Oracle plans to distribute and support Linux, probably licensing an existing distribution to bundle with their database. However they will still support all 4 major distributions ( including I assume Redhat (US), Pacific HiTech (Japan) and SUSE (Europe)) wanting to be the people who are called if a user has a problem with Linux. Read more below.

Bob Young gave an interview to techweb in which he states that the Intel deal with Red Hat is not intended to give Red Hat a heads start over other Linux distributors. Ed: It would be great if Red Hat convinces Intel to make pre-announcement technology information available to the whole Linux development community. Rather like Cygnus, it appears that Red Hat does not depend on loans. This is good, and hopefully their prudent strategy will mean that if they IPO they'll keep 51% of their stock so that they cannot be bought out (and killed).

An anonymous read wrote in to say that Red Hat Software will no longer carry TriTeal CDE for Linux. They instead recommend either GNOME or CDE from XiGraphics

Donnie Barnes from Red Hat Software dropped us a line to let us know how things are going at ISPCON. Click on the link below to see the full report.

Microsoft's understanding of Intel and Netscape's recent investment in Redhat is atypically dumb. Ed Muth, enterprise marketing group manager for NT, believes that because there is no proprietary IP in Linux (GPL oblige) "there is no reason to stay in the market". Given that Microsoft is built on marketing and some level of support, I have difficulty believing this statement is anything but FUD or some smoke-screen. The article goes on to a legal-expert who seems to believe that applications use linux source code. Thanks to Dan Speers.

Bob Young, head of Redhat, gave an interview to news.com today. Apparently, Red Hat will now gain all Intel proprietary information at the same time as Microsoft does. It also believes that its new powerful friends will encourage MIS directors of large corporations to trust Linux. Moreover to further encourage this, it will be spending its newly won money on improving its support infrastructure. Ed: Given some other information I'm not at liberty to disclose, Redhat's support options may be on the verge of increasing vastly. However, there is no need for Redhat bashing since not only do they have a history of giving back, but moreover any improvements they make to Linux on the basis of proprietary information must be released with any product thanks to the GPL. Indeed, more support will only help establish Linux as a viable platform, as Marc Andresssen explains. Notice Linus' confidence in the availability of Linux apps in 3 to 5 years.

Redhat has now announced that Intel, Netscape, Greylock and Benchmark Partners have invested in it. Intel wants to target ISPs with their Linux strategy. Intel will also be joining Linux International. It will be interesting to see in which way Red Hat will react to UDI given the discussion about it on the kernel list, summarized by Linux Weekly News. (updated)

dave methvin from XIG, the guys who make Accelerated-X, Laptop-X, and a host of other X based products for x86 Unix machines wrote me recently about the XBF and related projects. I really meant to post this yesterday, but, well, higher powers had other things in mind. Anyway, click the link to read what he has to say about these projects.

Jamie writes "An article on ZdNet says that Intel and Netscape plan to Invest in Red Hat. The announcement will be made at ISPCon '98, and the money will most likely go towards creating an enterprise support group within RedHat. "

Well, RedHat and XBF project keeps coming up with new developemtns. This time is a full X server for the i740 based chipset cards.

Michael Wood writes in with a problem I myself have experienced from time to time. Here's it is: I've recently installed RedHat 5.1 on a pentium ii w/ 64 MB ram, S3 Virge/GX AGP video card, and SB AWE 64. X (or Linux or something) seems to be very unstable. If I start X, open an xterm and type "ls -lR /" (or various other commands) as a normal user the machine hangs solid after a small amount of output. I've done this a few times while trying to figure out what's going on, while running "while sync; do sleep 1; done" from a virtual console. While the while loop is running, the hard drive makes a noise every second as expected. When the machine hangs the hard drive is completely quiet, so it's not just X that's hung. Ctrl-Alt-Del does nothing. Keyboard leds do nothing. Can you help him out? Hit the link for more...

Red Hat is releasing the source for their Neomagic chipset XF86 server. This was part of their XBF project, which releases binaries of X-Servers that you would otherwise not be able to get an server for. (note to video manufacturers:release specs! this is dumb!) Anyway, Neomagic has given Red Hat permission to release the source. Very cool. I've attached the official press release after this.

Pilchie writes "Hey, I live in a house with seven other students, we have an extra phone line for connectivity, and we are running a 10baseT network. I am configured as a proxy server for the network in Win98 (shudder!!), but would like to set something similiar up in Linux. We need: ftp, http, telnet, pop3, smtp mapping, nntp mapping, and socks 5 support. Is this possible? It also needs to be fairly simple, as I am not a Linux guru. I am running RedHat 5.0, with Kernel 2.1.122 "

Continuing his voyage, Jason Bennett has submitted his review of Peopleware. This is a book about how to run an office in the age of the "information worker". Not about coding, but about creating environments in which the work we are all used can be done. So, if you are interested (or have a manager who should read this), click below.

A number of you wrote in to talk about the fact that Applix has apparently decided that since the Linux market has continued to mature that they will be selling and marketing Applixware on their own, and no longer working thru Redhat. Let's hope this goes well for them.

Slashdot reader Brice Ruth has this question:

Since installing RedHat 5.1, I've been trying to find any kind of help in running iBCS. I realize that a package for iBCS is preinstalled with RedHat 5.1 (kernel-ibcs...), however, all attempts at running SCO binaries have failed. I HAVE been able to figure out that the reason it is failing is because I don't have libraries for the binaries. Let me rephrase -- I DO have the libraries, since I have access to a perfectly legal copy of SCO OpenServer, however, I have no idea where to place them and what directory structure is necessary so that they are found, etc. Two things would be quite helpful in my quest:

1. a good page that tells me all these things that I need to do
   
2. someone who has successfully used iBCS and is relatively familiar with the process in both SCO and Solaris.

If you have a question you would like posted to Ask Slashdot, then please send them to me. I would like to start posting more questions on a regular basis since Ask Slashdot is now its own section.

TrippD writes "I bought a Digital AlphaStation 200 through onsale.com a few weeks ago. After much strugle I have finally got it to boot into the installation of Redhat 5.0. I have gotten to the point where it starts for format the root partiontion, but it freezes every time, about half way through. I have tryed 2 different SCSI-2 drives (it didn't include a harddrive or cdrom). The kernel always reports 29XXX bytes of memory, even though it shiped with 16, and I have added 32 (Any combo, it still says 29 megs). HELP! "

Red Hat Software has won another award. This time RedHat Linux 5.1 receives the Editor's Choice award from the Australian Computer Magazine. Check out the press release for further details.

Mike Hicks writes "Raster has put up some more screenshots of GTK/GNOME themes at this page for those of us who like to look at great desktops... " All I can say is yummy.

Usman Latif has written a feature for us on Be, and why he believes that it makes sense for them to take their OS and release it as open source.