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."

wishus writes "Red Hat and Dell said they would co-host an Open Source Security Summit. 'Join Red Hat, Dell and experts in enterprise security from around the world for a summit on securing infrastructures with open source software.'"

Slashback with a success story about video editing on Free software, and all-important updates on the MySQL dolphin, MP3 software for Red Hat (why?), the fast-rising Phoenix, and more, all below.

desau writes "The good folks over at KDE have released the second beta of 3.1. Binary packages are available for most major distributions, save one."

I_am_Rambi writes "RedHat has released their latest OS, 8.0. Here is Red Hat's ftp site for download and some mirrors. If you need help there's a Howto." Jeet81 adds: "Red Hat is out with a new release, Red Hat 8.0. Looks like Red Hat is moving towards the windows XP style using its new Bluecurve graphical interface (the new default email client 'Ximian Evolution' looks a lot like MS Outlook)." So what's the verdict on Null or Bluecurve or whatever it's called? Good idea, bad idea?

Vicegrip writes "In an article on leaked release notes on Redhat 8.0 CNet also revealed that Bernhard Rosenkraenzer, known here on Slashdot as berorh, has quit over objections he has on what Redhat is doing to KDE in the new release. Bero says that the new version of KDE in Redhat 8.0 is going to be crippleware. I know I always found Bero's comments here on Slashdot helpful and insightful. His worries about what Redhat is doing to KDE for 8.0 have me rather concerned and thinking of switching distributions."

Mike Potter writes "After our initial launch, we received a ton of requests asking for support for RedHat 7.3 and Mandrake 8.2. OEone is happy to announce that HomeBase DESKTOP is now available as a free download for those two platforms. There's a great review of OEone DESKTOP at Linux Orbit."

The first ever official TPC-C benchmark on a Linux system has been published. This was run on a cluster of 32 HP servers with Intel Xeon CPUs, running Redhat Linux and Oracle RDBMS. The system had over 18 terabytes of storage, and cost over 2 million US dollars. Performance was higher than a similar system running on MS Windows.

An anonymous reader writes "A lot of people are angry over the changes RedHat has done to KDE and Gnome in their latest beta, code-named Null. They have basically "nullified" all the default themes and settings with which each desktop attempts to posture for more users. Instead, there is now a beautiful unified look. To explain RedHat's stance, Owen Taylor writes this piece here. I hope that RedHat successfully forces both Gnome and KDE to become compatible with one another which would result in the creation of a single desktop. This would be the greatest gift to the Linux world."

bhsx asks: "With all the innovations going into open source software these days, why do I still need to run Exchange to meet my clients' needs? Even when demonstrating technology like LTSP mixed with any combination of OpenOffice, Star Office, even Codeweaver's Crossover Office running the latest Microsoft suite, the clincher is always over Exchange functionality. I'm aware of Bynari's InsightServer(Coincidentally, I noticed on that page, that their code is for sale) and have started using that as a possible closer, and the cost is much less prohibitive than eXchange+w2k server+CALs; but why isn't there an open source solution to this problem yet?"

Mike Potter writes "OEone and OpenOffice.org have announced a new partnership that will see the two groups work together to bring OpenOffice applications to OEone HomeBase and see the Mozilla calendar data integrated into the OpenOffice suite. OEone is hard at work getting a version of HomeBase running on RedHat 7.3 and Mandrake, with help from open source developers."

KevinDumpsCore writes "RedHat, Mandrake, and SuSE are now certified LSB compliant!" Here's the announcement on the Free Standards Group's site. The Linux Standards Base (check out these related Slashdot posts) has been working for years to perhaps tame the what-lives-where cross-distro craziness. (Of course, distro makers are under no obligation to comply with the LSB's choices.)

mshiltonj writes "Tim O'Reilly wrote a little piece about his worries about the politicization of the Open Source community, specifically the Digital Software Security Act. He calls it a bad idea, saying, 'No one should be forced to choose open source, any more than they should be forced to choose proprietary software.'"

Mike Potter writes "OEone has released its OEone HomeBase product as an open source project, and a free download. HomeBase is a complete operating environment that runs on top of Mozilla, with the base operating system being RedHat Linux 7.1 or 7.2. There's a review of it over at Newsforge. Some of the OEone software has already been released as open source to other projects. For instance, OEone's calendar was the basis of the Mozilla Calendar project."

BoomZilla writes "Numerous stories abound regarding next week's LinuxWorld in San Francisco. Reuters has published a report about Sun's upcoming announcement at the show. Apparently Sun will be revealing its first general-purpose, low-end Linux machine, and its own version of Linux. In another article CBS MarketWatch reports that IBM and RedHat/Dell will also be making major announcements." It'll at least be interesting this year with Microsoft having a booth. I'll be there as usual, but without a booth, so maybe we can russle up a party somewhere for Wed night? Anyone know a good place? Perhaps that serves Guinness & Bodingtons? Also, go see the Golden Penguin Bowl since I'm a contestant this year and will undoubtedly embarass myself terribly.

ezadro writes "I just spotted this article at LinuxToday about Redhat being directly involved in a new distribution that will be known as ReHMuDi, which stands for Red Hat Multimedia Distribution." The goal seems to be a system for professional audio composers and engineers. Don't expect it for awhile- they have 24 months scheduled to do it, although it looks like releases will start by the end of 02.