“I used to be a complete SuSE fan. All my machines with the exception of one ran SuSE, it was a test
machine that ran whatever I happened to be experimenting with at the time. The reasons I was a huge
SuSE fan were many and not limited to only those outlined below…” From The LinuxGurus.org.

Netsnipe writes “In a few days time, DebianPlanet will be covering Linux Conference Australia (LCA) being hosted at the University of New South Wales by Linux Australia from January 17-20 in Sydney. The timing of this year’s LCA has been coincidentally close to the release of the 2.4 Linux kernel two weeks ago and it is the first major gathering of important Linux developers of the year including Alan Cox. In the spirit of the Debian project, we at DebianPlanet want to make our interviewing process as open as the Debian distribution is with its own reporting and processes. To further this aim we are inviting people to submit their own questions to our interviewees and share a major opportunity to learn where the Linux community is heading towards. Our question submission system is now open to all at http://lca.debianplanet.orgLCA will play host to speeches and presentations by the who’s who of the Linux development community, including Alan Cox and Dave Miller (Linux’s lead network code developer) who are key noting the conference. Other developers who have played a major role in 2.4 such as the firewall code (Rusty Russell), and DRI (Gareth Hughes) will also be a few among the many speaking about the major changes made in 2.4 as well as flaws that need to be addressed in 2.5. New features that will appear in the coming year will be presented by other speakers such as the Tux2 filesystem, improvements in hardware accelerated X, the IA64 platform and zero-copy networking.”

From Wired.com: “Consumer rights are in danger as copyright owners continue to push for restrictions on the use of digital content. Among other ideas, the U.S. Copyright Office is considering ways for content to be destroyed on hard drives after a secondary sale.”

Evan S writes “Want a root shell? The Openroot Project gives away root shells to anyone who needs or wants one. People can learn the UNIX operating system, experiment, or do whatever they want, for example, someone could start a community owned webserver by installing Apache. Openroot has been running for six weeks, and with generous donations from organizations such as the FSF, there has been hardly any downtime.”

South Korea’s LG Electronics Inc. has announced development
of a Linux-based tablet PC that boasts wireless LAN connectivity, reports Infoworld.

The Digital iPad is designed for applications such as basic e-mail
and Internet access and word processing, and as a multimedia
terminal, for which video and MP3 player software is installed.

CBS reports that NASA has ordered the space shuttle Atlantis to be removed from its launch pad, delaying its launch until the end of the week.

Business Week looks at the state of free ISPs Juno and NetZero, exploring their passed and forseeing their future.

Reuters reports that France is planning to introduce a blank digital-media tax to compensate musicians and filmmakers for the potential loss from copied works. Slashdot has a lively discussion on the topic.

Computer World reports on the introduction of a new OC192 (10Gbps) backbone between Massachussets and California. It is the fastest single backbone linking the two shores of the US.

SEUL.org has the latest SEUL/edu Linux in Education Report for January of this year.