A ZDNet review says the release of the StarOffice code isn’t as big of a deal as some people are making it. “Think of it this way: OpenOffice is to StarOffice what Mozilla is to Communicator.”

“In spite of a painful first install attempt, the flames of the Debian faithful, and a run of
bad luck with CDs that borders on creepy, a Linux World columnist is back this week with another Debian
install, Storm Linux 2000.”

RootPrompt.org has a ton of advice on building a good, cheap Linux machine. “You need to decide on the chipset/processor combination and then pick a motherboard with the
layout you need. I would like to be impartial, but it is always a good idea to stay away from Intel:
From Fall 1997 to Spring 2000, people witnessed recalls of pentiums due to ‘F0 0F’ pentium
bug, dropped L2 cache on original Celerons…”

It’s at LyX.org: “After 1.1.6 we will change the numbering scheme slightly so that hard
working system administrators won’t have to wonder what the fix suffix
stands for. They seem happy enough with something cryptic like the pl suffix
used by some projects but complain about fix. Oh well!”

The press release is at LinuxPR: Access Co., Ltd and Coventive Technologies announced
a joint solution that targets the surging information appliance market. The
partnership will gear to target the IA manufacturers in Asia for hand-held
browsers, PDAs, web phones, set-top boxes and many other information
appliances.

Cox News Service features the Fourth International Symposium on Wearable Computers, including mention of a 44-gram wristwatch computer and communicator under
development by IBM, able to compute using the Linux operating
system, employing a 100 mhz microprocessor and a 1 gigabyte data
storage capacity. Slashdot has more.

LWN.net has the advisory: Several problems in ping are fixed:
1) Root privileges are dropped after acquiring a raw socket.
2) An 8 byte overflow of a static buffer “outpack” is prevented.
3) An overflow of a static buffer “buf” is prevented.

SignalGround has a feature on a company’s employees working Linux into use there. “The company that employs Tom and me builds big pieces of food processing
machinery that cost upwards of $400K. Each machine includes an embedded
PCs running — and I cringe — NT 4. While the company’s legacy currently
dictates NT, those of us at the lower levels of the totem pole work to wedge
Linux in wherever we can. What follows is a short story of a successful
insertion that turned out to be (gasp!) financially beneficial to the company,
too.”

Paradox Entertainment has licensed the Canadian
developer Tribsoft the right to convert the acclaimed historical game Europa
Universalis to Linux. Tribsoft Inc. will cooperate with Hyperion
Entertainment on the Mac and Amiga version. The press release is at LinuxPR.

The Dallas Morning News has a feature on turning your old PC into something useful, including a Linux learning box for students. “The graphical desktop of XWindows provides a friendlier interface than
the lean, traditional text-only Linux mode, but it requires more hard disk
space.

For children who show programming promise, that old PC can be the
ticket to a bright, productive future.

The North Texas Linux Users Group (www.ntlug.org) conducts free
clinics for beginners, and help is always available in the open-source
world online.”