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.

KDE 2.0.1 is out. Announcement is here and a summary of fixes is here. You may also want to look at the FAQ before you install it. Lots of bug were fixed (specially to Konqueror). Binaries are available for RedHat (6.x and 7.0) and SuSE (6.4, 7.0, and 7.0 Sparc) as well as the usual tarballs. Japanese users may want to install the Japanese translations which have been added to this release. Any comments from people about Konqueror?

Smitty825 writes: "On Tuesday, LinuxPPC released a beta of their next product, while SuSE has announced that they will be shipping SuSE 7.0 for PowerPC on November 20! Both distros come with XFree 4.01 and KDE2, as well as the MacOnLinux emulator product."

You asked, they answer. Jon Lasser and Jay Beale decided to kick their answers back and forth a few times in the style of Crossfire -- at least if Crossfire guests were security-obsessed, literate hackers with a knack for finding gaps in Linux and Unix security. And don't forget the book creds: Jon wrote the excellent Think Unix (want to buy it, huh?), and Jay is plugging away at (and just plain plugging) his upcoming tome from Addison-Wesley,Securing Linux the Bastille Way.

Several folks noted that the KDE team has announced a collaboration with industry, similiar to the GNOME foundation ... it's called the KDE League. If only they can get Green Lantern and Aquagirl to join existing members like TrollTech, Corel, HP, IBM, MandrakeSoft, and SuSE. (Noticably missing from the official press release are names like Red Hat and VA Linux.)

cmickelson asks: "I've been running SuSE Linux 6.x on my laptop for over a year now and everytime I would compile something I would have to run make several times because of errors during compiling. Now my laptop is very unstable, Windows is unusable because of constant crashes, but Linux generally runs well except for Netscape core dumps, and the compiling problems. Anyway I just assumed the errors were due the system's instablility. However, I recently assembled a new desktop computer and installed SuSE 6.4 on that and the same thing happened when I tried to compile Samba. I had to run make five times before the whole source tree was completed. Is this typical? I find it hard to believe that gcc/gpp could be that unstable, but why else would this happen with two different systems? Is this due to the AMD K6-2 processors (which both laptops have), or is SuSE the problem?"

syn1 asks: "There has been a proliferation of Linux distros over the last couple years. Many are specialized for specific tasks or needs. In terms of Beowulf Clusters, there are a growing number of distros specialized for these clusters. Although the old favorite among specialized Beowulf distros is Extreme Linux, other distros such as Syclid Linux and Scali Linux are catching up in terms of user share. Additionally, more people are using conventional distros (Red Hat, Debian, Mandrake, SuSE, etc..) and adding Beowulf support. I am just wondering what fellow Slashdotters think about these various distros when it comes to Beowulf Clusters and which ones they think are best."

Okay, here (as a refreshing break from all the political stuff) is what amounts to one of the most lucid primers on software development management I've ever seen, contained in NEdit leader Mark Edel's answers to your questions. If you ever expect to lead an Open Source project (or a closed source one, for that matter), you need to read this from start to finish, possibly even print out a copy and read it over and over. Great stuff!

As the title says - The final Release Candidate (RC2) of KDE 2.0 is out. Announcement is here, Red Hat RPM's available here (for Red Hat 6.2 and 7.0). SuSE and other distributions RPM's available through the mirrors. Solaris 8 packages will be out soon. Please test this release and if you'll find any showstopper bug, then please report it.

This episode of Slashback brings a quartet of deja-vu inducing tidbits for your continuing edification and amusement: SuSE, not just Red Hat, will run on all those fancy schmancy new machines from IBM; DialPad sends a nearly bewildering apology to be-spammed e-mail recipients (bewildering because not enough other companies have done the same); laptops of the non-Transmeta variety; and some more information on optical switching, etc. Brush up on randomness, read at your own risk.

solusthewizard writes: "SuSE, probably Europe's top Linux distro, is available for download as a 'live evaluation' iso image for version 7.0. Not quite sure what that means as opposed to the shrinkwrapped version as I haven't finished downloading it yet! Check out here for the iso (or better still, look for a local mirror). Can't be any worse than Red Hat 7.0, my laptop is still recovering." Read about the things that make 7.0 beam with pride here, if you'd like. I will make a sizeable contribution to The Human Fund in the name of everyone who establishes or points to a mirror :)

Well, as the title says - the AMD X86-64 simulator is shipping (for Linux only - for now). You can go here and read the details. It is called SimNow!. Unfortunately, the kernel 64 bit port is not done yet, but hey, you got a nice simulated machine to play with! It's available as RPM for RedHat 6.2 and SuSE 6.4. NOTE: - you'll need PLENTY of RAM to operate this simulator! (384MB RAM is minimum) and disk space - 4 GB! So think before you download this beast!

a2800276 asks: "The story that XFS has gone beta raised some questions in my mind. There are now four journaling filesystems available under various OSS licenses and being actively developed for Linux, there being (in estimated order of maturity): SuSE/Namesys's reiserfs, SGI's XFS, IBM's JFS and Tweedie/Redhat's ext3fs. Avoiding the obvious question of why can't the effort going into four different projects be channeled into one, I think a discussion of the particular merits of the different fs's would be interesting."

riggwelter writes: "SuSE has announced a version of their distribution for the Sun SPARC architecture. It's available as four ISO images from their FTP site and mirrors. This mean s that SuSE now supports PowerPC, Alpha and SPARC in addition to i386. Anyone with a SPARC knocking about the place fancy reviewing it?."

chamont writes: "Even though Red Hat is still number 1, this article states that Caldera, SuSE, and Turbo are gaining ground fast. The article also mentions that Corel is pretty much history." Interesting to see -- what's cool is that the Linux market, at least what they measured, grew 89% overall. Turbolinux had monstrous growth overall -- you can see a lot more is happening on Pacific Rim.

chromatic is back with a mini-compendium of introductory Linux texts -- and yes, they have the famously protected "Dummies" trademark. Don't scoff at the nature of these books, though; the skill of translating the arcana of any computer topic (and boy are they all arcane to the uninitiated!) into language that mom, kids and the guy down the street can understand is not a common one. If you don't know what a root prompt (or an editor) is, or why you might want one, it's hard to do much else with your system.