martins99 writes: "Progeny was released today. It is a commercial dist based on debian but with lots of new stuff which Debian 2.2 (potato) or woody (testing) lacks like: support for 2.4, graphical installation, XFree86 4.02, glibc 2.2. Read more at www.progeny.com." Since Stormix is ailing so badly, I hope Progeny can do better...

2001 does not look like a good year for computer and Internet businesses, but I expect 2002 to be decent, if not spectacular, for a number of reasons including IRS policies. I also predict that Microsoft's software leasing concept will be more acceptable to businesses than you might expect, as will Red Hat Network and other subscription-based software support schemes. But before we go on, let's accept the fact that 1998 and 1999 were unusually good, and that we're unlikely to see anything like those years again in our lifetimes. We not only had Internet companies popping up all over the place -- much faster than they should have, in my opinion -- but we also had a major pre-Y2K hardware and software buying frenzy.

Anonymous Coward writes: "I saw this article on NewsForge. It looks like these guys are going to stop preaching to the converted & start showing off open source software to those who need showing of to." I usually figure that if it isn't in Debian unstable, I don't need it. :) But perhaps this site will be useful to people once it has some submissions.

mr writes "The boys and girls at Evans Data want to sell you a 178 page report about Linux. Now, they had a page that put FreeBSD between Caldara and Debian as far as how often it is used as a web server. They have pulled FreeBSD from the list. Seems Evans Data just figured out that FreeBSD isn't Linux. Did Evens Data use pages from TigerSoftware or perhaps the crack staff of Tucows?" There's also a Daily DaemonNews story with some figures.

Carlos Laviola writes: "Ben Collins is the new DPL. The results of the 2001 leadership election have been posted a few minutes ago on the debian-devel-announce and debian-vote mailing lists. The announcement is here. Congratulations to Ben Collins and the other candidates!"

Paul Nelson, writing "We are educators who think using open source software in public agencies is the responsible thing to do," says "We have released a turn-key terminal server distribution based on RH7 and the LTSP packages. Simply install Linux and start plugging in your diskless terminals. Very little or no configuration is required. We've included some cool educational software and have (with permission) bundled StarOffice as part of the install. To kick things off we have 1000 Intel Celeron processors to give to schools building Linux terminals. We also have some Xeon processors to help schools building servers. Our goal is to have 1000 terminals in 100 schools by one day (July 4th.) For more info including links to download the CD-Install image (650mb) head for http://www.riverdale.k12.or.us/linux/." Any parents (or other aggrieved taxpayers) out there might be interested in showing this off at a PTA meeting. You may also be interested in the Simple End User Linux and the Debian Jr. projects.

An anonymous user wrote in to tell us (and Timothy called RH and confirmed, this change was made a few weeks ago) that you no longer can Freely and Anonymously use Red Hat's Update Agent to download updated package DBs, and update packages. You must register, and pay $9.95 for the service. Of course you can still update manually, but how long before other services pop up to take its place? And Debian still does apt without me having to tell them where I live. This is unfortunate, but not unsurprising. I want RH to make a buck too, but this seems like a pretty crappy way to do it. Update: 03/19 03:21 PM by T : An unnamed reader points to this FAQ on the change, too.

IanMurdock writes: "Progeny Debian Release Candidate 1 is available. Read the release information or go to the download pages."

Steven Levy's Crypto is a brief history of the men involved in developing modern cryptography. If you've read Applied Cryptography or another work with a mathematical emphasis on crypto, you've heard their names -- Diffie, Hellman, Chaum, Rivest, Shamir, Adleman, Zimmermann, and so forth. But the other books on cryptography typically neglect the human side in favor of the math. Crypto aims to fill that hole.

Daniel Quinlan writes "Today, the Free Standards Group released version 1.2 of the Linux Development Platform Specification and let loose with the public review of FHS 2.2-beta that will be used in the Linux Standard Base (and is already being used by distributions). Also of note, the Linux Standard Base has a new chairman, George Kraft IV, and the LSB specification is nearing completion. Really."

Sould writes " Debian Planet are running a story here discussing whether Debian should retain document-specific cripples in xpdf - a GPLed pdf viewer that honours Adobe's copy controls. "

The Open Source Initiative has modified their official definition of an open source software license. The change itself is minor, but they're also calling for more input on other possible improvements to the definition - see below for more.

Ross Vandegrift asks: "Once upon a time long ago, apt-get totally trashed the company webserver while we were trying to upgrade it. Since then I have been very suspicious of apt-get. Recently, a friend from school talked me into trying it again. I slowly eeked back into it and was keeping our machines up to date, and automatically applying security patches. It was cool, I was starting to trust it again. Well, today that changes..." I'm sure everyone who has ever used RPM or apt can understand the frustration one goes thru when running into this problem. For those who have, what did you do to get your system functioning again?

cagrin wrote to us with a recent Nick Petreley feature on LinuxWorld. In this feature, he writes about one of my most favorite parts about Linux: Debian and apt-get. He's advocating that Debian become the standard for Linux, as RPM doesn't cut the mustard compared to apt-get. Now, granted, I've been able to blow up my machine before with reckless apt-get dist-upgrade -- but that's running unstable, and my own fault. Apt-get rocks.

blutgens writes: "I have a Sony VAIO superslim with no cd-rom and only a USB floppy. I'd like to install Debian or Slackware. Only problem is, without some serious mojo it's next to impossible to do. FreeBSD has an install disk which works fine and will load the MFS (same as a ramdisk essentially) but I'd just as soon migrate it back to linux (Don't ask, I have my reasons) but refuse to run redhat. I made custom kernels with USB support but all I get once the kernel tries to load that second floppy from USB is "Invalid partition table" the disk is fine, I've tried others. My question is what do other people do when they lack normal install media? Isn't there a debian netboot.img floppy image that won't require some magic needed to read a second floppy?"

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.

impaler writes: "Looks like Woody is frozen. LWN has a message from the Woody release manager, saying it is frozen. So, I guess it is finally frozen. Hopeful in less than a year Debian 2.3/3.0 will be out. Yay. Well, really lots of yay. Nice gui installer(even though I'm fine with the text one) and automatic hardware detection(something I like...especially when installing Debian on a box you know almost nothing about its hardware i.e. at an installfest)." And it looks like the Debian Release Manager has absolutely, positively staked his life on releasing Woody no later than July 8, 2001, so we can set our clocks now and hold him to his sworn word.

SquadBoy writes "The fine people at Debian have created a Telemetry Box Distribution this is what they have to say about it. "Version 1.0 of the Telemetry Box Distribution has finally been released. The Tbox distribution is a Debian GNU/Linux 'potato' based custom Linux version for remote monitoring and maintenance of networks. A telemetry box allows remote management and diagnostics. It uses a customized version of netsaint to gather data. Netsaint has been enhanced so that the configuration is possible via the Tbox Webinterface through SQL structures. Netsaint logs into a SQL table. Tools on the Tbox can then display the data in a variety of ways (graphs or reports)."" Storie's a bit old, but it's a cool little box.

Denial writes "Wichert Akkerman, the outgoing Debian Project Leader, has been interviewed on DebianPlanet. After two terms as the leader of the debian project, Wichert has decided to call it quits. He talks about how the election for a leader works, his plans for the future (VA Linux) and about the future of Debian. Interesting stuff."

mojo-raisin writes: "After more than a year of development, the first release of OMS has been made on www.linuxvideo.org. For those of you running Debian see this message for an easy installation to your system." Looks like you need a cutting-edge libc6, among other things.