MrEfficient writes, "ZDNet UK has a story in which Dirk Hohndel, the chief technical officer of SuSE Linux, clears up an earlier statement made by the chief executive, Roland Dyroff, about Linux's readiness for the desktop. "

t-money writes, "The Helix Code Web site went live this morning. They have a pre-release of their Helix GNOME desktop, which includes the latest development version of GNOME (gnome-core 1.1.5). " Thanks to all the people who wrote in about the Helix Code launch - I've got also got some information from Nat Friedman of Helixcode about what they are doing, so read more. And can I say Wow. This looks cool.

A lot of people have been submitting the interview with SuSe CEO Roland Dyroff, in which he states the Linux is not ready for the desktop. Sounds bad, right? Well, if you read the interview, it makes much more sense - he talks about company adoptions of Linux, but also addreses issues of hardware drivers and such. But with the upcoming release of the GUI Managers and the rising number of pre-installed Linux boxen, I think we're getting closer.

radja writes: "The SuSE chameleon has a new name: Geeko. E-mail to the winners was sent yesterday, so if you joined the contest, check your mail." Radja was pleasantly surprised to receive such mail, and looks forward to getting a plush Geeko and the coming 6.4 distro. Check out the results on the SuSE news page.

Syn Ack writes, "SGI and SuSE announced at CEBIT that they are going to team up to bring Iris FailSafe to Linux. Linus is quoted as saying that this is a "piece of the puzzle" that Linux is missing. Here is SGI's press release." The press release says FailSafe for Linux will be open source, but doesn't say under what license.

Maschendrahtzaun writes "After the green chameleon has been the mascot of the SuSE Linux AG for such a long time, we finally want to give it a name. We are therefore announcing a name competition for our chameleon.

The competition will begin in New York at the Linux World, which was staged Feb. 1, 2000 through Feb. 4; the final decision will be revealed at the CeBIT 2000, at the end of of February 2000 in Hanover. From all suggestions which we receive SuSE will select the most funny or best fitting ones, which will be presented to the public on our Web site. From these suggestions the public will then be able to choose the winning name. One of the suppliers of the name which gets the most votes will be invited by SuSE to the largest European Linux event, the "LinuxTag in Stuttgart". SuSE will also draw further winners from the hat, who'll receive a current version of SuSE Linux as well as the newly-named cuddly green chameleon. " Ya know, 'Rob' has a nice ring to it...

ZDNet UK reports that people who voted for best Linux distribution at the LinuxWorld, chose SuSE. Congratulations SuSE! (and if I might add a comment, please improve the GUI installer, maybe even release a beta version before going gold).

Soko writes "Linux-Mandrake has joined SUSE, Red Hat and Caldera in porting their distribution to Alpha and SPARC architectures. The announcement was originally found on freshmeat and talks about getting help from Alpha Processors Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. MandrakeSoft has ported its latest popular version of the Linux operating system, Linux-Mandrake 7.0, to the above processors. "

Yes, we know this is overdue. We put up the original Ask Larry Augustin post on Jan. 10, and here we are posting Larry's answers on the 27th. The first few weeks after an IPO are hectic for any CEO who is involved in one, and we understand this, but the wait has been as frustrating for the Slashdot staff as for anyone else, and there was nothing we could do about it. Anyway, finally, here are Larry Augustin's answers to your questions.

Ysidoro writes "With No. 316.081 of August 30, 1999 has been filed before the Uruguayan Trademark Office a trademark application for registration of the LINUX name to International class 42 (computer related services). This application has been filed by Mr. Francisco Pereira and Mr. Enrique Place de Cuadro, of Montevideo, Uruguay. In accordance with the official publication from the Industrial Property Bulletin No. 6 of December 1999. See the open letter writed by a group of Uruguayan Linux users. "

Hans Reiser apparently was offended by us mentioning ext3 and not mentioning his own FS. Under most circumstances we don't care, but he says "ReiserFS version 3.5.12 at is faster than ext3, it is stable, it is on our web site, and SuSE's." Anyone wanna try this out and do some benchmarking? I'm curious.

Everyone in the known universe has been submitting the news that Loki Software will be publishing and distributing Quake III Arena for Linux. The game will be published Dec. 27. The box will be a limited-edition collector's tin box and will include SuSE Linux 6.3. Asking price is 50$.

Tap noted that SuSE.com notes that 6.3 of the distribution should be released sometime today. Features include NEW X-windows installation, KDE 1.1.2, Star Office 5.1a, and XFree86 3.3.5. It should appear on the ftp site soon, and the Alpha release ought to follow shortly.

Bartmoss writes "Intel and the venture capital firm Apax are investing 12 million Euro in SuSE. Read the press release online. Looks like they want to open up new offices in parts of Europe, start moving into the Asian markets, and do the fashionable IPO thing. "

calibanDNS writes "SuSE has a news article on their web page announcing a new partnership with VA Linux. Apparently SuSE will help develop a software load for VA systems. " Co-development is set to start in December and will mean that SuSE will be an option on VA systems.

SuSE has announced that its next release, 6.3, will be available on DVD as well as CD. The release date is supposedly December. I hope this practce catches on. Debian 2.1 was 2 discs for just binaries, and it's much larger now. I have a 6 disc set of SuSE 6.2. The packaging is both neat and clumsy. Too bad the only DVD player I own is connected to my stereo....

Jón Ragnarsson asks: "I develop Oracle applicatons for a living. And they are usually internet-related. Right now I'm developing on a Oracle 8i / Windows NT4 machine. But I have more and more become aware that NT is very limiting compared to un*x when it comes to selection of tools and servers for Internet development. I have installed Apache, perl, php and other stuff on the NT, but with much difficulty. So now I'm planning to switch my development environment to Linux (RedHat, Debian or SuSE). The thing I would miss most is the SQL Navigator, a tool I don't know how I could live without it before I started to use it. :) I know there are some utilities available for postgres and mysql in KDE, but AFAIK, they don't work on Oracle databases. Any ideas what I could replace SQL Navigator with? Or should I start writing my own database front end?" Hey! I develop Oracle apps on Solaris and could use something like this myself!

Kurt has returned, continuing his reviews of Linux IDE ^[?] environments. After reviewing Code Fusion, he's reviewed Metrowerks CodeWarrior (for Suse). The full text of the review is below.

Ron Rangel writes " This website gives you quick, open, online access to simply run your applications on Linux. Or at least thats what they say." I tried it and it was kind of fun. You sign up (moderately intrusive questions), then Telnet (no ssh) into servers running several flavors of Unix and several Linux distros on different (Compaq) hardware platforms. Want to play with SuSE Linux on an Alpha (or whatever)? Here's your chance!

SuSE has released new X servers for the Rage based cards, as well as for SiS. It looks like it was too late to be included on the XFree86 V3.3.5, but its good to see SuSE doing lots of efforts to write those drivers for those chipsets.