meese wrote in to tell me that RHAD is holding a Screen Saver contest. Winners will be decided by votes at the Linux Expo, and the prizes will be various video cards (Winner gets a 3dfx). I wish I had time to enter this one.

Hitchhiker wrote in to say that a couple of nasty new holes have surfaced recently in the kernel. Apparently both the filesystem code and memory allocation code has serious holes. Don't worry- 2.0.34 will be out soon with fixes for both. Read this one for some better info.

Tucols has opened its doors. The Ultimate Collection of Linux Software (Com'on, we could have had a better name guys! Wasn't tucows enough?) thanks to Kenneth Sarmaat for letting us know.

Well the only reason I ever watch the super bowl is to see the fantastic commercials, and this year those ads have a bonus. The RedHat Linux based Alpha Render Farm that Digital Domain built up for rendering scenes in Titanic will apparently be use to render 10 commercials for Super Sunday. Hope they post mpegs or something so I can see them. Follow the link below to read the official RedHat press release.

Thanks to the several of you who wrote in to let me know that Linus has released the 2.1.79 kernel- an over 700k patch. Wowsers. Grab it from the usual spots.

Evelyn Mitchell sent us this story where you can read about slowdowns in Client OS sales. According to the article, Microsoft still controls 87% of the operating systems sold last year. The gem though is the comments about IS managers evaluating free OS's like Linux. Could 98 really be the year Linux breaks into the main stream corporate world in a big way?

This story was sent to me by 11 people, but vertigo was the first. It has a lot more of the same information about the Bonk/Boink attack, but more importantly is the the comments at the end from Jiva DeVoe, the primary source for the article. His solution to the security hole is to run Linux. It then mentions how much better Free Software is for security. It gave me warm fuzzies.

Ryan Morgan wrote in to tell us that a new version of MindsEye- a 3d modeller for *nix was released this morning. There are binaries available if you want 'em. Check out their web site and their ftp site if you want to download them. I've never tried this program, but I may give it a whirl this weekend.

Matthew Miller has the following to say "Byte magazine has a nice article on the non-death of Unix in the January '98 issue Reseller section. Take a look. The article says really nice things about Linux, too: ("Linux is what's bringing new hope to the Unix community.")."

here is a review of RedHat 5 compared with NT. As an intelligent observer of Slashdot might have already guessed, this article, like so many others shows which OS is superior. Thanks to Marcelo Magallon for sending this our way.

Another cameo appearance of Linux in a mainstream mag comes to us from Amos Shapira. He sent in an article at inforworld about NT 5.0's hefty system requirements, and how Linux will "beat the living daylights out of it" on a system with less than 64 megs of RAM. Flattery like that is just the kinda publicity we like to hear.

The original is back with a new issue. The Linux Gazette has out its January 98 issue which features a ton of cool stuff. Dave Finton pointed me to the Gnome/KDE article in this issue which is an excellent comparison of the 2 major contenders in the desktop Widget Wars which will significantly change our desktops in the years ahead.

The GGI Project has announced a New version of their product. The GGI project aims to create an accelerated standardized interface to game hardware, similiar to DirectX on Windows boxes. Paul Kelly was the first of 6 (so far!) to email me this one.

Linus does it again! Version 2.1.78 of the Linux kernel has been released. Get it @ kernel.org. Some improvements are: HFS support, init fixes, and many sound and SCSI updates. Beware: apparently, make xconfig will not work.

It just keeps getting better. The one and only Sengan Baring-Gould sent us this link at ZD-Net with yet another amazingly positive review of RedHat from the mainstream industry press. Things have never looked so good for the Linux world. Everyone seems to be jumping on the Linux is Good bandwagon. Now if we can just get them to jump off the MS Uber Alles bandwagon and we may actually have a 2 horse race in the industry.

RedHat software, makers of the most popular Linux distribution has announced that they are now partnering with Collective Technologies to provide phone tech services to RedHat users. With this announcement, RedHat is standing on the edge of being the easy to use Unix of the masses. The quality of Linux is already there, but easy tech support for people who buy the software is, in my opinion, the last major puzzle piece for a vendor to offer. Now we just need a unified desktop and Linux can take over the world.

Dave Hill sent us this link at SunWorld. It is a very pro linux article written by a Sun based magazine. Very cool.

In what will undoubtedly be the single most important achievement in the development of free software, the vi vs. emacs war will be settled at the Linux Expo. The war will be settled in the only fair way:Paintball! Thanks to Michael Maher for sending this my way. I hope I can make it... guess which team I'll be on!

In what has got to be the most bizarre thing I have ever read, it appears that Asia Carrera, a porn star with her own web site actually runs Linux. She's a newbie and doesn't know exactly what she's talking about in her Bulletin Reports, but she may very well be the ideal woman for most of the guys I hang on with on IRC. Thanks to Scott for this one. Now nobody go to the web site.

The second issue of LinuxFocus is out, and published simultaneously in several languages. The articles in this issue include a very cool intro to OpenGL programming. This seems to be another very cool source of regular Linux Information... I hope that this and all the other recently popping up linux news magazines can fill the gap the I know I see.