Bob_Robertson writes: "I have a Sony floppy adapter for their memory stick, and of course Sony has no "drivers" to use this rather expensive but nice thing in Linux. Works fine in Win95, but who cares? There should be a way to 'mount' the floppy adapter just like any other device. Searching has turned up no success stories other than the Sony USB adapter under SuSE, any suggestions? " The Sony chewing-gum memory has held on doggedly, and there are even non-Sony makers for it now. What suggestions can anyone offer for taking advantage of it under Free OSes?

jdfox writes: "SuSE announced more layoffs on Friday: 10% reductions in Germany, or about 50 (mainly non-technical) staff. This follows the February layoffs of 30 out of the 45 US staff in Oakland. Perhaps a merger with MandrakeSoft is in order? Both are RPM-based, both offer KDE-based admin tools. OTOH, as MandrakeSoft is right in the middle of an IPO, it might not be the best time to be thinking about a major acquisition. I mainly use Debian, but SuSE is an excellent distro, and I would hate to see the company go bust."

Last week, you asked Shawn Gordon questions about his venture TheKompany, an outfit which has been (fairly) quietly working on a small flotilla of software for GNU/Linux systems, and some cross-platform applications as well. His responses are below; you might be surprised at a few of them. (And some lucky Debian hacker might even pick up a job.)

We sent 10 of your questions to IBM Linux exec Scott Handy a while back. Here are the answers. As is common with corporate types these days, a PR person had a hand in what was said, so please take that into account as you read on. But I don't think anything much was changed (I can usually tell) in this case, though.

Okay, here's a nice "behind the curtains" peek into the way tech industry analysts (who are not the same as stock analysts) get and interpret their data, courtesy of IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky, in the form of answers to the insightful questions you asked him last week.

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.