nil0lab asks: "I want to use keystrokes to switch between various systems and go from workspace to workspace within each system with another set of keystrokes." By using a combination of VNC, SSH and the right window manager, nil0lab wants to be able to look at any desktop on his network. Sounds cool, and I bet there are a lot of us who could put a trick like this to use. nil0lab has a partial solution, however there are still issues that need to be solved, and this is where he needs your help.

Alowishus writes: "IBM is going to make one of its high-end zServer mainframes available for free to the public for development and testing of Linux applications. It has 10 CPUs and 2.1TB of storage, and will offer TurboLinux or SuSE distributions set up as virtual servers. It's expected to support about 1,000 simultaneous users." However, hold your horses just a bit: Registration is not yet open, the accounts are good only for a limited time, and the site lists other conditions details, though none sound onerous. Among other things, "once a user is registered and approved to access a LCDS system, a user is required to have direct Internet connection, via a Telnet and SSH client." Though there have been other free sandbox accounts, having an account on an S/390 would be sweet, eh?

Philippe Fremy writes: "After the Poll on what kde needs in priority suggests speed is an area of improvement, Core kde developer Waldo Bastian has written an paper where he explains why a C++ (or Kde) application is slow to start and how the community could improve that."

Marko van Dooren writes: "Waldo Bastian wrote an interesting paper on the GNU ld.so linker and C++. It seems not only KDE is slow. At least now I know what the kdeinit process is for."

Scott McNeil e-mailed me regarding Linux Standard Base releasing .9 - check out the full release of information below.

CarrotLord asks: "Looking at the recent release of IBM's Small Business Suite for Linux got me wondering about distribution compatibility and standards. Personally, I run Debian, and am considering a move to Progeny. However, I am concerned by the fact that many products (particularly commercial ones) are available for only a particular subset of distributions (usually RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, TurboLinux and Caldera, but rarely Debian-based distributions or the BSDs). What is the current state of play, particularly in regards to tools for developers to enable them to create and test installation packages for various distributions?" Such a tool would go a long way in removing the force behind the "Linux fragmentation" argument that most of Linux's detractors often refer to.

update() writes: "The SFGate has an article on Eazel. It's the usual color-by-numbers piece (embedded MP3 playing; Andy Hertzfeld is a genius) but with one new piece -- without new funding, the company has a month to go before running out of money." Particularly given that Eazel's beautiful desktop is in the new Mandrake 8.0, and scheduled to appear on several other companies' desktops, it would be a shame if the company should dissolve now. I wonder if some of the big names (Red Hat, VA, Mandrake, SuSE) could invest together to keep Eazel going at least for now -- they all stand to benefit. And would a PayPal account for donations be unreasonable?

An Anonymous Coward in red leather asks: "I mostly use my machine for desktop-user type stuff: web browsing, word processing, game playing, listening to MP3s, and so forth. Out of curiosity and general geekiness, I've tried a fair sampling of Open Source and other alternate OSes just for kicks (SuSe, Red Hat and Slackware Linux, BeOs, FreeBSD). My favorite, so far, has been FreeBSD. It's stable, fast, supports all my hardware (including nifty OSS sound drivers) and the ports tree makes installing new software painless. Yet when I tell my other Open Source type friends (including BSD users and supporters) that FreeBSD is my favorite Desktop operating system, they look at me funny and say, 'FreeBSD is a server operating system, weirdo.' My question is: Why is FreeBSD not considered a valid desktop choice? What would FreeBSD need added to it to make a desktop friendly BSD distribution?" Now I feel that *BSD is as much of a 'desktop system' as Linux. It may not be widely known as such, but still: "Have Desktop. Will Travel", and BSD does have a desktop, right?

An anonymous submitter sent in: "I'm currently looking into purchasing a new laptop. This machine will run SuSE linux and I will be developing some pretty processor intensive applications(genetic algorithms, mathmatical simulations,etc.) so raw speed is the major factor. I've been searching for information on the relative speeds of an 850Mhz P3 vs a 500Mhz G4 but all tests I've seen are on the 'native' OS (OS9/X vs WinMe/2000). Has anyone out there done some tests running the same OS (linux/openBSD)?"

LionMage asks: "I know Slashdot covered this a long time ago, but we have a new kernel now, and other things have changed as well. I followed the evolution of the experimental UDF drivers back in the 2.2.x series of Linux kernels, and Ben Fennema seemed to have both read and write support working. He claimed to be able to write to a CD-RW in UDF format, and I tried his drivers with my DVD-RAM drive with some measure of success. Recently, I installed SuSE Linux 7.1 on my machine, and discovered that the DVD-RAM drive was detected as two different devices, a CD-ROM drive and a "CD writer." OK, well, we'll forgive that little transgression. What's interesting is that inserting a DVD-RAM cartridge with data on it will in fact yield positive results when mounted. So clearly, the 2.4.0 kernel has some UDF support in it. (Unless this is a case where SuSE threw in support on a whim.) But I can only mount UDF volumes read-only. What's the point of a DVD-RAM drive under Linux if you can't write to it? A visit to Ben's page showed that little progress has been made recently, and there are no patches for the 2.4 series kernels. Can anyone comment on UDF support in the current Linux kernel, and how it's progressing? Alternately, are there perhaps some other drivers I'm unaware of which allow write support?"

zhensel writes "In Corel's latest Linux newsletter, they comment on the "spin-off" of their Linux distro reported here recently. In an apparent attempt to capitolize on the recent woes at Suse, however, they also confirm the release of the second edition of their operating systems targeted at european markets for the low, low, price of ?4.95 (or a few hundred megs of bandwidth). In addition, they promise increased development for their Linux productivity software. " I kinda think its just spin, the kinda stuff you say when you're going down like "Duck and Cover"

assbarn writes "Ximian has announced that they have released Red Carpet, their new updater application and software management tool. This marks a huge improvement over their old updater service, with full dependencies (a la apt) for both RPM and dpkg systems, and a channel system that can provide any kind of software to your Linux system." I've included their release below - check it out for more information.

assbarn writes: "The title pretty much says it all, but LWN daily is reporting that SuSE is laying off almost all of its US staff. What does this mean for their English distribution? The details are short (and sketchy), but the link is at LWN. " I've tried reaching both the U.S. and German branches: SuSE has yet to return a call placed to the U.S. office, and at the German branch it won't be business hours for a while. I've left that message at the SuSE American office, though, and will update with any confirmation/denial. Update: 02/08 12:03 AM by H :A couple people have sent in the LinuxToday piece. SuSE's PR agency has denied it, but LWN is standing by it, and several other readers have substantiated it to LinuxToday and LWN, including the original source on LWN. As well, SuSE did say that a number of positions were being relocated. We'll keep the story updated. Update: 02/08 04:38 AM by T : LinuxGram has some great information -- with real details! Skeleton crew of 12 to remain in the U.S. What's also interesting is that it confirms that the PR agency had "bad communication," which is an interesting statement to say the least.

Veidit writes: "The Compaq Cambridge Research Laboratory seems to have a cool project named "Mercury". They are integrating an IPAQ running Linux with many diffrent types of wireless alternatives like 802.11b, Bluetooth, GSM, CDMA via PCMCIA. The linux version seems to be the one that Handhelds.org has. " We also had an e-mail from Dan Sparks who writes: " The free Compaq TestDrive Program has added two new features allowing iPAQ handheld development online. In the Test Drive Program, we have four DEC Sharks (DNARD) SA-110 based network computers running Linux allowing development on Linux based StrongArm systems. In addition, Alpha2Arm cross-compiler tool chain has been added to every single one of our Alpha Linux machines, including our Brickwall Beowulf cluster. This means that you can compile programs for your iPAQ handheld on our blazingly fast Alpha computers. The Toolchain includes support for C and C++, and is available on all the Alpha-based Linux distributions we have, including RedHat Linux, SuSE Linux, TurboLinux, Kondara Linux, and Debian GNU/Linux."

Several people wrote in to point out that SuSE appears to be the first big Linux vendor to have announced a distro to be shipped with the still-cute 2.4 Linux kernel as default. Here's their announcment in English, and in German. Since they'll also be including a 2.2 kernel "in parallel," this isn't totally earthshaking (some other distros have been shipping 2.2 stock and 2.4 optional for a little while), but it certainly is welcome news that SuSE is willing to reverse that order. Update: 01/26 05:04 PM by T : SuSE's Lenz Grimmer wrote to correct this, saying "Even though we ship with the 2.4 kernel, it is _not_ the default kernel, the user has to explicitly select the kernel during the installation." Thanks for the correction, Lenz.

Yenya writes: "A few weeks ago, SuSE Czech created the Czech localized version of StarOffice. The most interesting fact about it is, that you can distribute the message catalogs and other parts of it freely, you can even use it freely, as long as you use it under SuSE Linux only. The localization itself, of course, works on other distros without problems. You just cannot use it legally."

James Hills writes: "Gamespy.com has released their end of the year Linux retrospective , "Operating system historians will record the year 2000 as the year that Linux gaming began to become a serious prospect for both gamers and developers. While many things still need to be resolved for Linux gaming to seriously compete with Windows gaming, companies such as Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSe, nVidia, 3Dfx, Loki, Vicarious Visions, Tribsoft, Hyperion Entertainment, and thousands of programmers working on projects such as KDE, Gnome, and Xfree86 have begun to make gaming in Linux gaming a more mainstream concept. Through the efforts of corporate investors and individual netizens, the Linux gaming market experienced tremendous improvements in all areas last year and the year 2001 looks even brighter. ""

morzel asks: "I've been looking on the internet to rent a dedicated Linux server to perform some back-up tasks for DNS/SMTP and perhaps some minor WEB/FTP. There are a lot of options out there, from $99/month deals to over a grand a month. What amazed me is that in almost every shop, 'Red Hat' is virtually a synonym of 'Linux'. And even if there are different choices, it's basically 'Red Hat 6.2 or Red Hat 7.0'. I for one would like another distribution to be on my production machines (like Slackware), but are there shops out there that can give me that?"

cr0sh asks: "I am seeking help obtaining TV output under Linux. I am currently running SuSE 6.2 and XFree86 3.3.2, using a Hecules Stingray 128/3D with TV out. I have tried numerous different modelines under X to try and activate the TV output, with no luck. A look at the chipset revealed that the card uses a Chrontel CH7002D-V to provide the TV output. Studying the specifications revealed that in order to activate it, an I2C bus or direct pin programming may be used. I searched the internet using Google to see what I could find out regarding this chip and Linux, but the best I turned up was an I2C bus driver for a Riva TNT/BTV chipset. Seeing that this may have been a blind alley, I tried setting up my Genius HiEncoder VGA-to-TV converter to display the output from the card, with help from Tomi Engdahl and his site. I eventually found a solid modeline to use, however, all I get is a black and white display. No matter what changes to the modeline I try, I cannot obtain color. I really need a color TV output (it is to drive an HMD I own). Can anyone give me suggestions as to how I may get proper TV output, either via my current card (anyone know how to enable the Chrontel?), gaining color via my converter (has anyone used the HiEncoder with Linux?), or using an entirely different video card (with TV output supported under Linux)? Any help would be appreciated."

ErrantKbd writes "An article at Infoworld discusses IBM's plans to release Itanium-based systems sometime in the January/February timespan. They will be building systems running Windows of course, but also ready-made servers running RedHat, Caldera, TurboLinux, and SuSE. Should be pretty sweet provided everything goes smoothly with the 64-bit processor. Note: there is an error in the article, a 64 bit system can directly address approximately 1 billion times more than the article suggests." Those'll be one helluva desktop box.