Everyone's favorite guy, Linus, threw 2.1.85 on the fire early this morning. Some of the improvements in the kernel are: documentation updates, SCSI driver updates, ham radio updates, and the addition of the System V filesystem. Guess where he put it

Debian is going to be used to design AMSAT Satellites. That's almost as cool as the impending release of Debian 2.0 which features LIBC6. 2.1 will have a new replacement for dselect.

I laughed out loud when I heard this. Mike Perry of linuxos.org fame writes the following

"Not only is this great Linux PR, not only is this www.linuxos.org PR, not only is this #LinuxOS PR, but it is Zummy PR! For those who do not frequent #LinuxOS, Zummy is an AI Q/A bot that apparently just passed the Turin Test (that is,to carry on a conversation with a human in a subject that that human posseses knowlege about, without that human realizing that the program is not human). This article from Sm@rtReseller January 26, 1998 (pages 82, and 83) quotes Zummy and one other channel member as Linux consultants. In the author's defense, he may have done this deliberately to prevent people from harassing or K-lining Zummy."

Skip wrote in with a link to The Linux Clothing Project which aims to make Linux T-Shirts for people. The slogan is 'fear the penguin' (which sounds vaguely familiar to a slogan I came up with awhile back). Oh, and don't forget to check out Bright Eye Productions the LCP's major competitior. We're taking orders for Black Shirts with the logo I designed, and more sizes now.

It's great to see that RedHat Linux has won InfoWorld's Product of the Year in the Operating System catagory for a second year in a row. And if that doesn't surprise you enough, the award for Best Tech Support was given to the Linux User Community. I bet a large number of readers of Slashdot deserve a part of this award. I know I'm amazed at the number of Linux Developers and Users that I can email and get help back within days. I only wish I could better help everyone that emailed me. Congrats to RedHat, and to Everyone Out There who made the other award happen. Let's make 98 even better.

It's another micropatch. Mostly just a Makefile update and some filesystem fixes. Go get it.

Linus released 2.1.83 to the world just minutes ago. It is an extremley small patch, 4kb compressed. The main addition is the documentation update for the Digiboard. Go fetch

Everyone's favorite operating system received more positive press over at The Irish-Times. Christopher Blizzard was the first of several to send in the story. Chris says there are a few inaccuracies and no real revelations, but it's always swell to see the positive press.

Wow. An MSNC article on Linux. Everyone should go and read that, just for the sheer juxtaposition of interests. Thanks to Christopher Carlson for this one.

James S. Blachly wrote in to talk about something that has been brought to my attention before, but you all should read this. He writes "The latest buzz on the linux-kernel mailing list is the copying of the Linux Logo, the Penguin. Apple is using the penguin as the new logo for Quicktime. An image can be seen either when installing the new quicktime 3.0 drivers or at www.apple.com/quicktime/. Apple is shamefully capitalizing on other peoples creativity. The linux penguin logo is originally by Larry Ewing. His terms of usage may be found here."

The similarities are extremely strong, but let's be honest, most cartoon stylized penguins look the same. "The Wrong Trousers" features a Tux-Like Penguin, and I seem to remember some old Warner Bros cartoons with somewhat similar birds as well. And it wouldn't surprise me if whoever created the Quicktime logo just didnt know. Only in the last 6 mos has Linux really become enough of a mainstream fixture that we would expect major companies to worry about conflicting mascots.

Stampede has joined the ranks of available Linux Distributions. Stampede aims to be easy for the new users as well as powerful for the power user. Ships with KDE as well. Thanks to Bob Grabowsky for sending the info.

You know the drill guys:download kernel, compile kernel, run lilo to install it, reboot, redial, download next kernel...

RedHat has announced that future versions of their very popular Linux Distribution will include Netscape's Navigator web browser. It's a lot to think about, what with the DOJ/MS issues with browser bundling, and the recent netscape bombshell. One thing is for certain though, having Netscape preinstalled for RedHat users is very nice for the newbies that Linux is winning over every day courtesy of all the positive press it's been getting.

Yet another ground breaking announcement this week. After the exciting news from the Govt about our favorite court case and the publicity bonanza for netscape doing "right thing" by handing out the source Navigator, Linus blows them all away with the latest kernel patch. Analysts are stunned. "Grab it" they say. And we listen.

I know everyone has been talking about the Linux Expo coming up in may, but Greg Hankins asked me to plug the Atlanta Linux Showcase as well. Bruce mentioned it in passing in his debian-announce message. The showcase runs from Oct 23 to 24 in Atlanta. Sounds cool...

debian-announce just sent out a message saying that Bruce Perens will be speaking at the LinuxExpo. In addition to LinuxExpo, Debian hopefully will be at The Atlanta Linux Showcase, International Linux Kongress, and the SANE conference.

As a side note, the message also mentioned that the Berlin is joining up with Software in the Public Interest (Debian's Corporation).

Linus has released kernel 2.1.80. But this isn't just any ordinary kernel- for the first time in a Linux kernel, the ARM architecture is supported. Newton Linux might not be too far off if a dedicated programmer has some motivation.

I sure hope you know where to get it by now.

Prasanth Kumar sent us this MicroTimes article which lists the top 100 people of 97 (I guess anyway) and lo and behold, there is Linus, with yet another mysterious reference to whatever-the-heck-transmeta reference. Linus, if you read this, send me email and tell me what you do! *big smile*

The latest in a virtual tidal wave of amazing pro linux mainstream news articles can be found here. It's just a really short little "Redhat is cool" thing, but they did list it first- above Apple, Be and OS/2. It amazes me that in the last year Linux has gone from something that nobody understands, to something that anyone who keeps up with technology has to know about.

Thank Adrian Likins for letting us know that The LinuxExpo Website has been updated. They now list costs, dates, events and lot's of other information. The dates don't overlap any of my classes, so there is a very good chance that I'll be there. Hope to see ya.