With a planned move to San Francisco next summer, last week saw San Jose's last Linux World Expo, at least for now. The future as always is stubbornly uncertain, but it's impressive that the serendipitous combination of Free tools (from GNU) and a Free kernel (from Linus) has inspired enough interest and prosperity to excite a larger group of people each year. If you've not had the chance to attend one of these expositions, we hope this article will give you a flavor of what it's like. Note: Here are a few pictures from the floor (Day 1 & Day 2) contributed by Sensei^); do you have any cool shots to link to in comments?

-|Oblom|- writes "AMD has partnered with SUSE to port Linux to its upcoming 64-bit Sledgehammer chip. The story is on CNET and the projects site is here www.x86-64.org Well... I have been waiting for a while for this announcment. Hopefully by the end of next year I'll be running dual-core 1.5Ghz(at least) Sledgehammer with Linux on it"

topdown writes "I just noticed that AOL released Instant Messenger Beta for Linux (rpm format for RedHat, SuSE, and Mandrake). Don't know about you, but I'll be sticking with gaim for now." Wow, this is fantastic news. Way to be on the cutting edge, AOL. Sorry, but this release doesn't even warrant a copy of our home game. I still don't forgive you for using the Jetsons theme music in your commercials.

Keith Packard from SuSE (and a member of the XFree core team) is doing A New Rendering System For X. You can check here to see what he has done so far. Looks great! Help is needed, so if you can give a hand - please do. Keith is going to show some more rendering stuff on LWE.

DickBreath writes: "It looks like SuSE 7.0 is released. See http://linuxpr.com/releases/2272.html. Now I wonder how soon it will be on my local bookstore's shelf." cloudmaster points to this description -- in German, there for the babelfishing adventurer -- of the new release. In addition to the ever-evolving SuSE logo, you'll find there that SuSE is branching ala Red Hat and others into Personal and Professional versions; the Personal comes with "three easy to understand handbooks" intended to guide new users, one of which is all about system configuration.

Omega996 asks: "Does anyone have any experience with Firewire on 'alternative' OSes? I use Linux (SuSE 6.4), FreeBSD, BeOS, and MacOS, and it seems only MacOS (and only recently) has Firewire support for something other than digital video input. I'm a UNIX geek, and I'd rather be using a UNIX variant with Firewire than MacOS 9, but I don't see any support for Firewire storage (disks, CD/RW, etc.). Am I missing something?" Well, here's a link to the Linux 1394 Project, however IEEE 1394 (or, if you are dealing with Sony devices, i.Link) is the generic name for Firewire. Does anyone have any information on such projects for FreeBSD, BeOS and other not-often-heard-from Operating Systems?

qbasicprogrammer writes: "Security Portal has a review on the security of Red Hat, SuSE, TurboLinux, and Caldera Linux distributions." Debian and Slackware are absent, but its a decent piece.

flupke asks: "In this article at ZDNet one can read about Linux consolidations. They provide several possible schemes such as: Caldera & SuSE, LinuxCare and O'Reilly, SCO and Turbo Linux, Compaq and MandrakeSoft. I don't think it's very accurate, but I'd like to have Slashdot readers on this subject because one day, it will happen ..."

salty dog writes: "Linux now supports Ultra ATA/100 HDDs, initially funded by SuSE Linux. Get the driver from: [www.linux-ide.org]." As you either know or have probably guessed, ATA/100 is the successor to the ATA/66 hard drive interface standard. And as the linux-ide.org site puts it, "Again Linux Beats MicroSoft to Future Technology Standard!" 'Nuff said.

Patrick McGouirk asks: "I work in a mixed-OS house, and need to have both Windows NT and Linux installed on my laptop. While everyone in this situation knows about the Linux+NT mini-Howto, I was installing SuSE 6.4 this weekend and accidentally did something that seems to have created an alternative solution. I installed NT as usual (hda1, primary) then installed SuSE (hda2, primary) + swap, as well as a third shared FAT32 partition (hda3, primary). I put lilo on hda2, but while fooling around with YaST2 I made hda2 active by accident. When I rebooted lilo came up with the choices of Linux or NT, which I have switched back and forth several times this weekend with no apparent problems. While in theory I knew that both Linux and NT care less about which partition is active (as long as it's a primary), It never occured to me until now that you could actually change the active partition to dual-boot. My question is this. Does this seem a safe method of dual-booting? If so this solves the basic problem of everytime you update Linux you needed to copy the new lilo to NT's root drive. It also makes Linux your primary OS!" I'm running this one for all of the Linux/NT folks out there who didn't know about this trick.

Günter Bechly sent in an interesting open letter to the KDE project regarding KDE, and its current exclusion from Debian (this is of course due to the licensing issues over which wars have been waged, lives lost, and kittens strangled). The letter is attached... he offers a $3k "Bonus" or "Reward" or "Bribe" depending on how you look at it, if KDE will be included with future versions of the distribution. Its an interesting one because the license issues are fuzzy to begin with, but it also shows that there is a strong demand for the software. Then again, I wonder if just hosting the debs and a line for a sources.list might suffice ... or just inclusion in non-free?

Frequent book reviewer and genuine Englishman Duncan Lawie sent us this first-person account of UK Linux Expo 2000. Proof (not that it was needed) that not only is Linux continuing to grow in the UK as elsewhere, but that the disconnect between suits and geeks remains as evident as ever. Read below for good news and medium news -- thankfully, that seems to be as bad as it gets for this transmission.

appletnc from linhardware.com points us to their article about Athlons and Linux. They're trying to sort out the compatibility problems rumored to exist with the boards and chipsets. He says "Despite SuSE's Athlon workaround and RedHat's (in)compatibility note, etc.) and rumors, we have not seen many reports of problems by LhD users. Are Linux users actually experiencing problems with Athlon motherboards? Given that the outstanding price/performance value of the Athlon, the question is how well do Athlon motherboards work under Linux?"

SuSE has announced that they are going to release a beta SuSE Linux for IBM's S/390. A beta version will be out in late June. TurboLinux has signed an agreement to port their Linux distribution to S/390 as well. The only major distributor that is missing here is Redhat. What do you think about Linux distributions and the S/390??

negaPLuCK writes: "i just mounted my first reiserfs partition. When the reiserfs.o module loaded into the kernel what popped out but ads for SuSE, MP3.com and Ecila.com." I've attached the exact text in the read more: it's more like sponsorship than ads, which on one hand is a cool way to finance development, but where is this gonna end?

Well, as the title says - SuSE 6.4 Evaluation version is now available. Before you start using it seriously, take a look at some of the updates that SuSe already released for this version, such as the Netscape update which you need to install over your installation. Credits for this story goes to Linux Weekly News.

troc writes: Here's the "info on this year's Linux Beer Hike sponsored by SuSE (and others). It's a European event, where Linux users wander around a nice hilly area, drink beer and exercise their minds of an evening doing Linuxy stuff. " I wanted to go last year, but my flabby ass probably shouldn't be goin' on ye old hacker hike ;)

In our third and final part of the 'Making Music with Linux' trilogy, we try to make sense of the alphabet soup of the Linux sound world by exploring OSS and ALSA, and we investigate musical notation systems and software available for Linux.

Smoking writes "It seems like SuSE 6.4 has been announced at SuSE's german site but not yet at their US site.
It includes an (hum!) enhanced graphical installer and new stuff like XFree 4.0 (not installed by default). The release date for the german version is March 27th and the little mathematical function on the box is cooler than ever. " They also recently announced that they will be working with the folks at SourceForge for some of their new development.

Earlier we announced that Walnut Creek CDROM and BSDI are merging. Obviously, this will shake up the BSD playing field considerably, and will doubtless have knock on effects with the Linux and other open source communities too, to say nothing of the various commercial organisations that already rely on FreeBSD or BSDI on their servers. Here, to answer questions about the merger, is Bob Bruce, president of Walnut Creek. Jordan Hubbard, FreeBSD core team member and release co-ordinator, and Gary Johnson, CEO of the new company, also contribute.