zDooder writes "According to Yahoo Finance, rumors are flying on Wall Street about RedHat buying out Corel. " Corel's stock has been all over the place as a result (Discloser:I own some Corel stock). It's definitely an interesting match. Corel's distribution is based on Debian, and Word Perfect is a decidedly closed source product. I'm not putting a lot of weight in this one, but I've heard stranger rumors so who knows.

Anonymous Coward writes "Red Hat has re-layed-out the site yet again. Looks like an attempt at a portal, but only internal resources. IWNSM (it would not surprise me) if future versions of Red Hat had netscape and lynx's default home pages set to redhat.com :) " It looks quite a bit like Yahoo. The GeekToys section is a bit timely, too, if not a bit heavy on Nerf.

mozart in mirrorshades asks: "Okay, I know that there is a naming convention that is used by RedHat for the distro code-names. I asked some Redhat guys at the Atlanta Linux Showcase (hey Rob!) how the names were linked and they refused to tell me. Apparently there's a link between each pair of names (eg: Cartman(RH6.1) and Lorax(RH6.2?) are both cartoon characters?). Could someone please shed some light on this so I can put an end to my quest?"

mochaone asks "I've always admired the Slashdot crew for putting together a great site that has vastly contributed to the internet experience. I have an idea for a website that I think has great potential also. I would like to know how slashdot (or any other webcompanies) got started and what tips they might offer? Should I use webhosting services or provide content on my own computers? What's a typical server setup -- separate boxes for web servers, database, banners, etc? T1 line or T3? How often should I backup data if providing content on my own computers and should I store backups offsite? Any other tips are welcome. More interested in the high-level, architectural issues rather than the "Use Debian over Redhat" or "Use Python over Perl" issues. I think those have been covered in other Ask Slashdot features. "

bgarcia writes "There is a PR Newswire story stating that Red Hat and RSA Security have signed an agreement to include RSA's BSAFE SSL software in Red Hat Linux Professional Edition." And Wired tells us Red Hat is coming out with with a new version that improves large system performance and speeds crash recovery. (Click below for more)

Anonymous Coward writes "There's a press release out that says Red Hat and Oracle are teaming up to take on e-commerce. They have outlined bold initiatives to add support for IA64, a journaled filesystem and high avaliability. Even more they say it will include Motif, but they still say all additions will fit with the GPL." It's basically Oracle 8i teamed with an "optimized" version of Red Hat. Sounds nice. This joint product could have major impact on the e-commerce software marketplace if it works as promised. Claimed shipping date is mid-December.

Bryan Crowl writes "Only yesterday all australians got to have their say in the historic referendum on becoming a republic. The Australian Electoral Commission have been using a Virtual tallyroom to allow people from all around the world to view statistics. Last night they posted some statistics about the amount of visitors , 6 million in the first 3 hours, or about 556 a second. And what was this server running to handle this sort of load, Linux(Redhat) and Apache(1.3.6) Check it out @ link "
You can also check it out for yourself by using the Netscape Poke. As we've always said, it's real world benchmarks that mean the most :) .

Great answers to this week's interview questions. Mick Morgan, of the UK's CCTA [Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency] has turned this Q&A session into a truly detailed primer on how to choose the hardware and operating system behind a high-profile Web site - and has dispelled quite a few myths in the process. You'll want to read this interview even if you're not into server mechanics. It contains enough personal insight and wit to be of interest even to Slashdot's least-technical readers. (Click below to see what we mean!)

Jón Ragnarsson asks: "I develop Oracle applicatons for a living. And they are usually internet-related. Right now I'm developing on a Oracle 8i / Windows NT4 machine. But I have more and more become aware that NT is very limiting compared to un*x when it comes to selection of tools and servers for Internet development. I have installed Apache, perl, php and other stuff on the NT, but with much difficulty. So now I'm planning to switch my development environment to Linux (RedHat, Debian or SuSE). The thing I would miss most is the SQL Navigator, a tool I don't know how I could live without it before I started to use it. :) I know there are some utilities available for postgres and mysql in KDE, but AFAIK, they don't work on Oracle databases. Any ideas what I could replace SQL Navigator with? Or should I start writing my own database front end?" Hey! I develop Oracle apps on Solaris and could use something like this myself!

Kelly McNeill writes "The media is nutso for bigness. All you hear about in the tech press these days is that Linux is attracting big partners like IBM, finding big users like Deja.com, and making big IPO money like RedHat. That's all good, and I'm sincerely grateful for anything that helps me make a living without using Visual Interdev -- but to me, small and raw is where it's all at." The quote's from the article, which is big and cooked - and full of graphical comparisons between NT and Linux as useful development environments for small Web businesses.

David A. Madore asks: "Every once in a while, I decide to try out IPv6 (on my local PC network that isn't connected to the Internet). And every time I'm disappointed. Now that the kernel supports it, and libc (glibc 2.2.1) supports it, and that I've recompiled the net-tools with inet6 support (why doesn't RedHat do that by default, I'd like to know), I would expect to be able to type 'telnet ::1' and get a connection to localhost, prompto! Instead, I get '::1: Unknown host.' Isn't the whole point of' IPv6 support of the libc to make program support completely transparent? And isn't the whole point of dynamically linked libraries so that we get it without even having to recompile anything? Or am I being incomparably naïve here? Will we have to rewrite and recompile any network-aware program so as to get IPv6 support? By the way: How will X11 DISPLAY strings work with IPv6 ':0' is kindda confusing in relation with IPv6 addresses)? Can anyone clarify the matter?"

dooling asks: "How would one go about building a Linux cluster from the ground up? I read a lot about Linux clusters on /. and have been able to find some information on configuring the cluster, but have found little on how to assemble the hardware, i.e., what is necessary, how they should be connected, etc. So does anyone have reliable information on hardware assembly and configuration? Also, (if you've never done this before) is it worth building your own, or is it better to just buy one prebuilt and preconfigured? If you want specifics: 20-40 machines, Linux (probably RedHat 6.x), disk or diskless?, do not need video cards (but should we have them?), switch or hub (best way to hook them up). We will be doing pretty straightforward scientific computing (floating point number crunching). "

Chilli writes "I just stumbled over RMS Linux on RedHat's web site. It includes only free (as in freedom) software and at least $1 is donated to the FSF for every sold package. This is super cool, I think, and I probably have to buy one just because it is so cool. I think, this finally proves that - as far as this is possible for a company - RedHat cares about the community. (The URL is to RedHat's secure commerce server, I hope it manages the /. effect, but I didn't find another URL - so, this is maybe not really official yet, but what's on the Web, is on the Web.)"

The-Pheon asks "Ok. I've read the FAQs, scoured the Linux newsgroups searching for information about ipmasqadm and I still can't get simple port forwarding to work on RedHat6. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. The scenario: Standard Red Hat 6.0, Kernel 2.2.12, and ipchains-1.3.8. External is ip_aliased with a legal dns addresses, Internal is a single reserved address and network, IP masquerading is configured and working for intenal -> external connections. This seems like it should be simple. To forward a simple telnet I use: /sbin/modprobe ip_masq_portfw; /usr/sbin/ipmasqadm portfw -a -P tcp -L x.x.x.x 23 -R 192.168.1.12 23 The result: A telnet sessions to x.x.x.x (from a completely outside source) just hangs. Closer investigation shows that port forward is working -- sort of." More details are available if you hit the link.

Kurt has returned, continuing his reviews of Linux IDE ^[?] environments. After reviewing Code Fusion, he's reviewed Metrowerks CodeWarrior (for Suse). The full text of the review is below.

A few days past, we solicited questions from you folks to ask QuakeLaird John Carmack ^[?] . We sent the questions over to him, and he answered. A lot. It's definitely one of the best interviews we've had yet - click below to read more.

rips asks: "I've been a moderately skilled Linux user for several years now but my problem solving skills on this one have got me stumped. I have compiled many kernels before but when compiling a recent kernel (2.2.11 or 2.2.12) the compilation will run without a hitch, lilo (v20) will accept the changes but after a reboot the system will crash at: 'Uncompressing Linux... Ok'. I have tried compiling the 2.2.12 kernel on 3 different machines with 2 different distributions (RedHat 6.0 and Slackware 3.2.0) and for different target processors and kernel options but nothing seems to work. I've even tried running off a boot disk incase it was LILO but to no avail. This has really got me stumped. Has anyone else figured out the cause/solution to this?"

OUSpirit writes "I saw this over at Netscape's Technews site. Evidently, Intel (and some other companies) just invested some major bucks in TurboLinux to put them on more equal footing with RedHat. They plan to use the money to expand management and development staff. "

An Anonymous Coward wrote to inform us of a new Chinese Linux distro, Blue Point Linux 1.0RC, which includes support for Chinese characters. The bad news is the developers, who have based their effort on Red Hat's are alleged to have forgotten to include the modified kernel source. Coward asks: "Don't they violate the GPL?". Some people over at the BP Forum apparently have some thoughts. What do you think: is this against the terms of the GPL? (Can someone translate this?)

S7 writes "Opera Software has indicated that it is currently diversifying its browser to accomodate a wider flavour of Linux distributions, not just RedHat and its derivatives. Hope they finish soon!" Yeah, I know Mozilla is going to have wonderful features like instant messenger and changeable themes and I don't know what-all else if and when it ever gets end user-usable, but Opera is a plenty good enough browser for the likes of me; it's fast, compact, simple, and reliable, all of which are software qualities I admire immensely. In fact, the only two things I really miss from Windows are Opera and NoteTab, which is IMO the worlds's finest text processing tool for online journalists. Now that Opera's on its way to Linux, all I need is a Linux version of NoteTab or something like it and I'll be in PC heaven!