This morning, we found an excellent piece in our in-box about how a 911 call center in Utah has switched all of its workstations over to Linux. If anyone needs 24/7 reliability, it's the people at the other end of 911, and apparently they're now getting it, thanks to Linux-using, Slashdot-reading Officer Sherman Stebbins of the St. George, Utah Police Department, who tells us how he did it below.

Having finally flown back home, recovered from the gain/loss of sleep, time zones, and of course, the obligatory luggage being lost, we're trying to wrap-up the latest installment of LinuxWorld. If you are interested in some commentary and stories coming out of LWCE, click below.

Bill Clarke wrote to us about WholeLinux system they unveiled at LinuxWorld. From a "cheap" CD-ROM even, they can install Red Hat Linux in 4 minutes, plus another 2 for things like Apache, Sendmail etc. Heh-run around with one of these things at your office/school. See how long it takes for the NT people to reinstall. *grin*

Stewart Rosenberger has written an interesting piece about what the success of Linux means for the users out there who are currently using it. Will it mean that the pioneers will move on to other places? Is this already starting-rather then Linux fragmenting, the user base fragmenting? Click below to read more-it's well worth it.

John Q. Public asks: "I have done many checks with people I know personally, and on DejaNews and still haven't found a resolution to my problem. It appears, from reading posts on DejaNews, that I'm not the only one experiencing the pheonomenon. What happens is, while viewing certain PHP3 scripts under Netscape I get a "Connection Reset By Peer" message. Oddly enough, it doesn't happen under other browsers. We are using PHP 3.0.12, Apache 1.3.6 and are integrating it all with MySQL 3.22.23b on top of RedHat 6.0. I normally wouldn't think to turn to slashdot for all of my problems but it appears that I'm not the only one fighting this problem, perhaps someone out there knows whats going on." Any clues?

We sent a stack of questions to Bruce Perens earler this week, and here are the answers. But before you start reading what Bruce has to say and taking it as gospel, he has a reminder for you: "I have to make the disclaimer that I am not attempting to practice law. The advice I give is to help you formulate strategies for participatation in the free software community, you may still need to consult an attorney regarding how you implement those strategies."

A person known as "Barry the Suit" wrote in to tell us that he has seen the Red Hat Road Show (eg, the time when the top dogs go try to convince guys with mega bucks to buy lots of their stock when the IPO happens). He wrote a summary of the event which is actually quite interesting- tends towards the financial side, but since Red Hat is the first Linux company to make this lonely journey, its really interesting to follow it. Hit the link to read the report.

Joseph writes "Red Hat looks like it put those Atomic Vision folks to work with a new site design. More hype before their IPO?" I'm just glad to see a simpler, more elegant design.

PhiberOptik asks: "I recently got a BP6 board, with onboard ULTRA66 controllers and ran into a problem with my Red Hat 6.0 installation. It seems that Red Hat Linux will not support the controllers, which my main hard disks are hooked up to. So far as I know, no Linux distros exist with ULTRA66 support, and BeOS or Solaris 7 won't recognize them either. Are there any updates or distros which support this new technology?"

kmb asks: "I recently bought a Gateway PC with an integrated Creative Labs Sound Blaster AudioPCI 64D sound card. Apparently Gateway is the only vendor to use this particular card and also apparently it differs in some sometimes significant ways from the other SB AudioPCI 64 cards. I've looked at a few web pages, but this is my first time trying to do anything with a PC sound card and besides which, most of the info I've seen is Windows-specific. I'm running RedHat 6.0 and ended up installing the ALSA-project sound drivers because I wasn't having much success with the OSS drivers. I've gotten some apps to record, but the card still isn't acting the way I expect it to. (For instance, I'd really like to get Slab 3.0 working, but even though I can see the VU meter picking up the sound input, when I go to record I get nada.) So, does anyone have configuration and/or driver tips or specs or anything about this particular card?"

NoWhere Man noted a story on CNet that that talks about Red Hat and their plans to Create a full blown Linux Portal. They note the fact that RH has job openings in San Fran, as well as the trivia that they recently hired 20 (!) people from Atomic Vision. They note that RH will be competing more directly with VAs Linux.com, and of course, yours truly.

Chuck Milam writes "Red Hat has announced Red Hat Europe. Interesting--I wonder if they're going to give SuSE a run for the money? " Looks like they are opening a German and UK office, and have announced that Colin Tenwick (of Sybase) will be in charge.

hfcs writes "Just browsing the Red Hat Careers page, and a good number of their open positions are listed as being in San Franscisco. Just a couple of weeks ago, all positions were listed as being in RTP, NC. Hmmmm.... "

Computer Associates looks like it has finally released it's UniCenter Managment Framework for Red Hat Linux. Other distros to follow soon, and you can order a free CD from CA.

Dennis Heltzel writes "MagniComp just changed their license (again) to freely allow distribution with Linux Read the news here. I wonder if RedHat will do an errata to their errata. " (This change was posted today, 17 July, 1999.)

Christian Winebrenner writes "RedHat seems to have seen the new licensing terms on rdist (background story: Pseudo-Free software...) and decided that the best solution to the problem is to recommend that users DOWNgrade to the previous version. Their RH 6.0 errata page offers the solution of ditching rdist 6.1.5 in favor of 6.1.0. Who knows how long it will be until we find that distributions will be riddled with "holes" from out of date non-free-for-commercial-use software? "

EvilNight writes "There's an interesting article up on Salon that makes a few comparisons between Red Hat and Microsoft. Interesting reading. They also touch a little on the squabbles between LinuxCare and Red Hat. " A very good article. Covers a lot of the issues, and clearly.

pate writes "It looks like Red Hat has scooped up another free software name. According to this article, Havoc Pennington started work there yesterday. " He's the guy who does the weekly GNOME summaries, and is responsible for countless other Good Things(TM) in GNOME.

greg writes "This is a white paper written by Larry McVoy at Sun Microsystems discussing free Unix software, *.BSD, Linux, GNU and FSF and competition with Microsoft. In the paper Larry proposes the opensourcing and standardizing of Unix in gerneral and Solaris in particular. Whats truly impressive is that it was written in 1993 and is still quite relevant and its predictions regarding Linux were very accurate. Here is the link: " Currently only available in Postscript... HTML is coming.

A reader sent us a recent BusinessWeek article interviewing Red Hat's Bob Young. More indepth then most of them usually, I learned some of the odder tibits about Red Hat interesting, including the toliet in the first apartment and other such stories.