At the beginning of this month we sent your questions to Isam Bayazidi of Amman, Jordan. He's a Slashdot reader, founder of the Jordan Planet blogging community, and (I know this from personal experience) knows the best places to buy discount-priced computer components in his home town. Enjoy!

Here are OSDL CEO Stuart Cohen's answers to your questions, many of which were spurred by the recent release of an OSDL co-sponsored Linux TCO study (that anti-open source commentator Rob Enderle has already/inevitably questioned).

Ravi writes "Any system or network administrator will know the importance of applying patches to the various softwares running on their servers be it the numerous bug fixes or vulnerability checks. Now when you are maintaining just a single machine, this is really a simple affair of downloading the patches and applying them on your machine. But what happens when you are managing multiple servers and hundreds of client machines? How do you keep all these machines under your control up to date with the latest bug fixes? Obviously, it is a waste of time and bandwidth to individually download all the patches and security fixes for each machine. This is where this book named "Linux Patch Management - Keeping Linux systems up to date" authored by Michael Jang gains significance. This book released under the Bruce Perens' open source series aims to address the topic of patch management in detail." Read the rest of Ravi's review

nanday writes to tell us that Newsforge (Owned by VA Software, just like Slashdot) is running an interesting look at the, recently reported on, GPLv3 by the Debian team. From the article: "Initially, Branden Robinson says, he was worried about GPL3. 'The amount of secrecy around the initial draft process had me very nervous,' he says. In addition, after the Debian consensus rejected the GNU Free Documentation License, he was concerned that GPL3 might become equally contentious in Debian. 'I'm glad to say that my fears are assuaged,' Robinson says. 'I was impressed with both the large and small changes. In a nutshell, I like it.'"

An anonymous reader writes "XYZComputing has a great interview with Martin F. Krafft, the author of "The Debian System". From the article: 'Despite Debian GNU/Linux's important role in today's computing environment, it is largely misunderstood and oftentimes even discounted as being an operating system which is exclusively for professionals and elite users. In this book Krafft, explains his concept of Debian, which includes not only the operating system but also its underpinnings. Debian is not only a robust and scalable Linux distribution, but it has many other features which are worth looking into, like its open development cycle and rigorous quality control.'"

Slashback tonight brings some corrections, clarifications, and updates to previous Slashdot stories, including a possible release date for the long awaited Optimus keyboard, yet another extension in the Blackberry court case, lakebed theory on Mars possibly all wet, US-CERT statistics perhaps not all they are cracked up to be, stem cell investigation reveals papers were faked, the FTC objects to the Netflix settlement, and a new Crossover Office fixes the WMF exploit among other things. Read on for details.

anon mouse-cow-aard writes to tell us the Register is reporting that the Nokia 770, originally scoffed at by many as useless, is doing quite well. There is even an open source platform development site, maemo, that offers quite a bit. It uses wlan for connectivity and has 'cpu transparency' so you can build apps for normal Debian (albeit with a custom set of libraries) and then run a sort of 'checkout' for the ARM processor, and it will run on the handheld. There is ssh and VOIP coming soon. Overall it is shaping up to be pretty cool.

Anonymous Coward writes "Linux Gazette has a new filesystem benchmarking article, this time using the 2.6 kernel and showing ReiserFS v4. The second round of benchmarks include both the metrics from the first filesystem benchmark and the second in two matrices." From the article: "Instead of a Western Digital 250GB and Promise ATA/100 controller, I am now using a Seagate 400GB and Maxtor ATA/133 Promise controller. The physical machine remains the same, there is an additional 664MB of swap and I am now running Debian Etch. In the previous article, I was running Slackware 9.1 with custom compiled filesystem utilities. I've added a small section in the beginning that shows the filesystem creation and mount time, I've also added a graph showing these new benchmarks." We reported on the original benchmarks in the first half of last year.

benbranch asks: "I am presently learning the Python programming language. The language itself is brilliant and seems very easy to pick up, however my problem is finding a decent IDE. I use Mac OS X (as Windows is excruciating), and though I love Linux (Debian/Ubuntu) all my work computers are Mac's. Can anyone advise me as too a good open source IDE for Mac? If there are any Python programmers out there using Macs, I would love to hear from you."

norburym writes "The Bruce Perens Open Source Series of books published by Prentice Hall PTR is a strong collection of nearly 20 volumes focusing on Linux and open source technology. Edited by Linux guru and former Debian GNU/Linux Project Leader, Bruce Perens, the books are aimed toward developers, sysadmins and power users. Several months following the release of a new print volume, a free electronic version is made available on Prentice Hall PTR's web site. The series includes some excellent editions including Official Samba-3 HOWTO and Reference Guide (2nd ed.), Linux Quick Fix Notebook and PHP 5 Power Programming. The newest book by Mark Wilding and Dan Behman, Self-Service Linux: Determining Problems and Finding Solutions, is another well-written and worthy companion to this series." Read the rest of Mary's review.

Marco Ghirlanda writes "There is an Italian Public founded Research and Technology Park -- the Virtual Reality & Multi Media Park which is hosting a Hollywood-like film studio, the Lumiq Studios The Lumiq Studios and is investing a lot of resources in creating a Debian based multimedia distribution, Mediainlinux wich is basically two lines of Linux Live CD, one based on Knoppix and one made from scratch (Mediainlinux 3) for 2D, 3D, Audio and Video pre and post production. ML needs testing outside our production environment and our school. "

Johhny writes "What is it about Ubuntu that has enabled it to grow so much? This distribution has clearly built on Debian's success but it has more than a few other things going for it. Ubuntu has become one of the most popular versions of desktop Linux despite its many differences from some of the other popular versions out there, including its scheduled releases and its counterpart, Kubuntu. The article takes a look at this distribution and tries to find out how Ubuntu defied the odds. This article generated a really informative comments page at OSnews."

phaedo00 writes "Ars Technica has reviewed the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet which is powered by a variant of Debian Linux. Eric Bangeman praises the device for its "wow" factor and has high hopes for its potential, but nagging issues with the implementation, relatively weak specs, and small software library lower the device's chances of becoming a hot item. From the review: 'The 770 could also use some beefier hardware. One of the attractive things about the 770 for me is the price--US$359. In order to hit that price point, I imagine Nokia had to make some hardware trade offs. Unfortunately, those make themselves glaringly apparent at times. 128MB of shared memory isn't enough; neither is a 250MHz ARM processor.'"

v.ciaglia writes to tell us that TuxJournal has a great interview with Branden Robinson, one of the Debian maintainers. The article has a nice mix of personal and Debian specific questions. From the interview: "My primary focus as Debian Project Leader has been to try to resolve some long-standing infrastructural issues that have been frustrating our developers and users. My emphasis has been on internal processes because, as I said above, I think we need to be prepared for more growth. I am very happy to speak at conferences and with the press about Debian, but fundamentally I think Debian sells itself. Because of that, I want to make sure that we're "ready to ship" -- ready to meet the demands of our users."

Last week you submitted questions for Dr. Herb Thompson, author of the latest Microsoft-sponsored Windows vs. Linux study. Here are his answers. Please feel free to ask follow-up questions. Dr. Thompson says he'll respond to as many as he can. He's registered a new Slashdot username, FFE4, specifically to participate in this discussion. All others claiming to be him are imposters. So read, post, ask, and enjoy.

David Lang asks: "With the release of MySQL 5.0, PostgreSQL 8.1, and the flap over Oracle purchasing InnoDB, the age old question of performance is coming up again. I've got some boxes that were purchased for a data warehouse project that isn't going to be installed for a month or two, and could probably squeeze some time in to do some benchmarks on the machines. However, the question is: what should be done that's reasonably fair to both MySQL and PostgreSQL? We all know that careful selection of the benchmark can seriously skew the results, and I want to avoid that (in fact I would consider it close to ideal if the results came out that each database won in some tests). I would also not like to spend time generating the benchmarks only to have the losing side accuse me of being unfair. So, for both MySQL and PostgreSQL advocates, what would you like to see in a series of benchmarks?"

An anonymous reader writes "An Intel Software Architect announced on the Debian mailing list yesterday that Intel has begun supporting Intel devices on Debian sarge for their extensive reseller channel. This covers the D845, D865 and D915 chipsets and was done to meet customer demand. They've posted drivers as well as the various distributions supported by the chip maker (Debian, Mandriva, Novell and Red Hat). Looks like the pure open source distributions are finally getting the attention of the big players!"

Rambo writes "Nokia has finally set a November 17th US shipping date for the $359 770 Internet Tablet. It features a Debian-based distribution called Maemo, which includes kernel 2.6, X.org/Scratchbox WM, and GTK for easy porting of applications. Hardware specs are: 800x480 ) screen, 220 MHz TI OMAP ARM processor (with DSP), 64M of RAM, 128M of flash, USB slave port, 802.11b/g wireless, Bluetooth, IR, and a RS-MMC slot. Even more details at LinuxDevices and Internet Tablet Talk. It sports a battery life of 3 hours for continous Wi-Fi usage, and accepts common Nokia phone batteries. Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Nokia, and am anxiously awaiting my own pre-order!"

Zebrahead writes "Tom's Hardware has a nice review of the Ubuntu H2. How about storing your operating system, including some applications, on a highly mobile device? This is exactly what the Ubuntu H2 was designed for. In theory, the Ubuntu H2 package can be run on virtually any computer that has at least one empty USB port. A tiny 1" hard drive with 3 GB capacity was teamed up with the Debian-based Linux distribution Ubuntu. Bundling a tiny storage device with a fully-featured open source operating system enables the user to take a system installation, all its settings and applications, and a limited amount of data with him. It would be great to take this pretty interesting product to an Internet café, a computer at a friend's location, or any other system you can think of."

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that Debian 'etch' has finally hit beta (testing) complete with graphical installer. The new version includes a default 2.6 kernel, auto laptop detection, secure apt to verify downloaded packages, improved log file and bug reporting, added language support, and much more.