From ComputerWire via The Register: “Leading Linux distributor Red Hat Inc expects revenue to grow at least 26% to between $99.5m and $101m in the current financial year and anticipates an operating loss of $3m to $4m for the year, with the company breaking even at that level in the third quarter.”

Salon.com reports on former Netscape chief executive James Barksdale saying “Microsoft still chills the technology industry years after the software giant was charged with antitrust violations. Barksdale, now a venture capitalist, said Microsoft’s many tentacles scare off investors in potential competitors.”

ActiveState – Programming for the people writes: “The Perl Dev Kit gives Perl developers the tools they need for rapid development and delivery of Perl applications. Key features include PerlApp, to create ready-to-run applications for HP/UX, Linux, Solaris, and Windows; the Visual Debugger, with remote debugging capabilities; and PerlNET, which makes it possible to build .NET components using Perl. The Perl Dev Kit can also be used to create stand alone ActiveX controls, Windows services, and Microsoft MSI
installation files.”

IDG.net reports on Sun’s efforts to make moeny on StarOffice. “StarOffice 6.0 will come with enhanced features and added support, but at a price, as Sun aims to attract a wider audience, such as businesses, towards the office-productivity software suite. A less sophisticated version of the product will still be available for free download from OpenOffice.org, the open-source community sponsored by Sun, the company announced Tuesday.”

– By Grant Gross –

Tucked into one corner of the FOSE technology-for-government trade show was a little booth drawing a crowd that rivaled the numbers at all but the largest exhibit monstrosities from companies like Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Gateway.

The NoVaLUG booth — the FOSE home for the Linux User Group that serves Northern Virginia –was doing brisk business passing out Linux literature, distributions on CDs and answering questions Wednesday, and there always seemed to be 10 or 15 people crowded around. You’d be hard pressed to believe there’s technology recession judging by the huge exhibits in the center of the trade show floor — the number of exhibitors are up by nearly 15% from last year, too — but the NoVaLUG crowd was succeeding with an approach more grassroots than flash.

“We try to have a few words with everyone before we reward them with a distribution,” said Tim Bogart, the high-energy coordinator of the NoVaLUG booth. “This is Linux advocacy. Left it its own devices, it would be in the hands of corporate America. It’d be left to IBM and HP and people who were latecomers to the party.”

About 20 volunteers, some from DCLUG as well, signed up to work the booth at the three-day FOSE, which ends today. The group, dressed in T-shirts and polos among the suit-and-tie crowd, had several Linux-related toys at the booth, including a projector showing NoVaLUG scenes from the show. The crew of volunteers, many of whom took time off from work to staff the booth, were handing out copies of Linux.com’s introduction to Linux and business card-sized literature from Tux.org, with sayings such as, “No, it does not crash. Yes, it does have Solitaire,” and “World Domination. Fast. We’ll settle for 5% but they’re going to be very happy with our software.”

During the three days, the group was also planning on handing out about 1,000 Linux CD sets, most burned by NoVaLUG volunteers and branded as “distributed by DC Metro Area Linux Users Groups and sponsored by FOSE.” Among the CDs being distributed:

• A one-disk Mandrake 8.1 provided by MandrakeSoft, with a NoVaLUG burned CD with Mandrake updates current through March 17.
• A one-disk and a two-disk “Red Hat-like” distribution, burned by LUG volunteers and labeled “GNU/Linux RPM based distribution version R7.2” to avoid Red Hat trademark issues.
• A burned CD of Knoppix Linux, a 700MB Linux distribution, including KDE and OpenOffice, on one bootable CD.

The booth volunteers were giving Knoppix to those people who came up and asked, “What is Linux?”

“You push the big red button twice, once to turn the machine off and once to turn it on, and you can test Linux without having to rewrite anything on your harddrive,” Bogart said of Knoppix. “Once they realize they can test drive it without messing with their hard drive, their eyes twinkle. Some of these people think that if it ends in X, it must be hard to use. I say, ‘No, you’ve been listening to the FUD.’ “

Pete Nuwayser, a booth volunteer, said the questions ranged from those basic questions to advanced administrator queries. A common question is, “Where is Linux used?”

“I tell them if they’ve used Google, they’ve used a Linux-powered search engine,” Nuwayser said.

Added Bogart: “The point is, you don’t have to go find Linux, it’ll find you. It’ll find you in the form of a Web site or an embedded system. You are a Linux user whether you know it or not.”

This is the third year of NoVaLUG at FOSE, and Bogart said the group tries to surprise the trade show organizers with something new every year. Bill Howell, general manager of the trade show group for show organizer Post Newsweek Tech Media, said NoVaLUG is an important piece of FOSE because it adds more community flavor to a show that bills itself as a huge community event.

“FOSE is a place where NoVaLUG can get its message out, can check out the competition and can extend its reach,” Howell said. “Three years ago, we didn’t know how to spell Linux, and they came to our office and told us why Linux was important and why NoVaLug was important.”

Elsewhere at the show, it’s still difficult to find Linux, even though there’s growing use of Linux and Open Source software at places like the U.S. Census Bureau. Part of the huge Hewlett-Packard booth was branded with “Linux at HP” signs, and today, at 2:15 p.m., there’s a panel discussion about the National Security Agency’s SELinux project.

Anonymous Reader writes, “In this whitepaper on Linux Scheduler Latency, Clark Williams of Red Hat Inc. compares the performance of two popular ways to improve kernel Linux preemption latency — the preemption patch pioneered by MontaVista and the low-latency patch pioneered by Ingo Molnar — and discovers that the best approach might be a combination of both.”

http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT8906594941. html.

On Monday, March 25th, Richard Stallman will speak at Cambridge University. The title: “Software patents, obstacles to software development.” Here’s a summary:

“Software patents are patents on software ideas. A typical computer program
today combined many software ideas, just as a symphony combines many musical
ideas. Inevitably most of them have to be old ideas. Software patents mean
that every design decision brings a risk of getting sued.”

For more information, email rmstalk@fipr.org

Alan Cox: “This is versus pre3 to keep the change set size down. This adds the fun
stuff. If you want a peaceful life and a production -ac system please
stick at 2.4.18-ac3 or 2.4.19pre3-ac4. IDE and large NFS changes do not
in general make for stability first time around.”

Download: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/testing/patch-2.4.19-pre4.gz
[+ indicates stuff that went to Marcelo, o stuff that has not,
 * indicates stuff that is merged in mainstream now, X stuff that proved
   bad and was dropped out]

Linux 2.4.19pre3-ac5
o	Further IDE updates				(Andre Hedrick)
o	Reduce ide tape debug noise			(Alfredo Sanjuán)
o	Sync devices on final close not each close	(Miquel van Smoorenburg)
o	Make max busses/irqs dynamic on x86		(James Cleverdon)
	| Needed for big IBM boxen
o	Remove exp_find in NFS (never used)		(Al Viro)
o	Fix read locking on NFS export_table		(Erik Habbinga)
o	Fix possible NFS error path mnt/dentry leak	(Al Viro)
o	Use MKDEV macro in NFS device create		(GOTO Masanori)
o	Clean up stale fh stats				(Trond Myklebust)
o	Tidy nfsd_lookup				(Al Viro)
o	nfsd_setattr fixes				(Trond Myklebust)
o	Tidy up nfsd vfs calls				(Trond Myklebust)
o	Clean up nfsd syscall interface			(Trond Myklebust)
o	Fix fat NFS handle interfaces			(Trond Myklebust)
o	Tidy up export list handling for NFS		(Al Viro)
o	Use seq_file for NFS exports proc file		(Al Viro)
o	Support for deviceless file system exports	(Steven Whitehouse)
o	Remove big kernel lock use for most of nfsd	(Trond Myklebust)
o	Convert sunrpc code to use generic linux lists	(Trond Myklebust)
o	Tidy up svc_sock NFS locking on SMP		(Trond Myklebust)
o	Improve tcp error/close handling		(Trond Myklebust)
o	Close down idle NFS tcp sockets			(Trond Myklebust)
o	NFS TCP fixes for buffer space tracking		(Trond Myklebust)
o	Handle TCP RPC service flooding			(Trond Myklebust)
o	Enable NFS over TCP via config options		(Trond Myklebust)

Dre writes: “As reported on the dot, on this, the first day of us Northerners’ Season of Love, the KDE Project has released KDE 3.0RC3, the final release candidate for KDE 3. Having greatly benefitted from a week-long hacking session to stabilize and mature KDE 3, this release is very solid and stable and, better yet, boasts a very noticeable performance increase over KDE 2, particularly with Konqueror. The release can be downloaded through KDE’s load-balancing mirror system. Due to an expedited schedule – KDE 3 is scheduled to be tagged in the next few days – this release is being announced before all binary packages have been uploaded. Please help us find any elusive showstopper bugs before Friday, I’m sure you will enjoy the experience of using this release!”

The word is out that Mandrake Linux 8.2 is now available for download
and pre-order. MandrakeStore already has several pre-order specials for
both the 8.2 PowerPack and ProSuite Editions. Place your order now and
be among the first to receive the new release.

Just some of the new features of Mandrake Linux 8.2 include:

* Updated graphical installer with improved rescue mode, encrypted
  filesystem, security updates
* Automatic detection of "hot-plug" devices
* Advanced printer and scanner handling
* Kernel 2.4.18
* Improved Firewire support
* Support for USB2, ECC memory, i830 DRM, ATA133, Geforce3
* XFree86 4.2 provides 3D acceleration for many video cards previously
  only supported in 3.3.6
* glibc 2.2.4
* and lots more

You'll also enjoy KDE 2.2.2 and GNOME 1.4.1. KDE includes a new print
system which has been integrated with PrinterDrake, and GNOME includes
Evolution to closely match the features and look of MS-Outlook.

Read the official announcement here:
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/82announce.php

Discover the new features:
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/82.php3

Place your order today at MandrakeStore.
http://www.MandrakeStore.com

Mandrake Club members are entitled to download proprietary drivers and
commercial software for 8.2
http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/club/