Christopher Litsinger writes "I have a computer that I share with my wife, who is a slight technophobe. I've tried to make our computer as easy for her to use as possible. As I result I've setup my computer as follows. It has an Adaptec 3940 card, set to boot off SCSI ID 4. A Jaz drive is set to SCSI ID 4. There is another SCSI drive set to ID 0. Now when I want to load any given operating system, I just stick a Jaz disk in and boot from it. When I'm done, I pop out the Jaz disk. When my wife starts up the computer, it finds no cartridge in the Jaz drive, it defaults to boot from ID 0. RedHat 5.0, and then I get to the LILO part, it tells me I can't load LILO onto the MBR of device 4. Now I obviously could put LILO on device 0, but I'm sure there's a way around this. "

A new Linux distribution has been released. This one is called Linux-Mandrake and has nothing to do with Mandrake of Enlightenment fame. Its goal is to provide an easy to use environment for beginners, and provides out-of-the-box support for French users (accents, etc). It's based on Redhat 5.1 (with all bug fixes up to 17th July) and a fully functional KDE. Users can mount their CD's without messing with /etc/fstab. It seems a good idea as an introduction as long as it does not lead to dumber users.

BOredAtWork writes "gtk.org received an update recently, and it includes links to lots of language bindings, and a new GTK-developers-list being hosted by redhat. They also promise to update more often ;-). "

vasquez was the first to tell us that X inside, now Xi Graphics, the makers of Accelerated X, will be releasing a new Linux distribution targeted at Fortune 500 companies. As they already sell and support their own commercial software to the above companies, they know what level of support to provide, and how not to get sued. What's funny is that they were asked to do this by the said companies... what's wrong with Redhat? Suse? Dld? Caldera? Maybe Xig will produce updates at a slower rate. Let's hope they also contribute to all Linuxes, like Redhat, Caldera and Suse have done.

Phil Smyth writes "I toured the under-construction Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at an open house at Brookhaven National Laboratory yesterday. One of their systems people told me that they will be using a massive array of Pentium Pros running Red Hat to analyze the terabytes of data streaming from the experiments. NT was rejected because of the difficulty of administering the array. Incidentaly, the RHIC is an unbelivable piece of engineering. "

Jesse Barnes wrote in to let us know where to get at the non-alpha, full version of Linux for many Indys. Additionally, check out the page for more information.

Bob Bell was the first to write in and let us all know KDE has finally hit the big 1.0! Something that a lot of you have been waiting for a long time, I'm sure. Markus Fleck (aka python) wrote in to tell us that Red Hat has hired Preston Brown, the author of KOrganizer, and a recent volunteer to the Harmony Project. Harmony is the project to provide a free and superior Qt replacement. An interesting turn of events, indeed...

endisnigh writes "I am a smalltime sysadmin working in a cyber cafe in Dublin - my problem is that the linux server that we have here (redhat 5.1) attracts system crackers for some reason - people from a few different countries who seem to be portscanning etc.. I wouldn't consider myself totally green as regards to linux, but find it hard to get good up-to-date linux security advice that covers everyting from shadow passwords, to secure finger daemons to immutable file systems to just *exactly* what daemons don't need to be running on a mail/web/name server. I want answers! I want advice! I want cheesy poofs! "

Well folks, its friday, and I'm ready for the weekend. And I'm gonna celebrate by cleaning out the submissions box. What follows is a fairly sizable list of quickies that have been built up over the last week or so. First off, Felix Finch sent us a link to IllusionWorks.com. It is exactly what you would expect. Kinda cool. Frank Berger sent us a link to a Chicken Conversion for Quake II. What a strange world we live. Oliver Fischer, the guy who was working on those Linux Keyboard Keys has updated his page with more information for anyone interested. Mike Roessing wrote a sort of zd parody. It's friday, you might enjoy reading such thing. Christopher Lee sent us a link to a NY Times Writeup on VA Research and Linux. Fict wrote in to tell us that the latest issue of Phrack is now online. Matthew Miller wrote in to say that Red Hat is selling, well, Red Hats like the one in their logo. Fict wrote in to send us a link to Denounce.com (uber cool fake news site) one MS buying Linux.

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.