Frank Caviggia writes "The Inquirer has a story up about Red Hat providing educational institutions with the ability to certify students as Red Hat Certified Technicians (RHCT) and Red Hat Certified Engineers (RCHE) how this will relate to Microsoft's MSCE program. You can find the story here. Red Hat has more information on the program here."

An anonymous reader submits "Competing infrastructures may foster improvement in each desktop, but the Gnome and KDE hackers still know how to work together when needed. The Free *nix desktop has been improving quickly. Red Hat's unified desktop was controversial, but obviously the right decision for regular users. Now that KDE and Gnome have decided to combine their Human Interface Guides, it can be done right--by the developers themselves. Note: they also want to involve 'people working on other non-KDE non-GNOME HIGs.'" Update: 02/03 20:19 GMT by T : Apparently not everyone's browser can read http://freedesktop.org, so the initial link up there now sports a "www" as well. And it's .org -- sorry.

BrunoC writes "Looks like Red Hat is getting a little Microsoftish and is quietly introducing its brand new 12-month-only Errata. Quoting The Reg: 'Red Hat's current death list EOLs RH 7.1-8.0 at the end of this year, while 6.2 and 7.0 get theirs as of the end of March.' You can read the whole article here." I don't see how this is "Microsoftish" -- the code Red Hat creates or includes is still GPL, and you can pay anyone willing to fix it. They're not required to support it forever :)

Most of the questions we got for LinuxWorld exhibitors were pretty general, with no specific exhibitor attached to them. I did my best to get appropriate people to answer them. Here are the results. (And for those who wonder... Kevin Mitnick emailed - he's been traveling and busy, but hopes to get his answers to us shortly.)

Slashback updates tonight on sky-diving cars, Microsoft's new code Glasnost (guess who's signed up to see the code?), the fate of the PCI-SIG list, the SCO and Linux licensing brouhaha, music royalties in Finland, and more. Read on for the details.

We ran the "Call for questions" Monday, January 13, under the headline, Discuss BIOS and Palladium Issues With an AMIBIOS Rep. Note that Brian Richardson, AMI sales engineer, is a real engineer, not just a salesperson, and is also a staunch Slashdot reader who knows we have low tolerance for PR whitewashes around here. Brian's answers are real, not laundered, and he responded not only to the 10 questions we sent him but also to some he felt deserved answers even though they weren't moderated all the way up. Please note that in much of this interview he is speaking as "Brian Richardson, individual," and that his opinions do not necessarily reflect those of AMI's management. With that said, be prepared to learn a lot about the BIOS business, and how TCPA and Palladium relate (and don't relate) to it.

arb writes "The Age has an interview with Shawn Gordon, president of theKompany.com where he discusses such issues as RedHat's focus on Gnome and the relegation of KDE 'to second best', other Gnome vs KDE issues, distributions including proprietary bits and so on."

BladeMelbourne asks: "As a web developer with a healthy love of Linux, I was wondering which fonts look great in Linux web browsers (particularly Mozilla/Netscape). Using 'Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif' just doesn't look nice. Do different distro's have different fonts? Which fonts resemble Arial/Helvetica? Which fonts are anti-aliased? Speaking of anti-aliased, does anyone know concisely how to get AA fonts with Mozilla on RedHat 8.0? I have my TTFs working, but don't seem to display correcly and look rather ugly on my display."

Alkini writes "Red Hat just announced a new beta, codenamed Phoebe. Their highlight list includes Mozilla 1.2.1 with Xft antialiased fonts and glibc-2.3.1. The new beta can be downloaded from RH's FTP site or one of the mirrors."

An anonymous reader asks: "I've got an old 486 that isn't doing anything (it has RedHat 6.2 on it and even that barely works), and I have been considering installing an even older distribution to make it more usable. I'm looking for something I can download still, has a good bit of programs, has X, and is still a relatively reasonable download for a 56K modem. I would like to download the distro with my new computer, then burn a CD or do something like that to install it on my old computer. The computer is a 486 at 33Mhz with 16MB RAM and a 1.5GB HDD. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated."

ruiner5000 writes "Well it is official. AMD has just sent out a press release announcing that Covalent and Redhat are developing a 64 bit version of Apache. "Covalent is developing 64-bit compatibility because we believe the upcoming AMD Opteron processor-based server systems will deliver superior performance and reliability for our easy-to-install Apache project server software," said Mark Douglas, senior vice president of engineering, Covalent Technologies. "Compatibility is essential, and we are cooperatively working to ensure optimal performance with the upcoming AMD Opteron processors." "

GaelDesign writes "The legendary Red Hat Road Tour 2002 is nearly at an end, and a good time was had by all. One of the most successful stops on the tour was the presentation at the O'Reilly and Associates headquarters in Sebastopol, California. Because the Red Hat RV's arrival was delayed due to traffic conditions, Tim O'Reilly gave a rousing speech beforehand that was well received by the audience. Read a detailed report of the event at The Idea Basket."

Spencerian writes "UNIX guru and writer Dave Taylor's Teach Yourself Unix System Administration in 24 Hours is a strong "rosetta stone" reference and tutorial for beginning and intermediate Mac OS X, Linux and UNIX system administrators. The book covers fundamental and specialized UNIX sysadmin tasks for three UNIX flavors: Red Hat Linux 7.2, Solaris 8, and Mac OS X, version 10.1.2. Although Mac OS X and Red Hat have advanced in versions since this book was published, it doesn't appear to affect the book's usefulness since many of the tasks involve the venerable UNIX command line." The rest of Kevin's review is below -- read on to see if this book might help you.

krog asks: "I've recently signed a contract with a local middle school to replace their aged Apple /// cluster with a roomful of IBM Aptivas running Linux 7.3. Now surely I will be installing such ease-of-use tools as KDE3, Gnome, and screen, but I am looking for suggestions of other software to install. Anyone know of any good text editors/BASIC interpreters/shells/etc suitable for eight-year-old children?"

aldheorte writes "After installing Red Hat Linux 8.0, I discovered some minor bugs. Some of these are with software actively maintained by Red Hat (e.g. redhat-config-date), but some are not (e.g. gaim). Although it is possible to enter bugs for any package at Red Hat Bugzilla, some of these packages have zero bugs, which probably indicates this is not a preferred method of receiving bugs for that project. In fact, I've found this to be the case for for several project. I find no listed bugs for Red Hat's Bugzilla and a whole database of bugs at another site, such as SourceForge. There are many distributions and channels for open source projects to reach the end user, so how do users, especially non-technical ones, effectively submit bug reports to the right database? How do open source projects make it easier for users to submit bug reports and consolidate the bugs in a single database?" Update: 11/01 11pm EDT by C :Don't know why this was sitting under the "HP" topic, so I've changed it to something more appropriate. Sorry if this has resulted in any confusion.

An anonymous reader asks: "Like many others these past few weeks, I took the time to download the latest RedHat (replace with your favorite distro here) and upgrade my system. Despite the usual mail hangovers (corporate mail is still Outlook through POP3, etc.), the new *Office suites are great and I can almost dump Windows. However I was amazed at the sorry state of Linux instant messaging. Before you flame me, mod me down or doom me to a lifetime of Windows usage, allow me to explain: I am not a native English speaker, and it seems that every single Windows IM client I use (except Trillian) can deal properly with accented characters. Worse, every third-party Linux client I have tried deals with them differently, resulting in garbled (vaguely Unicode-ish) junk! Does the Slashdot crowd (especially the non-English folk) have a solution for this? (Short of VMware and Win32 clients, that is. Wine doesn't work at all for me)"

Russellkhan writes "The Register is running a story about a new RedHat kernel patch that cannot be explained to U.S. citizens or others in the U.S. because of DMCA restrictions. The illegal explanation is hosted at Thefreeworld.net, a site created specifically to deal with these DMCA issues."

Mattzilla writes "The latest release of Transgaming's WineX (details available here) now supports EverQuest. You asked for it, here it is. This release also has Direct 3D and Direct Show updates as well as fixes for Mandrake 9.0 and RedHat 8.0 CD device auto-detection. With EverQuest now under Linux I'm sure a great deal of people won't find a need to be dual-booting any longer." The EverQuest support is called "preliminary"; check out those release notes for a few known problems and workarounds.

Nice2Cats writes "Python is something of a programmer's dream and an author's nightmare. What started life as a scripting tool for the Amoeba operating system has matured into a full-blown programming language with such speed that every book seems to be outdated in a year or two. To make matters worse for publishers, the crew around Python's creator Guido van Rossum keeps adding higher-level constructs such as iterators with every new release, reducing reams of code to single-line idioms at half-year intervals. Because not everybody has been able to keep up -- RedHat 7.3 infamously still ships with version 1.5.2 as the default, while SuSE 8.0 is hanging in there with version 2.2 -- authors are forced to cover stone age variants as well as modern forms. Python is cross-platform (Unix/Linux, Mac, Microsoft), has two underlying languages (C for Python, Java for Jython) and works with various GUIs (Tkinter, wxWindows, Qt, GTK, curses, Swing). Given this breadth of material, the idea of writing that most fragmented form of a programming book, a 'Cookbook,' seems as crazy as, say, nailing a dead parrot to its perch." Read Nice2Cats's review below of The Python Cookbook to see how well O'Reilly deals with dead parrots.

pantropik writes "OSNews has been giving quite a bit of bandwidth to Red Hat's newest offering lately. This article, which generated quite a bit of controversy in the comments section, detailed a new user's 'frustrations' with the new release. The latest article, written by yours truly, is rather lengthy, explaining such things as adding 3D drivers, missing MP3 functionality, DVD decoding, using APT with RHL, and customizing Red Hat's modified KDE. At the end, I wrap up with my impression -- as a simple user -- of this 'crippled' KDE implementation. Of course, you can also check out this story, which takes a look at RH 8.0 from 'Joe and Jane User's' perspective."