From eWEEK (on Yahoo News): “StarOffice has the interface familiarity and file
format compatibility that will enable it to peacefully coexist with Microsoft Office.
And its cross-platform support and ingenious use of XML (Extensible Markup
Language) will pay dividends in future, more wide-scale deployments.

New features aside, the price of StarOffice-free-should be enough to give
pause to sites weighing their software options in the context of Microsoft’s
potentially costly and entangling new licensing schemes.”

LinuxWorld: “n this series, we show how little you need to spend to outfit your
organization — big or small — with hardware some might consider
worthless, while giving away nothing in utility, speed, reliability, ease
of administration or use. Sound impossible? It’s not!” Part 4 of an ongoing series.

Linux 2.4.11-pre6 is out; changelog below; download from your preferred mirror site.

                   pre6:
                    - various: fix some module exports uncovered by stricter error checking
                    - Urban Widmark: make smbfs use same error define names as samba and win32
                    - Greg KH: USB update
                    - Tom Rini: MPC8xx ppc update
                    - Matthew Wilcox: rd.c page cache flushing fix
                    - Richard Gooch: devfs race fix: rwsem for symlinks
                    - Bj?rn Wesen: Cris arch update
                    - Nikita Danilov: reiserfs cleanup
                    - Tim Waugh: parport update
                    - Peter Rival: update alpha SMP bootup to match wait_init_idle fixes
                    - Trond Myklebust: lockd/grace period fix

                   pre5:
                    - Keith Owens: module exporting error checking
                    - Greg KH: USB update
                    - Paul Mackerras: clean up wait_init_idle(), ppc prefetch macros
                    - Jan Kara: quota fixes
                    - Abraham vd Merwe: agpgart support for Intel 830M
                    - Jakub Jelinek: ELF loader cleanups
                    - Al Viro: more cleanups
                    - David Miller: sparc64 fix, netfilter fixes
                    - me: tweak resurrected oom handling

                   pre4:
                    - Al Viro: separate out superblocks and FS namespaces: fs/super.c fathers
                      fs/namespace.c
                    - David Woodhouse: large MTD and JFFS[2] update
                    - Marcelo Tosatti: resurrect oom handling
                    - Hugh Dickins: add_to_swap_cache racefix cleanup
                    - Jean Tourrilhes: IrDA update
                    - Martin Bligh: support clustered logical APIC for >8 CPU x86 boxes
                    - Richard Henderson: alpha update

                   pre3:
                    - Al Viro: superblock cleanups, partition handling fixes and cleanups
                    - Ben Collins: firewire update
                    - Jeff Garzik: network driver updates
                    - Urban Widmark: smbfs updates
                    - Kai M?kisara: SCSI tape driver update
                    - various: embarrassing lack of error checking in ELF loader
                    - Neil Brown: md formatting cleanup.

                   pre2:
                    - me/Al Viro: fix bdget() oops with block device modules that don't
                      clean up after they exit
                    - Alan Cox: continued merging (drivers, license tags)
                    - David Miller: sparc update, network fixes
                    - Christoph Hellwig: work around broken drivers that add a gendisk more
                      than once
                    - Jakub Jelinek: handle more ELF loading special cases
                    - Trond Myklebust: NFS client and lockd reclaimer cleanups/fixes
                    - Greg KH: USB updates
                    - Mikael Pettersson: sparate out local APIC / IO-APIC config options

                   pre1:
                    - Chris Mason: fix ppp race conditions
                    - me: buffers-in-pagecache coherency, buffer.c cleanups
                    - Al Viro: block device cleanups/fixes
                    - Anton Altaparmakov: NTFS 1.1.20 update
                    - Andrea Arcangeli: VM tweaks

SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH, Oct. 9, 2001 — Linux NetworX, a provider of powerful and easy-to-manage cluster computing solutions, announced today that BioCryst Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: BCRX) is now using a Linux NetworX Evolocity cluster to aid in creating pharmaceuticals for the treatment of human disease and illness such as influenza and hepatitis C.

Implementing an innovative drug discovery approach, scientists at BioCryst create synthetic small-molecule inhibitors, atom by atom, to bind with specific disease-causing proteins or targets. By identifying the target protein in advance and by discovering the chemical and molecular structure of the protein, scientists believe it is possible to design a more optimal drug to interact with the protein.

?The Evolocity system from Linux NetworX speeds the rate at which BioCryst scientists are able to design and develop comprehensive compound libraries and databases of potential targets for their drug discovery efforts,? said Shane Hiett, director of information technology for BioCryst. “Not only does the Linux NetworX cluster technology fit our needs, but the ClusterWorX® management software helps us gain control of cluster administration and ensure cluster health.?

The massive amount of data computation inherent in drug design typically requires the power of a supercomputer-class system. Cluster technology is a method of linking multiple computers, or compute nodes, together to form a powerful, unified system. Linux NetworX clusters can match the performance of traditional supercomputers for a fraction of the cost.

BioCryst?s new Evolocity cluster includes 32 Pentium III 933 MHz processors, with 16 GB of memory and a 10/100 Ethernet network. Linux NetworX configured the cluster to handle complex computer modeling applications, such as X-ray crystallography and combinatorial chemistry. BioCryst utilizes the Linux NetworX ClusterWorX management software and signed an on-going service agreement as well.

?Linux NetworX is an excellent choice for biotechnology organizations demanding powerful and reliable high performance computing Linux clusters,? said Clark Roundy, vice president of marketing for Linux NetworX. ?We are pleased to see companies like BioCryst rely on our technologies to enhance their capabilities.?

About BioCryst Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Founded in 1986, BioCryst Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: BCRX) is a biopharmaceutical company focused on the development of pharmaceuticals for the treatment of viral, inflammatory/ autoimmune and cardiovascular diseases and disorders. BioCryst develops novel small-molecule pharmaceuticals using structure-based drug design, an approach to drug discovery that integrates biology, biophysics and medicinal chemistry. The Company’s most advanced drug candidate, RWJ-27021, is a neuraminidase inhibitor designed to treat and prevent viral influenza.

About Linux NetworX

Linux NetworX (www.linuxnetworx.com) brings its powerful and easy-to-manage cluster technology to those demanding high performance and high availability systems. Linux NetworX provides solutions for organizations involved in oil and gas exploration, aeronautical and chemical modeling, biotechnology research, graphics rendering and visual effects, Web serving, ISPs, ASPs, and other technological research fields. Through its innovative Evolocity hardware, ICE? cluster management tools and professional service and support, Linux NetworX provides end-to-end clustering solutions. To date, the company has built some of the largest cluster systems in the world, and boasts numerous Fortune 500 customers.

Linux is a registered trademark owned by Linus Torvalds. All other products, services and companies are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

CONTACT
Brad Rutledge
Linux NetworX
801-562-1010 ext. 218
brutledge@linuxnetworx.com

Posted at LinuxDevices: “The MyLinux Pocket Linux Workstation Project, a 100% Open Source Project sponsored by Arizona
Cooperative Power, LLC, is accepting Advanced Purchase Orders for its Wide Beta Version MyLinux
Pocket Linux Workstation (PLW). The PLW is a 100% Open Source, custom embedded Linux platform
that is small enough to fit in your pocket and yet powerful enough to serve as your workstation.”

Here’s what PC World NZ author Geoff Palmer wrote, after ditching Windows and using nothing but Linux (“cold turkey”) for a month: “In its heart of hearts I believe Microsoft realises the inevitable. It’s fighting hard – who wouldn’t? – but at the end of the day it’s
ultimately doomed. That’s why it’s pushing .NET and Passport and using XP as a sales platform. Its days as an operating system and
software tax-gatherer are numbered. It’s moving instead to position itself as an internet tax gatherer. Whether it makes that
transition depends to a large extent on how effectively it can demonise a cute, cuddly penguin called Tux.”

Brian Vincent has posted the 105th edition of Kernel Cousin Wine. Check out a notable quote from CodeWeaver CTO Jim Graham, a discussion on debugging MFC programs, the proper way to submit a patch to Wine, and Borland style imports. Posted at kt.zork.net.

“his summer, J.S. Wurzler Underwriting Managers
raised premiums by up to 15 percent on clients that use Microsoft’s Windows NT or Internet Information
Server. Wurzler found that system administrators who use open source systems tend to be better trained
than those who use Microsoft. Wurzler’s stance was bolstered last week when John Pescatore, Gartner’s
research director for Internet security, advised companies that were hit by both the Code Red and Nimda
worms to quit using IIS immediately and switch to more secure platforms like Apache.” Full story at Interactive Week.

“The business of open source has finally come of age. Open-source software is in the IT
marketplace alongside all the traditional, commercial, closed-source products. It is on the
menu of IT options for business, and it is being evaluated for its merits and deficiencies like
any other solution.

The revolution continues. Only now, business is definitely paying attention.” More from InfoWorld.

Eugenia writes “Tao Group is a well known name in the embedded systems market, but they became very popular when Amiga, Inc. licensed their products (the Elate OS and their Java runtime) for the next generation of Amiga, AmigaDE. The Tao Development Team answers to OSNews a series of questions regarding AmigaDE, Tao’s relationship with Amiga, Inc. and their technology they offer in general. They also clear up some misunderstanding that seem to exist regarding what AmigaDE really is, and they offer a number of cool screenshots of the platform.”