Slashdotters discuss the development. There’s a press release from Freedom.net, the company’s owner. Apparently, there is “overwhelming” customer demand for Windows stuff.

– by Tina Gasperson –
VMWare is planning to give away 1,000 copies of the Windows version of its Virtual Machine Workstation product at the upcoming Microsoft Tech Ed conference in Atlanta, and while the retail Workstation package includes two pre-installed Linux distributions, the Microsoft-only giveaways have had a tux-ectomy, even though a VMware representative originally said the CDs would include SuSE and Turbolinux.
VMWare company representatives have now stated that the company will not distribute SuSE and Turbolinux packaged with the special Microsoft Tech Ed conference version of the Workstation 2.0 product, adding that the conference attendees are Microsoft users and wouldn’t be interested in virtual machines with Linux pre-installed. Earlier, company officials said Linux would be included.

Last month, NewsForge reported that members of the Suncoast Linux Users group were chased off by building management for handing out Linux CDs and magazines in front of the conference building. Microsoft employees told the SLUG members that they couldn’t “pass out free software” at the event.

In an ironic twist, Linux and Open Source community supporter VMWare first said it would give Linux to Microsoft .NET developers and other conference attendees, apparently with Microsoft’s blessings, on June 17 at the MS Tech Ed conference. Anyone who shows up at the booth at 6 p.m. that day is free to snag one of 1,000 copies of the software that allows a user to run multiple operating systems without partitioning or dual-booting.

According to a press release dated June 15, VMWare says its Workstation “can be a critical tool in the development kit of .NET developers.” VMWare is attending the conference, it says, in order to demonstrate the abilities of the Workstation software to attendees.

The software giveaway is a “special edition” of the Workstation product for Windows normally sold at the VMWare website, but the sales department of VMWare confirmed that it does include SuSE Linux and TurboLinux.

VMWare is a well-known Open Source supporter. The company sponsors several Linux Users Groups, donates VMware products, and has contributed code to Samba, Wine, XFree86, KDE, and other projects.

The company claims three Operating System partners: Microsoft, SuSE, and Turbolinux. While it has an OEM agreement with MS to distribute several Microsoft operating systems with VMware,the company also includes virtual machines with pre-installed SuSE and Turbolinux in the same package, which, it says, “removes a significant barrier to many users getting started” with either of the two distributions.

Microsoft’s public relations department said it was not aware of VMWare’s plans.

PCWorld: “Rambus expects to push RDRAM chips beyond existing frequencies of 800 MHz to 1 GHz and faster in the next few years, and
is preparing in-line memory that supports throughput of up to 9.6 gigabytes per second within four years.

Company officials offered a peek at the Rambus road map this week in a briefing in Taipei, Taiwan.”

Wired: “Getting e-mail on your mobile is cool, huh? Well, Japan’s i-mode users who opened a post containing malicious code recently were unable to prevent making a slew of emergency calls.”

The Register: “Users of MS Exchange 5.5 or Exchange 2K with OWA (Outlook Web Access)
implemented — including those 2K users who patched their systems last week —
need to install an updated patch as soon as possible because the one issued
earlier for Exchange 2K contains outdated files, and the vulnerability in 5.5 went
unnoticed at first.”

Wired: ZDNet “has just launched ExtremeTech.com. It’s a direct attempt to take on techie sites like AnandTech and Tom’s Hardware Guide — popular because they are peer-level sites. Will geeks accept the corporate approach?”

OReillynet.com: “Log files collect data and grow in size. If you don’t tend them, they will fill up all available disk space. Michael Lucas explains how to easily manage log files with newsyslog.”

FairfaxIT: “A 16 year old computer hacker illegally used software to last year cripple major internet sites, including CNN and Yahoo!, witnesses told a sentencing hearing in Canada today.”

SecurityFocus.com: “Due to a flaw in the handling of specially crafted ad hoc queries, it is possible for a logged in user
to utilize the ad hoc query in such a way that the use of the system administrator’s cached
connection would be invoked rather than that of the user. This would enable the user to access the
database with administrative privileges.”

Slashdot links to a Python mailing list post about the “first GPL compatible release in a long time.” The release is actually a downgrade from 2.1, so unless you really need something GPL friendly, don’t do it.