You can't help but know that Microsoft and the Department of Justice (plus several of the states that joined in the suit) are attempting to settle their antitrust dispute. The rest of the states are holding out for a settlement with more teeth, or a continuation of the case. A few links from the past few days: The LA Times looks at the states still opposing Microsoft. Microsoft defended the settlement before a Senate committee, which was crippled by political maneuvering (see also the NYT story). The speech given by the CEO of Red Hat is online. Microsoft filed a brief with the court, unsurprisingly urging the court to accept the settlement. The Register has a story on the proposed settlement, which is available at the DOJ Antitrust website. Linuxplanet has some advice for people who want to comment on the settlement - you've got 60 days from November 28. Finally, Microsoft has named two people to help it comply with the proposed settlement.

Now that Linux kernel 2.5 is under development by Linus and others, the all-important job of maintaining and updating the "old" kernel series (the one that people rely on in day-to-day use) has fallen to 2.4 maintainer Marcelo. You asked Marcelo about everything from the influence of politics (age and otherwise) to his working enviroment and approach to maintainership; his answers are below.

One of the most-heard complains from people who use distributions like Red Hat, Mandrake or SuSE is the "dependency hell" problem. You want to install an RPM and bang -- you have a dependency problem. There have been a few attempts to overcome dependency problems: SuSE with their YOU (Your Online Update), Mandrake with URPMI, and Redhat with their UP2date program. There is also a solution from Aduva called Aduvizor, but it's not supporting the latest distributions yet. Read on to learn about another interesting solution ...

HNFO writes: "HP is unveiling their new 'blade' servers that fit onto a single card. Their press release is here. They are currently available with your choice of RedHat, Debian and SuSE. A picture of the card can be found here and a picture of the chassis can be found here." If you're looking for high-density slot-based computers, earlier postings about RLX's Transmeta blades and OmniCluster's x86 variety might interest you as well.

gnudot writes: "Red Hat announced this morning that they have entered into an agreement with IBM to provide support services for the entire eServer product line. This includes zSeries, iSeries pSeries in addition to the xSeries (What no qSeries? or 7Series?) which is already supported. Here is the story on Yahoo."

JoeGee writes: "According to this article on ZD Net, more and more companies born from open source projects are beginning to move towards closed source products as a source of revenue. Version 5 of GFS will be closed source, and even SuSE's director of sales Holger Dyroff has a quote that seems to disparage the service model of revenue. The one company that refuses to change its operations is, surprisingly, Red Hat. Red Hat CTO Michael Tiemann says 'We believe the Red Hat brand stands for open-source.'" Yes, this is a dupe. Bad Tim! *whack*

Uttles asks: "I recently installed Mandrake 8.1 on my machine at home and as a Linux Newbie I have been having trouble getting all of my hardware to perform correctly. The Mandrake distribution comes with a config tool called HardDrake but I have not found it very useful. It displays every piece of hardware, but it doesn't give you the option to install or configure drivers for that hardware. In fact, the only functionality it has is a "run config tool" button that for some devices launches a configuration application. I have been told that Red Hat and other distributions have similar tools, and none are very powerful. So now I am asking Slashdot: What is the best hardware configuration tool, either GUI or text based, for Linux systems?"

Reader samjam sent in an interesting piece about his dream handheld PC, sort of a cross between a subnotebook and a wireless web pad, with the kitchen sink thrown in. Mmmmm, light-emitting polymers. I can't decide if this kind of thing is right around the corner or just a fantasy - after all, normal notebook computers sell, and at a nice high premium - and web pads are less than successful - why would anyone spend the money to develop a device like this?

Jacek writes "Looks like GSL 1.0 is finally out! Look here. I've been using it in my research for the las few years and I really liked it! Thanks to all developers for the great job! Jacek"

Over the last few months, I've had a number of AskSlashdot questions about quiet computers, what hardware to get, and other items for assembling a mega-machine that won't knock the roof off. I've put the finishing touches on my own mega machine -- if you're looking at doing the same thing, or are just curious about the hardware involved, you can find out about what I built.

Triones asks: "I have found that Windows 2000 has a limit on the number of distinct windows that can be opened. W2K cannot open more than around 70 distinct windows (duplicate IE's on the same url don't count) even when it has 50Mb free phyiscal memory and much more in system cache. The max I can get is about 75 windows. Similar limits on machines with 256Mb or 512Mb ram. Some of my friends have reproduced this phenomenon on their systems. (By the way, no such problem with Linux (Redhat, XFree86, Gnome, Sawfish)). Is it related to the graphics 'resource' (GDI?) in Windows? Is there a parameter that can be tuned to increase the limit? If this is a 'flaw', is it fixed in XP?"

Spirit writes "Red Hat has anounced the release of Version 7.2 distribution with Gnome 1.4 and Nautilus, default ext3 fliesystem and according to ZDnet migration from LILO to GRUB"

budGibson asks: "I have just purchased a Dell system for home that will be arriving shortly with Windows ME installed. It has a (free) upgrade coupon for Windows XP. After using Windows 2000 on a development machine at work, XP is attractive because of its likely good stability for a Windows. Although I prefer Linux, compatibility with my graduate and undergraduate business students requires that I have some version of Windows." Put simply, is XP dual-boot friendly?

Armin Herbert writes: "According to this mail from Rafal Wojtczuk and a german article on Heise Online, there's a new severe bug in all Linux Kernels, from 2.2.0 up to 2.4.10, which allows users to become root on your system. Kernel 2.4.12 fixes this problem, and RedHat, Caldera and other distributors already supply patches for their Kernels. See Bugtraq for more information." Important notes for anyone running a multi-user system. Update: 10/19 16:12 GMT by J : If I'm reading Nergal's writeup correctly, 2.4.10 is still vulnerable to the local DoS, but not to the local root exploit. Separate issues. And as pheared points out, there is one unverified report of a custom 2.4.12 being vulnerable as well; please try the exploit on your system and let us know what you find. This is a big one, you can expect the kiddies have already added this to their rootkits. Update your systems now!

the_2nd_coming writes "Red Hat has announced a legislation alert for the SSSCA. They are collecting comments to hand to lawmakers. Get those comments in while you can, but make sure you give them some thought."

beton asks: "We've all come to the point where we feel the need to change distros. A friend of mine has been a loyal Red Hat user for over 4 years now, but now he'd like to try Debian. He's trying to accomplish this with minimal effort so I was wondering if there are any tools around that allow to change from Red Hat to Debian without having to start from a 'clean' PC and reconfigure everything to fit your needs. Such a tool should e.g. reinstall all your programs and should try to configure them using your current config files. I did some searching on Sourceforge and Freshmeat but I didn't find anything useful. Do any of you know such a tool or is the whole idea just impossible to accomplish?" Even limiting such a tool to the larger distributions out there, it would be a bear to implement such a tool and iron out all of the wrinkles. Of course, if all Linux distributions could agree on a file system standard, then such a tool may even be unnecessary, but I doubt that will happen in the near future. So how do you all weigh in on this issue? Would a distribution conversion tool be useful or would we all be better off with a file system standard that works across multiple distributions?

Søren Schmidt was browsing through the 2.4.10 linux kernel source when he saw something that looked a bit familiar. Too familiar in fact. Søren is the principle developer of FreeBSD's ATA drivers, including FreeBSD's support for ATA RAID cards, and as he looked through the linux/drivers/ide/ files the sense of deja vu was overwhelming. Read on for more.

Reader Bob Johnson wrote this detailed review of Hacking Exposed followup Hacking Linux Exposed -- especially in light of the various color-coded Windows viruses still on the loose, this might be a good present for your your local Windows administrator as well, but both Bob and the authors are clear: GNU/Linux systems may be more resistant, but are not immune to cracking.

DrInequality writes: "For those of you out there who admire the portability of Java but want something faster or open source, the answer to your prayers is finally here. The Internet Virtual Machine is open source, fast and supports C, C++, Java and ObjectiveC. There are some cool demos for Linux (requires Redhat 6.0 or above, and OpenGL 1.2 or Mesa 3.41) here (1.5MB) and for Windows (requires glut32.dll, here) here (1.5MB)." We mentioned this last year; perhaps it has improved. I'm sure a lot of people would be interested in a language as portable as Java but speedier.

Readers have sent in quite a few links to stories wrapping up this year's LinuxWorld. The most interesting thing I saw was the HP MP3 stereo component which looks a lot like a tivo, but for sound. I'm not sure if they're going to get it right, but it looks close. Hopefully the code will be available. If it is, I'm buying one. Hit the link to read a bunch of other links related to the show compiled by Timothy.