“Jeanna Matthews, assistant professor of Computer Science at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, had only six students in her Advanced Operating Systems class last year. All of them entered the IBM Linux Scholar Challenge. Four of them won. And won big: IBM ThinkPads for themselves and an IBM Linux zSeries for the University! How did this small technology school in the frozen north country of New York State produce three of the 25 winning Linux Scholar Challenge projects worldwide? To tell you how, Dr. Matthews shares her classroom experiences and illustrates the teaching environment at Clarkson. In the rest of our series, the students give you the details on their winning entries.” More at IBM developerWorks.

Embedded.com: “Hardware design’s growing abstraction might lead you to think open-source development is just around the corner. Jim [Turley] says that’s not the case.”

“By improving the kernel, and not changing or adding to the API, applications can run more responsively by merely switching out a standard kernel for the improved one. This is a big benefit. It means that ISVs need not create special versions for different real-time efforts. For example, DVD players may run more reliably on an improved kernel without needing to be aware that the kernel they are running on has been improved.” More at LinuxDevices.

– By Grant Gross –

A judge has ruled against an injunction Microsoft is seeking against Lindows.com, the company that’s trying to make more Microsoft programs work in Linux. Microsoft alleges that Lindows is violating its Windows trademark, but our own Jack Bryar notes dozens of other cases where Windows or Windows-like names are used in company products.

Looks like Microsoft either has dozens of trademark violation cases to sue over, or much more likely, will be told by a judge that if it wants a trademark, it should come up with words less common than windows, word or office. But don’t hold your breath — when was the last time you saw Microsoft do something truly innovative?

In other business-related news, there were several reports this week of Sun Microsystems’ plans to start charging for its popular StarOffice suite, an alternative to Windows that opens most Microsoft-formatted documents. The Open Source project for OpenOffice will continue, however.

Disney buys a bill

Sen. Fritz Hollings — who’s from South Carolina but gets a sizable chuck of money from Disney and other large copyright holders –finally introduced a version of his Security Systems Standards and Certification Act, now going by the name the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act. The proposed law would require electronics manufacturers to embed copy-protection controls in all PCs and consumer electronic devices sold in the United States, pretty much squashing any kind of fair use rights the public has on copyrighted works, and further limiting legitimate reverse engineering done by Open Source developers and others.

I’m not sure how much good a few thousand signatures will do against the corporate resources of Disney and and the motion picture industry, but there is an anti-SSSCA petition available. The petition had more than 70,000 signatures as of Sunday evening.

Linux at federal trade show

Linux continues to be in the background at the FOSE technology-in-government trade show, but don’t blame the efforts of the Northern Virginia LUG. Members were hoping to pass out 1,000 Linux CDs at the three-day event.

Several government agencies are using Linux and Open Source, however. On Friday, the Cyberspace Policy Institute at The George Washington University announced a plan to gain an international security rating for the U.S. National Security Agency’s Security Enhanced Linux project.

Also this week, Internet architects at the U.S. Census Bureau detailed how Open Source software is being used on several agency Web projects.

Newly released

Mandrake 8.2 was release, but some users reported some installation problems.

Netscape 6.2.2 hit the download sites this week.

One reader says we should “prepare to fall in love with KDE 3. The was released this week.

Newly reviewed

LinuxLookup.com reviews RAV AntiVirus v8.5 for Linux. “Defiantly a must have for you system administrators!”

OSNews has a review of the Lycoris Desktop/LX Linux distribution, but says the OS isn’t quite ready for the desktop.

New at NewsForge and Linux.com

Other stories that NewsForge and Linux.com reported first this week:

Tina Gasperson reported on Caldera’s OpenLearning product, a Linux training curriculum for everyone from new users to big business customers.

Robin “Roblimo” Miller talked to a custom browser programmer about the ease of moving from development based on Internet Explorer to Mozilla, now that AOL is planning to use the Mozilla engine as its default browser.

Stock news

The Nasdaq ended last week at 1.851.30, down ever-so-slightly from the 1,868.30 March 15 close. It was the second week in a row the Nasdaq fell. Of our index of 11 Open Source-related stocks, 10 fell, with only MandrakeSoft rising a week after the company asked for more customer support because of a cash crunch.

Red Hat saw its stock price tumble 17% Wednesday on reports of lower than expected quarterly earnings. The company did report an “adjusted” profit, despite what was called “weak” sales.

Hewlett-Packard’s merger with Compaq was approved by Compaq shareholders, but even that didn’t help HP’s stock price.

Here’s how Open Source and related stocks ended this past week:

Company Name	Symbol	315 Close	3/22 Close
Apple	AAPL	24.95	24.09
Borland Software Int’l	BORL	12.26	11.99
Caldera International	CALD	2.05	1.61
Hewlett-Packard	HWP	19.05	18.15
IBM	IBM	106.79	105.60
MandrakeSoft	4477.PA	e2.89	e3.00
Red Hat	RHAT	7.10	5.95
Sun Microsystems	SUNW	9.06	8.86
TiVo	TIVO	5.32	5.18
VA Software	LNUX	1.89	1.72
Wind River Systems	WIND	13.73	12.53

MkLinux takes advantage of the Mach Kernel abstraction to run on
HPPA, Intel, and PowerPC. MkLinux will run on almost all Macintoshes, with new support added every week. MkLinux is based on Red Hat with a new kernel
for more hardware support.

MkLinux

MkLinux is an Open Source operating system which consists of an implementation of the Linux operating system hosted on the Mach microkernel. We
estimate that there are somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 MkLinux users. A significant number of the installed MkLinux systems are being used in
mission-critical applications.

Why MkLinux?

MkLinux abstracts the hardware from the operating system and allows the possibility of running multiple operating systems at the same time. The two
operating systems essentially should be able to coexist without affecting each other.

MkLinux is a microkernel based operating system which is 100% compatible with the monolithic (ie. original) Linux since it is based upon almost
entirely unmodified Linux code, but becomes trivial to port to any platforms supported by the OSF Mach3 microkernel. The Linux sources now include the
Mach interface as a new machine type, but the same sources can equally well be used to build the original monolithic linux.

By using the OSF Mach3 microkernel the resulting Linux system will also be able to take advantage of additional functionality made available such as
SMP, MMP, and hard real-time support, to mention but a few.

Visit http://www.mklinux.org/ for more information.

KSI Linux (current release is 2.0) is a powerful well built
distribution with support for
Russian, English and Ukranian languages.

About KSI-Linux

Number 1 Russian and Ukranian Linux – suitable for all!

OS Linux has become the most popular UNIX-like operating system about the end of XX century, and also a cheap alternative to cost-intensive (HP,
Sun Solaris, Digital
UNIX) solutions. At present, the pace of Linux’ occupying the marked (compared to other OSes) is the most intensive and the tendency stay on.

The strong point of Linux is it’s mulipurpose nature. Linux covers all the range of applications, from desktop PC to powerful
super-high-performance clusters of computer
systems. Today multiprocessing Linux kernel successfully functions on a wide range of hardware platforms: PC, DEC Alpha, Apple Macintosh, DEC VAX,
PalmPilot, HP
PA-RISC, Sun Microsystems SPARC and Ultra-SPARC-64, StrongArm, etc.

A wellknown problem of software localization in order to suit Russina and Ukrainian’ users requirements is not viewed by western manufacturers of
Linux distributions as the
one worth an attention. Instead they are annoyed with quantities of small bugs in different Linux distributions, with the absence of qualified
consulting and product technical
support services for Ukrainian users. The spectrum of applications distributed with Linux system by foreign vendors is insufficient to solve the set
of tasks common for
Ukrainian users, ISPs, other IT companies.

On January 27, 1999, with conformance to the world-wide process of Linux development, an own custom Linux distribution — KSI Linux 2.0 (Nostromo)
— was announced by
Global Ukraine engineers. This new version has been developed for about a year after previous, 1.2 (Tornado) version of KSI Linux was issued.

The arrival of this distribution is backed by desire to get an industrial quality, full-featured all-in-one product, which will be developed in
conformance with Linux project
world-wide. KSI Linux project assumes distribution of the product almost for free (at the cost of CDROM) and provision of support and consulting
services for Ukrainian users.

KSI Linux 2.0 distribution (already available on CDROM) is supplied with a set of software packages necessary and sufficient for many common tasks.

At present, the process of “KSI Linux Co.” creation is almost complete. Company’s main goal is the most complete and qualified satisfaction for a
demand of Ukrainian
companies and enterprises, and personal users, for this software product, and provision of technical support and consulting services for them.

Even today the emerging company is able to satisfy Ukrainian market demand for ready-to-run, stable, localized, professional quality Linux
distribution, and in the nearest
future the company will be able to extend it’s supply to the international market of former-USSR countries. The product went through a year of field
testing at Global Ukraine’
production servers. Today KSI Linux backs up almost every PC-platform server of first complete Linux distribution built around the new-generation
kernel of version 2.2.x,
while all other Linux distributions offered worldwide are based at 2.0.x kernels. The product than get an ability to support all the modern PC
hardware which arrived on the
market during last two years — RAID arrays, watchdogs, scanners, TV-cards etc.

KSI Linux Company, 15.03.1999
http://www.ksi-linux.com
phone: (380)-044-249-1726.
Moscow distributors:
http://ksi.ncport.ru/

Since its first release in 1992, Slackware has been built
with ease of use and stability as top priorities. Including the latest popular software while retaining a sense of tradition, providing simplicity and
ease of use alongside flexibility and power — this is what a Linux distribution should be.

The Slackware Linux Project

Slackware Linux was first released in April, 1992 to provide a stable, easy to use distribution of the Linux operating system. Years of evolution have not changed the fundamental philosophy of the Slackware Linux Project — that simplicity is important and stability is key. Compliance with the published Linux standards (such as the Linux File System Standard), a determination to produce the most UNIX®-like distribution possible, and a focus on simplicity and ease of use have made Slackware one of the most popular, stable, and friendly distributions available.

More Information

More information on Slackware Linux, including installation and configuration help, Frequently Asked Questions lists, a web-based discussion forum for users, and of course the latest Slackware news is available at www.slackware.com, the official website of the Slackware Linux Project.

SuSE Linux includes over 1500 applications. With the new graphical
installation tool, users can be up and running
Linux on a drag-and-drop desktop in under 20 minutes. Advanced features include hardware acceleration for 3D graphics chips and a journaling
filesystem. SuSE Linux

Summary of Products and Services:

SuSE’s Linux
expertise has led its flagship product, the SuSE Linux
distribution, into becoming one of the most popular Linux distributions
worldwide. Now an international company, carefully localized versions of
SuSE Linux are available in many languages. SUSE Linux is available for
the Intel, Alpha, and Power PC* platforms. SuSE was founded in 1992, making it one of the earliest commercial Linux companies.
*Spring 2000.

In addition to its Linux distribution, SuSE provides professional services
to both enterprises and end users, offering technical support, consulting,
Partner Programs, and sales support to customers, resellers, and
distributors around the world. Because IT professionals respect the
reliability, comprehensive range of support, and level of technical
consulting SuSE offers them, SuSE is the platform of choice for server
systems at many companies.

SuSE is a technology leader in Linux. Through its SuSE Linux Labs division, SuSE contributes significantly
to Linux research and development with projects like XFree86, ALSA,
KDE, glibc, and kernel development, as well as with ports to other
platforms such as Sparc, Alpha and PPC, always releasing its contributions to the
Open Source community.

Staff:

SuSE has a solid engineering team: With over 250 employees worldwide,
two-thirds are employed in development, support, and information technology
service.

Because SuSE Labs is leading several important Linux development projects, more than 50 key developers from the Linux Community work
for SuSE. This level of Linux expertise enables SuSE to provide global
support for “mission-critical applications.”

Software Products: SuSE Linux Distribution

SuSE Linux comes with installation and administration tools, a
carefully maintained set of over 1500 applications, an extensive
manual, and 60 days of installation support. SuSE’s Linux distribution
adheres to international standards.

The current version, 6.3, premiered in early
December 1999 in both CDROM and DVD formats. Check http://www.suse.de/en
for upcoming information about new versions.

Non-Linux users sometimes wonder why SuSE releases an updated distribution every
4 months if Linux is so stable and reliable. The
quarterly releases allow the SuSE Development Team to bring the latest
Linux software and technical innovations to the market. However, while
Linux itself is continuously updated, SuSE controls its own releases.
SuSE only incorporates updates to the heart of the Linux operating system,
the kernel, when stable and when they provide performance improvements.
Experimental software outside the kernel is always labeled as such and
comes with documentation. SuSE ensures both innovation
and stability with every release.

In other services to its users, the majority of the new packages
are also available from our ftp server: ftp://ftp.suse.com. Technical information is always available online
through the support database.

Software Awards and Reviews:

The SuSE Linux distribution has won many different industry and user
awards, including:

• Favorite Linux Distribution: Linux World, Conference and Expo, February 2000 and March 1999
• Favorite Linux Distribution, Reader’s Choice Awards: Linux Journal, 1/99; PC
  Professional 4/99; Computer Bild 6/99; PC Intern 4/99; PC Magazin 4/99, PC Answers 8/99

The SuSE Linux distribution is also frequently praised for having
excellent documentation, comprehensive hardware support, and an encyclopedic
set of Linux tools. The technical editor of Linux Journal Magazine,
a major US Linux publication, summarized many SuSE Linux benefits
when he stated in a recent review (10/99):

“SuSE is a serious, high-performance distribution which is more
complete than practically any single distribution, and at the same
time is clean and fast due to effective configuration and
intelligent design.”

— Jason Kroll, Technical Editor, Linux Journal Magazine

SuSE Linux for Business

Businesses adopt Linux because it now features
business-level applications in addition to technical versatility
and economy for IT solutions. SuSE supports businesses with its
distribution as well as with associated applications running on the
SuSE Linux platform. Such applications include:

• Informix SE enterprise database solutions
• StarOffice 5.1 (Personal Edition) and Corel WordPerfect 8.0**
• “Linux Office Suite 99,” a SuSE product featuring a set of office
  applications
• ADABAS D Linux Edition
• Arkeia Backup Tools

SuSE Linux ISVs offering enterprise-level
applications include, among others:

• Hummingbird, provider of Exceed and other network connectivity and business intelligence products
• Appgen, a major provider of client/server-based general
  business and accounting applications
• Metrowerks, provider of professional software development
  tools, including CodeWarrior(R)
• Progessive Systems, a premier network security vendor
• Quadratec, providing backup and archival solutions

Combine SuSE’s popularity as a server platform with the availability of
business solutions on SuSE and SuSE technical support, and you have
solid business solutions.

Contact Information

SuSE Inc. can be contacted in the US at (510) 628-3380 or info@suse.com. The web site is
www.suse.com.

SuSE Linux AG, the international headquarters, can be contacted at +49 911 740 53 31 or suse@suse.de. The
international web site is www.suse.de.

v. 1.0 January 2000
SuSE Inc.

Storm Linux is a Debian GNU/Linux based distribution designed for
the desktop and network markets. Enhancements include the Storm installer, the Storm Package
Manager and the Storm Administration System.Storm Linux 2000

Storm Linux 2000 has been greatly improved as of August 2000,
and is now based on Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 “potato” release.
There are three editions of Storm Linux 2000 available:

• Starter Edition
  Boxed set. $19.95. Includes 1 CD, Installation Guide, PowerQuest Linux Prep Tool and Star Office 5.2
• Deluxe Edition
  Boxed set. $69.95. Includes 5 CDs, Installation Guide, User Guide,
  PowerQuest Linux Prep Tool, Star Office 5.2, Heroes of Might and Magic III (network play disabled), Macromedia Flash, Acrobat Reader.
• Open Edition
  Freely redistributable, this edition is available for free download from the
  Stormix servers and mirrors.

Storm Linux 2000 currently includes:

• Linux kernel 2.2.16
• KDE 1.1.2
• Helix GNOME 1.2
• glibc 2.1.3

Debian GNU/Linux
The Debian GNU/Linux
project was begun in August 1993, with funding
from the Free Software Foundation as part of their
GNU Project.
Debian’s goal is the creation of a complete operating system that
uses only Free Software. There are now over 500 Debian developers worldwide who are actively working on Debian GNU/Linux.

Storm Package Manager
Storm Package Manager is the graphical front-end to Debian’s advanced package management system. It enables you to install, update and remove software
and packages effortlessly. Simply choose the package that you want to download, and let Storm Package Manager do the rest. By automatically accessing
the Debian archive over the internet, Storm Package Manager enables you to easily download the most recent versions of all your favourite
Linux-compatible software packages. Upgrades are just as easy, and your system will stay clean, without you having to remove old, unused programs.

Storm Administration System (SAS)
The Storm Administration System is the network administration tool developed by Stormix. An integral part of Storm Linux 2000, it enables users to
maintain and configure systems remotely.

SAS is module-based, allowing the interface client to run separately from its core applications. This allows remote connectivity, giving the user
the ability to execute applications on a specific Linux box from other systems. Its 3 main components are:

SAT – Storm Administration Tool – a generic interface for the selection, loading, and display of various system modules.
Modules – software designed for a specific configuration task under Linux. There are currently 3 modules implemented: network, users, and dial-up.

MID – Module Interface Daemon – the software that facilitates communication between the system modules and SAT. Additionally, MID was
designed as a network aware daemon which allows SAS to be used over either LANs or WANs (internet). In technical terms, MID is referred to as a relay
agent.

SAS offers benefits to both users and developers.

Users benefit from:

• Remote administration from anywhere in the world
• Advanced user interface in both text and graphics

Developers benefit from:

• Creating graphical applications easily with SAS and SIL (Simple Interface Language)
• Modularity of SAS, which means that code doesn’t have to be re-written.
• Graphic and text interfaces accessed from same code-base.

User friendly and fast (Pentium optimizations),
Mandrake features many graphical interfaces (KDE, GNOME, WindowMaker, AfterStep, IceWM…) and is also compatible with applications packaged for
RedHat Linux. Mandrake won two awards: “Best Product of the Year” and “Best Linux Distribution/Server”, and was a finalist for “Linux
Distribution/Client”. Easy, for everybody!

Linux-Mandrake^TM is a friendly Linux Operating System. It provides ease of
use for both home/office and servers. It is freely available in many languages, all over the world.

CLICK ON THE PIC ABOVE TO WATCH THE LATEST SCREENSHOTS

What is Mandrake exactly?

Inside Linux Mandrake, the graphical interfaces like KDE, GNOME, AfterStep, WindowMaker, IceWM etc. are fully integrated in a very modern
distribution, 100% compatible with application packaged for Red Hat! You don’t have to spend hours to get all those graphical interfaces to work: once
Mandrake is installed, everything works: you just have to choose which one you want to use… Linux-Mandrake also features the “Mandrake touch,”
MandrakeSoft’s signature on graphical interfaces that gives users the power to use their Linux system easily, including easy CD-Rom and floppy disk
access and easy Internet upgrades using “Mandrake Update” icon. Mandrake is easier to use than any other Linux systems: just get it, install it and
work!

Give me a reason to try it!

Don’t lose your time, don’t lose your money!

With Mandrake, you get a full graphical Linux system, 100% compatible with RedHat^tm, with a full effective Graphical Desktop Manager and
many improvements (True-Type fonts integrated, Pentium optimization for best performances, many end-user applications…).

Linux-Mandrake? It’s Easy, for Everybody!

More informations about Mandrake can be found on: http://www.linux-mandrake.com

Message to Linux developers:

All our software is released under the General Public License (GPL). You can contribute and influence Linux-Mandrake development through our
experimental Mandrake distribution called “The Cooker”. Join us!