What’s with the job cuts and new business partnerships at Mission Critical Linux? CEO Robert Tumanic told a News.com reporter that no matter what anyone else says, the company isn’t being fattened up (or should that be slimmed down?) for sale. Sources, however, say that Red Hat Linux is close to buying the company.

Here’s more on that Sun letter, in a report posted at News.com: “Sun Microsystems has turned up the volume in its long-running battle with Microsoft over
Java.

In full-page ads in The New York Times, San Jose Mercury News and The Wall Street Journal on
Thursday, Sun called on consumers “to demand that Microsoft include the Java platform in their
XP operating system.” Sun also said consumers should demand “PC vendors like Dell, Compaq,
Gateway, IBM and HP (Hewlett-Packard) include the Java platform in their applications.””

“Today, Bynari, Inc. announced the release of its full-production version of Insight GroupWare.
Bynari’s success on the IBM S/390 and zSeries platforms led the development team to engineer a client/server solution for
IBM xSeries line of servers. Spillover from the Company’s marketing efforts with Linux on the mainframe has opened new
markets for lower-end and midrange platforms.” Press release at Enterprise Linux Today.

“Today, Bynari, Inc. announced the release of its full-production version of Insight GroupWare.
Bynari’s success on the IBM S/390 and zSeries platforms led the development team to engineer a client/server solution for
IBM xSeries line of servers. Spillover from the Company’s marketing efforts with Linux on the mainframe has opened new
markets for lower-end and midrange platforms.” Press release at Enterprise Linux

Anonymous Reader writes “This week, advisories were released for xmcd, tomcat, squid, zope, FreeBSD
kernel, openldap, xloadimage, and kerberos. The vendors include Caldera,
Debian, FreeBSD, and Red Hat and SuSE:
http://www.linuxsecurity.com/articles/forums_artic le-3475.html“

Mathias Bogaert writes “An open letter to the Java developer community.

Worth the read!.” Indeed: The letter addresses Microsoft’s decision to remove Java from Windows XP, and urges readers not to settle for software that isn’t open.

Joe Barr writes “http://www.linuxworld.com/site-stories/2001/0809.k ylix.html
If an old dweeb like me can whip up a Linux app with Kylix, anybody can.”

1984 all over again — no, not the book, the breakup of the Bell System in the United States. News.com: “The idea of a Bell breakup has become a rallying point for rivals and critics of the giants, who
allege that Verizon Communications, SBC Communications, BellSouth and Qwest Communications
International have abused their control of the networks.

With a bill introduced in
Congress last week, new fuel
is being added to the breakup
fire. Few expect the measure
to pass this year, as it has
become part of a tense
congressional tug-of-war
between Bell allies and
enemies. But it is shining a
light on the ongoing criticism
of some of the most powerful
players in the communications
business.”

An announcement, from the JBLinux Web site: “JBLinux 2.2 has now been released! The 2.1 release never made it to the public as
some minor bugs were discovered just before the planned release. New in this release
is lots of updates for both workstations and servers. Support for the jfs filesystem has
been included in the installer – which means that currently ext2, jfs, reiserfs and xfs are
supported for installation. Software RAID support has also been included in the installer,
supporting Linear RAID, RAID-0, RAID-1, RAID-4 and RAID-5. “Lots of bugfixes on the
installer have also been made, most noticably a serious bug in the 2.0 installer has
been fixed, which resulted in no CDROMs being found on some hardware
configurations. The 2.2 release comes with kernel 2.4.7, XFree86 4.1.0, the latest
Ximian GNOME, KDE 2.1.1 (updated packages for KDE 2.2 will be released as soon as
it’s ready), Mozilla 0.9.3, Galeon 0.12pre1, the latest Wine release, Evolution 0.12,
Abiword 0.9, and lots of more goodies. The distribution now comes on two CD-ROMs,
where the first one is the installation CD-ROM and second is called Contrib & Extras,
where useful additional software has been put, software that not necessarily everyone
needs – like drivers for nVidia and 3dfx cards, CUPS, additional fonts, KDE i18n
language packages, Mozilla plugins (java and flash), Netscape 4.x, etc). For complete
list of changes, please see the full ChangeLog available here. Note that there has been
discovered a small bug in the installer when using ext2 as the root filesystem, please
see ‘updates’ at the ftp site for more information.”

Andrea Arangeli releases Linux 2.4.8pre8aa1. Changelog below.

                 Only in 2.4.8pre8aa1: 00_alpha-iommu_fixup-1

                         Really reserve the last mbytes of 32bit pci space for cypress magics.

                 Only in 2.4.8pre8aa1: 00_alpha-sg_fill-1

                         When splitting one virtual consecutive sg slot into many physically
                         consecutive slots update the dma_length of ex-leader and ex-mergers
                         correctly.

                 Only in 2.4.8pre8aa1: 00_debug-vm-lru-mm-corruption-1

                         Add debugging code, during heavy load a BUG() triggered in DEBUG_ADD_PAGE
                         in page_launder while removing a buffer from the inactive_dirty,
                         despite we cleared the inactive_dirty bitflag from the page->flags
                         some other bitflag was still set, this could be random memory corruption
                         but it could also be a race condition in the vm. Unfortunately the
                         printk in BUG() clobbered %eax so I couldn't see the contents of page->flags
                         from the bugreport so now I'm printing page->flags explicitly before
                         BUG() so next time we'll see if page->flags was just random or in which
                         other list the page was supposed to be too.

                 Only in 2.4.8pre8aa1: 00_drm_vm-1

                         Never use page->virtual directly, always use page_address(page)
                         to get that information, so we keep saving ram when highmem is
                         not selected and on 64bit archs in general.

                 Only in 2.4.8pre8aa1: 00_module-oops-1

                         Andi extracted the module_oops code from -ac, ready to be applied
                         to mainline.

                 Only in 2.4.8pre6aa1: 40_blkdev-pagecache-10
                 Only in 2.4.8pre8aa1: 40_blkdev-pagecache-11

                         Fixed trivial rejects, fsync_no_super lines.

                 Only in 2.4.8pre6aa1: 50_uml-2.4.7-3.bz2
                 Only in 2.4.8pre8aa1: 50_uml-2.4.7-5.bz2

                         Picked new -5 revision from sourceforge.

                 Andrea