 2.2.0 is getting closer. Not much closer, but still.

An anonymous reader that I shall refer to as Triple Hyphen (that's what he put in the box- I guess that good be his name) wrote in to ask for everyone's assistance at The Linux Hardware Certification Lab. Initially they need a nice logo designed, but they also have links for hardware vendors to register as well.

We received this from James E. McEvoy: " We've just made ObjectTeam, our OO modeling and design tool, available for Linux. Our engineers have been using this version for sometime to work at home. You can download it at our website Here's what you get: UML compliant Class Diagram Editor; Code Generation for C++ and Java; Reverse engineering of existing C++ and Java code; Unlimited personal use" It's not open-source, but it's got good reviews and looks like it could be useful. It's also good to see more Linux support. Anyone had any experience with this or other such tools?

Bart Grantham writes "I'm an intermediate (closer to beginner than advanced) Linux user and I'm wondering where I can find more information about pumping up performance. Specifically, when running XFree86 on two completely different SCSI based systems, disk access significantly decreases interface responsiveness. I can understand this to a degree, but the mouse will consistently hang for a second at a time or more. Under Win95, disk access is much faster for nearly any kind of transfer. Is there a repository of information about tweaking Linux for performance (UI or otherwise)? "

Juergen Schmidt, editor of C'T, was kind to inform me that there is now the original English version of his interview with Linus on C'T's web page

Geoff Smith writes in to ask "I'm wondering what kind of luck people have had using the new(ish) Super7 socket 7 motherboards (and their associated technologies such as 100MHz RAM, AGP video cards, and specifically the AMD K6-2 processor) under Linux. Is there a Super7 mobo that folks like for Linux? Any compatability problems (aside from the well-known, and hopefully soon-to-be-fixed, i740 card glitch with the MVP3 chipset)? I'm thinking my next machine will be based around an AMD K6-2 and haven't seen much about using Linux with it (hopefully this means it's a slam-dunk). Thanks in advance for any help you all can provide..."

Nils Lohner posted to linux-announce the new board members for Software in the Public Interest (SPI). The board members are President: Ian Jackson, Vice President: Martin Schulze, Secretary:Dale Scheetz, Treasurer: Nils Lohner. Bruce Perens (former President), Ian Murdock (former Secretary) and Tim Sailer (former Treasurer) have decided to pursue other interests in the field of free software.

perrin was the first one to let us know about the kernel. Several folks told us about Gnome. So go download stuff already.

Gopal Sarma writes "The venerable Ogrady's Power Page has detailed instructions on how to install Linux on a Power Book G3. The instructions are good, but the only problem is that they are using MK Linux rather than Linux PPC. Anyway, for those of you who were wondering if it could be done." I guess I know what I want for christmas now.