Network World Fusion has a short item. “Via Technologies Wednesday announced that
a U.S. company, Rauch Medien, is offering
lower power Web servers based on its C3
microprocessor.
The GreenServ comes with up to 60G bytes of hard-disk space and up to 1G
byte of RAM, and comes installed with Linux, Free BSD or Windows 2000.”

ZDNet UK reports on new servers from the two companies. Also, Compaq expanded its TaskSmart line of server appliances. The TaskSmart W line, which
uses the Linux operating system, is used for hosting Web pages.

It’s at LWN.net. Among the items: “JoeSNMP 0.2.6 Released:

Following the identification of several problems related to SNMP
data collection, the fixes are in, tested, and the new JoeSNMP has
been released.”

From a press release at Sandia.gov: A computer program that enables a collection of
off-the-shelf desktop computers to rank among the world’s fastest
supercomputers has been released to the public by Sandia National
Laboratories. The program, called Cplant system software, dramatically
extends the capability of researchers to modularly assemble large blocks of
off-the-shelf computer components.

The rationale behind this open-source release is to allow researchers free
access to the body of research and development that created the most
scalable, Linux-based, off-the-shelf computer available, says Sandia
manager Neil Pundit.

LinuxPlanet has a column about the differences in Linux distributions and the confusion that can cause. “Now incompatibilities are being introduced hand over fist, as distributions fight for a bigger and bigger
piece of a diminishing pie, until one day one will own all of nothing. Does this do anything useful for the
distributions, users, Linux, anybody? Well, no.”

Reuters reports on Sharp’s plans to sell its Zaurus multimedia PDAs, using Linux and Java, in the United States in October and in Europe early next year.

From Canada Newswire: CAE today announced it has signed two contracts
with ALSTOM (Switzerland) Ltd. to develop first-of-a-kind simulators for two
different Gas Turbine-based (GT-based) power plant configurations. Already an
established world leader in the supply of power plant simulators, CAE enters
the growing market for GT powered plants with these two orders valued at
approximately C$3.5 million.
These simulators will use the Linux operating system – CAE’s latest
alternative to the Unix and Windows NT operating systems for power plant
simulators.

Imagine our surprise when this press release from PRNewsWire landed in our submissions bin: “Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) today
announced it will work with Corel Corp. to build a shared source
implementation of the C# programming language and common language
infrastructure (CLI) specifications that it submitted to ECMA in October 2000.
Designed to be used for academic, research, debugging and learning purposes,
this implementation will run on FreeBSD and Microsoft(R) Windows(R) and will
be published as source code under Microsoft’s Shared Source licensing
framework.”

“The first hint that all was not well came at about 2 a.m. on Saturday, US eastern time, in the form of slow-loading
pages. By 7 a.m. it was obvious that this was not a typical, easily-fixed, reboot-the-database problem. The network
operations people were paged, but did not respond. Uh-oh.” More at Slashdot.

– by Tina Gasperson –
Jacques Le Marois, MandrakeSoft co-founder and CEO, has confirmed the authenticity of an IPO memorandum leaked to European Linux site LinuxFrench.net. The memo was originally distributed to MandrakeSoft’s employees and shareholders and was not intended for public consumption.The letter begins by explaining the reasons behind the French Linux distribution’s decision to go public:

"1. Why are we conducting an IPO?

“MandrakeSoft has three choices to choose from for the future: be profitable right now; be
profitable in the short term; be profitable in the long term. The first option wouldn’t require any
additional external investments, but would reduce the potential of Mandrakesoft in the Linux and
operating systems arena. The second option would require a small amount of fund raising, yet
maintain our capability to grow. The last option would require a large amount of money be
raised, but the financial markets are no longer interested in companies that only have long-term
profitability plans.

“So we have decided to pursue the middle-solution, which is to be profitable in the short term.
We feel this is the best approach as it is more realistic and involves the least amount of risk. We
will reach profitability in the near future while keeping alive our great growth potential. We
already have all the tools needed to succeed — a strong user base, a well-known product,
and a team already in place. This solution also fits best with our recent refocus around Linux
businesses.”

MandrakeSoft will make a special stock offering of 10% of the IPO release available to project contributors, stating, “MandrakeSoft’s success is largely due to our community of users and contributors; therefore, we will present our main contributors a special offer … These people will be offered the option to purchase stock as privileged investors.”

According to the memorandum, the special 10% for contributors will not be available to U.S. residents and others outside of the European Union because of “regulatory issues” and the inability to “solicit foreign individual investors without filing multiple papers.” However, U.S. residents and others are welcome to participate in the open market portion of the IPO.

MandrakeSoft is planning a rapid timetable to the IPO date, which is expected sometime in the second half of July. The full text of the leaked memo is available here at LinuxFrench.net.