EE Times reports that UK development company Silaria has ported a version of Lineo’s embedded Linux to its Proteus 3 processor.

From LinuxWorld: “The shell is gone, and that’s good. Load times
are much improved. That’s good, too. But my
gtop system monitor shows that memory consumption is still high, ranging from 55 megabytes with only the word
processor loaded to 73 megabytes with the word processor, spreadsheet, drawing tool, presentation tool, and HTML
editor running. Those numbers are higher than I noted in SO 5.2. Sun is making progress, but it looks like two steps
forward, one step back.”

Catch up on the all the latest news from the Debian Hurd mailing list in this report, posted by Paul Emsley at kt.zork.net. This week: Richard Stallman drops by to remind everyone that “GNU/” are the first four characters in the name of any Linux distribution, boot problems with an AMD 400MHz K6 system, and a discussion about replacing serverboot pager legacy interface.

Commentary from scotfinnie.com: “What about Linux? Some hail open-source software development as the answer. But I have some doubts about that. It’s essentially software by committee, and there’s no incentive for
participants to react quickly to changing market demands. The Linux open-source movement seems to be something of a contradiction, but “react quickly” is still the operative phrase. I’m hopeful
the Linux community can create a truly Windows-competitive desktop OS. It has made some strides but isn’t there yet. We’ll have to wait and see.”

Linus announced kernel prepatch 2.4.11-pre4; download from your favorite mirror site. Changelog:

Continued merging from various sources..

                                   Linus

                   ----

                   pre4:
                    - Al Viro: separate out superblocks and FS namespaces: fs/super.c father=
                   s
                      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

Reported at The Register :”Senior IBM server executives were horrified to learn yesterday that W3C standards
may not in the future be royalty-free. Internet standards and Linux have helped IBM
widen its appeal in recent years, and the company has pledged $1 billion on
developing and marketing Linux. But its continued investment depends on good will
from the Linux developer community, and that may well be imperilled by its
preference of RAND to royalty-free for the most fundamental WWW standards.

IBM holds over 34,000 patents and gains over $1 billion in royalties annually from
its patent portfolio.”

National Post: “Microsoft Corp.’s Windows XP software has yet to provide an expected boost to
personal-computer sales, and demand may continue to lag for several months in light of last month’s
terrorist attacks in the United States, investors and executives said yesterday.

“It certainly hasn’t had a huge pop in PC sales,” Carly Fiorina, chief executive of Hewlett-Packard Co.,
said this week. “Before Sept. 11, we had been talking about a more subdued back-to-school season and
I think that’s clearly the case now.””

“The lights are going out all over the Internet,” said one person quoted in this San Francisco Chronicle story about Internet sites removing information that might be of potential use to terrorists, in the wake of the Sept. 11 air attacks. Government sites have yanked down information ranging from office maps to contingency plans for chemical attacks, news that hardly comes as a surprise. But even independent government watchdog sites like the Project on Government Secrecy have removed information, including their own maps of CIA facilities and pictures of foreign nuclear power plants. Most of this information is still freely available in libraries and government reading rooms, by the way, and some find the Internet data-removal obsession to be lacking in common sense. Said another subject: “It didn’t take a supersecret map for terrorists to find the World Trade Center.”

Help Net Security offers a review of Marcel Gagne’s new book Linux system administration – A user’s guide. Bottom line: “A fine book on system administration, with more information than you’ll
likely ever need, serves also as a great pointer and reference guide. However, don’t
expect that it will guide you by your hand for every single problem you may encounter.
No such book exists. But, it will provide you with some clues on what to do.”

Reported at BBC News: “A national day of action is being held on 6 October to raise
awareness about the copy-protected CDs that are starting to
appear in record shops across the UK.

The CDs are just one method that record companies are
experimenting with in their ongoing attempts to stamp out piracy.

The protests are being organised because activists say that not
enough is being done to warn consumers about the restrictions the
CDs place on their ability to enjoy music.”