Michael Eilers has written a sort of introduction to Beowulf, what it does, what it doesn't do, and why we should care. It really is a sort of quickie distributed computing FAQ that many of you might enjoy. So hit the link below and find out.

Redhat recently announced their new partnership with Precision Insight. This met with some opposition as the press announcement only talked about binary drivers. However, PI promises full source code wherever possible. Also, the first fruit of the relationship is ready for downloading. It's a NeoMagic 128 driver.

Andy Tai writes "This Red Hat press release announces that Adaptec will support the Linux community by providing technical information for driver development on Adaptec products.

The Economic Times have an in-depth look at Linux, first throughout the world, and then in India. The articles are full of interesting tidbits, for instance that the largest UK ISP runs Linux, or that Suse is 40% of the German market. One less certain fact is their statement that Intel will help port Linux to Merced.

Redhat has posted a Datapro Survey showing that Linux does better than any other real OS on Overall Satisfaction, Interoperability, Cost of ownership, Price, Internet Readiness, Flexibility (tie), Availability (tie).

NT beats Linux on Percentage Growth (blame the suits for that), Solaris on Java Support (well... they did invent it), and Digital Unix on Product Functionality (anyone know why?) and Performance. Surprisingly NT does rather better than I would expect having used it, which makes me wonder how they built their survey.

It has been a long wait, but it's out there now: RedHat Linux 5.1 for SUN Sparc. It's available on the Red Hat FTP site and its mirrors. This is the first glibc based RedHat distribution for Sparc. Enjoy.

Matthew Newhall has written an interesting piece on commercial vs. GPLd programming, and OS development. His solution is a free software advocacy commercial license. Will it work? Read and decide for yourself.

Recently Red Hat has announced that they will begin distributing binary X servers for video cards with NDAs and unreleased specs. Personally, I have a NeoMagic chipset, so I'm happy to see it. Frank LaMonica has written up his opinions on this issue and sent them here. In any case, you should read why he thinks that this is a good idea.

Mark McCoy was the first to notice a press release over at Red Hat discussing new binary only servers. Basically, binary servers will be made available for chip sets that require an NDA or for chipsets that won't release specs. This seems like a kludge to a bigger problem, but it all is an excellent start to get high end hardware supported quicker.

Kenneth Oswalt writes "Performance Computing (aka the magazine once known as "Unix review") has an interesting review of Caldera Openlinux on their website and in the july issue of their mag. In it they describe the relative ease of installation, and the wide variety of applications, as well as comparing Redhat's documentation to that of Caldera. (spoiler, redhat wins.) "

Elliot Lee wrote in with a link to this page which explains how you can make use of the previously-worthless-under-X knob that is now standard on Microsoft Mice (and like all microsoft innovations, is probably going to be the defacto standard everywhere by sometime next thursday). I actually like the knob sometimes (not as much as those cool IBM mice that had a trackpoint to allow left and right as well as up and down) and wouldn't mind seeing applications made aware of it. The page has Examples for KDE, Netscape and others.

mazeone writes "I'm downloading the gnome 0.20 rpms from RHAD as we speak... looks like they have come put them back out." I'm looking forward to taking a gander at this bad new boy. I've been fiddling with KDE on and off for a few weeks, and I think I'm ready for a change.

Ok let's be careful with this one... this could erupt into a Distro Flame war, but I'd really like to see some helpful responses to this one, so everyone be careful, and see if you can't help Joe Bowman who asks "I've heard a bit of Stampede Linux and am just curious on whether any people currently running it would suggest a switch to it, and why? Currently I am using RedHat 5.0, and am a Linux newbie. I've been working on Linux servers for about a year, only learning what I needed to know, and just recently have put Linux on a machine at home. The idea of Stampede interests me, though would it be soon for a newbie like myself to give it a try?"

Allright we've got something of a doozy this time guys. Iuri Wickert has written in with a strange problem involving updating his RH system, and a mysterious problem that prevents his drives from being unmounted. When he reboots, it needs to fsck despite being, at least theoretically, properly shut down. Hit the link below for the full details of this whole conundrum.

Robert Outlaw wrote in to tell us that GNOME 0.20 has made an appearance on the Official FTP Site. Tarballs and RPM's are availiable at RHAD's Site as

John Ello wrote in to tell us " Apparently Redhat included a 'redneck' dialect option in Redhat 5.1. " Ya know, this is the stuff that makes me happy to be running linux. Sorta like when I use sudo and get an error message like "This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.". Stuff like that just makes everything much more entertaining. It's the little things that make me happy I guess.

Eureka sent us a press release from Cobalt, maker of those very cool server cubes we saw at LinuxExpo. They are joining RedHat, Corel, Netscape, Caldera and the rest of the usual suspects endorsing the open source model. They are now officially releasing a MIPs port of Linux to their FTP site, and have officially scored a couple of Cool Points in my book.

Jesse wrote in to tell us that RH5.1 (Manhattan) has made an appearance on kernel.org's mirror. Interested folks should definately check the mirrors list and be warned- I checked a few other mirrors and am not seeing the 5.1 dir on most of them, but kernel.org is on the official mirrors list, so I'm assuming this is legit.

Juhapekka Tolvanen wrote in to say that Red Hat has now really announced the release date of Red Hat v5.1. I screwed up this one, thats for sure. Oh well. You can pre order your CD at their web site. The 3rd CD is full of Bonus Apps- lite versions and demos. They should throw in a 4th CD in 5.2 and dump their contrib dir in :)

Red Hat Software has announced that they will ship v5.1 of their distribution on June 1. The full distro will come on 3 cds, feature better installation and administrative tools, as well as updating everything you'd expect from the previous release.