– By Grant Gross–

The huge technology marketing extravaganza Comdex, the fall version, brought thousands of geeks and businesspeople to Las Vegas this week, along with the Linux Business Expo held in conjunction with Comdex. In the true fashion of a trade show, there were a lot of words written and some actual news that broke out.

Perhaps the biggest news was the latest volley in what the media sees as a war to control the Linux desktop. Backers of the KDE desktop environment announced the coporate-backed KDE League at least partially in response to the Gnome Foundation formed earlier this year. Among the more interesting coverage: a LinuxPlanet opinion piece accuses KDE of earlier lying about the League, saying it’d never happen. Upside.com also weighed in with a comparison of the two competing marketing boards.

There were a ton of other announcements at the Linux Business Expo. EE Times rounds up a bunch of them, including public premiers of the Linux-run iRobot and a rehash of IBM’s installation of 15,000 Linux servers for the Lawson convenience store chain in Japan. CNN.com called the iRobot “the closest thing yet to a personal R2 D2.”

Microsoft and Linux: Partnerships and FUD

In other news this week, new Microsoft partner Corel floated a rumor that it may sell its Linux operations. Corel, for it’s part, says it’s still going full-speed ahead with its Linux products.

Speaking of everyone’s favorite software monopoly, Microsoft senior v.p. Craig Mundie ripped on Linux at Comdex, saying the problem with the Open Source model is it can’t produce software fast enough to keep up with consumer demand.

NewsForge news editor Tina Gasperson also looked at the relationship between Microsoft and Open Source, with developers of Open Source projects for Windows asking, “Can’t we all just get along?”

Linus interviewed … again

If you’re curious whether Linux creator Linus Torvalds can be asked anything he hasn’t been asked before, The Register published a wide-ranging two-part interview with him. The second part focuses on version 2.4 of the Linux kernel, and how soon it’ll be ready for release.

New in NewsForge this week

Columnist Jack Bryar challenges Open Source developers to come up with a solution for faulty ballot problems plaguing the U.S. election, and several others recently.

News editor Tina Gasperson finds a couple of free software or Open Source advocates who like Microsoft’s Whistler, because it may be a tool for the community to turn users against Microsoft.

News editor Dan Berkes looks at a couple of soon-to-be-released Linux palmtops.

NewsForge editors read and respond to comments posted on our discussion page.

O’Reilly net discusses LAMP, an Apache toolkit designed to get Apache, MySQL, and a scripting language (Perl, Python, or PHP) up and running quickly on your system. “An overview of the Apache Toolbox, a Swiss army knife of a script, providing a customizable, menu-driven interface to downloading and compiling a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHPherlthon) — minus the Linux — installation.“

Net-security.org has a guide to Sys-V style init scripts. Sys-V init scripts are used in practically every major distribution, except Slackware (which uses a modified BSD-type one with support for Sys-V init). The guide describes init’s runlevels, and how they relate to the init scripts.

Alan Cox has released 2.2.18pre22. “Bugs to go: PS/2 mouse detection. Anything which isnt a strict bug fix or previously agreed is now 2.2.19
material.” (thanks to lwn.net)

O’Reilly Net has an article describing dealing with latency in Linux. “Latency can be defined as the elapsed time (delay) between the generation of an event and its realization. If the delay is great enough to be perceptible, you have a latency problem. Here are a number of easy-to-implement adjustments that will dramatically reduce latency times on Linux systems.“

Slashdot readers talk about an announcement that LinuxPPC has released a beta of its next product,
while SuSE has announced it will ship SuSE 7.0 for PowerPC on
November 20.

Aleksandar Stancin aka D’Pressed in this article at net-security.org discusses, in brief, compiling of a new Linux kernel, or an old one, which ever pleases you most, on a example of the upcoming kernel 2.4.0, by using the 2.4.0-test9 version, and some references on new and improved firewalling implemented in it, called iptable. –LogError

Oreillynet.com has a how-to: “The configuration system that PHP uses for installation is one of
those nice, simple things in life that makes it rosy. At first it might
seem a little confusing, but it’s really very easy.”

Linuxdevices.com has a story on several annoucements by embedded Linux company Esfia: “A brand new embedded Linux software company has just joined the growing number of Asian companies that are
embedding Linux within consumer Internet and information appliances. Timed to coincide with last week’s Comdex
extravaganza, Taiwan-based Esfia unleashed a volley of product and technology announcements and launched its
new website.”

“www.userlocal.com is a new slackware user site that is banner-free, 100% lynx compatible, and run by volunteers. If you use slackware linux then come on by! Userlocal features slackware geared articles, news, help, links, propaganda, screenshots, and anything else we can think of or you can suggest. All suggestions and feedback are welcome. Hopefully userlocal will become a focal point for the online slackware community.”
–neskoy@userlocal.com