From Slashdot: “Finally some good news on the patent font. A US district court
tossed out most of Rambus’ patent infingement claims against Infineon. The judge also
states that even if Infineon has infringed on the remaining patents, they didn’t do so
willfully.”

An Interactive Week story talks about how Linux will soon give “the giants in handheld computer software,” meaning Palm and Microsoft, some competition. The story mentions Sharp and Agenda Computing’s handheld projects.

ZDNet has a story on Linux handhelds, mentioning upcoming products from Royal/Olivetti, Sharp, G.Mate, and of course, Agenda Computing. The obligatory quote from a Microsoft employee is a surprisingly mild “the jury is still out on them.” Palm, the leader in handheld organizers, is a little more concerned about Linux entering its domain, citing Sharp as a major competitor with “deep pockets.”

In a press release posted at LWN.net Jason Haas cites burnout as the reason he’s leaving the project. “Co-founder of popular Linux distribution maker is ‘retiring from the
computer world.’ In a stunning announcement, LinuxPPC co-founder Jason Haas has announced
that he is resigning from LinuxPPC Inc. The company makes a popular Linux
distribution for Apple Power Macintosh and other PowerPC-based computers.” Also, Slashdotters discuss the development.

– by Tina Gasperson –
If you haven’t downloaded and installed Mandrake 8.0 yet, you may not be aware
of Mandrake Campus, MandrakeSoft’s free (and Open Source) online repository of
Linux courses and quizzes.Users of Mandrake 8.0 will notice a link to MandrakeCampus on their desktops.
All it takes is a simple sign-up process to get started with the courses,
which are sorted by topics: basic tools, desktop administration, server
installation, and “server services,” which includes instructions on file
server, Web server, and electronic mail setup. Each course is broken down into
modules (each with its own quiz), and each module is further broken down into
sub-modules.

On the welcome screen, I noticed that the last site update was February 16,
2001, after having been updated previously on February 7 — makes me think that
nobody’s been minding the shop for almost two months. It is never good PR to
give the impression (even if that impression is incorrect) that site updates
and maintenance have lapsed.

I decided to start my test of the Mandrake Campus site within the basic
tools course. Within basic tools are these modules:

• basic concepts
  free software
  strengths of GNU/Linux
• administration basics
  vi
  common administration tasks
  system update
  service management
• advanced shell
  command line
  bash

Each sub-module contains several pages of explanation of terms and some examples. It’s similar to reading a text book online — which could be very valuable, except that there are no exercises. Most people benefit from the kinestheticity of reading the information and then performing the exercise.

After you’re done reading, you take the quiz and your score is stored on the site. You can go back and take the quiz as many times as you like to improve your score — but don’t be lame and look at the answers until you’re really through. I took the quiz on the advanced shell module. It was only four questions long, not thorough enough to truly test knowledge (yet, what test actually determines true knowledge?), but fun nevertheless. Perhaps the quizzes should be a bit longer (but not too long).

As with other Open Source projects, the Mandrake Campus is looking for people to contribute courses and documentation. KDE folks recently put out a notice that the campus needs people with KOffice know-how to write up course material. Anyone who wants to contribute should contact chris@mandrakesoft.com.

NewsForge editors read and respond to comments posted on our discussion page.

Wired: “Companies whose websites have been hacked are notoriously shy when it comes to reporting attacks, an FBI official complains at a cybercrime conference. Ryan Sager and Declan McCullagh report from Washington.”

PRNewswire: “SGI (NYSE: SGI) today
announced the production release of XFS(TM) 1.0 for Linux(R), the high-end SGI
journaled filesystem software, and code availability of Linux FailSafe(TM)
clustering plug-ins.”

Sensei writes: “For those who are currently using Linux and are curious about Solaris 8, I can tell you since I use both daily that there have been some changes to Solaris that, IMHO, make it a much easier transition for us penguins. Here’s a short intro to help the newbies feel more confident in sinking their teeth into this robust version of UNIX… ENJOY! From LinuxNewbie.org.“

Alan Cox announces that Linux 2.4.4-ac2 is available. It’s at ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/2.4/, and intermediate diffs are available from http://www.bzimage.org.

2.4.4-ac2
o Remove some spurious whitespace differences
between trees (me)
o Make the VIA timer reload check test avoid
tripping on a timer as it rolls back to zero (me)
o Drop dasdfmt man page changes (dos ^M noise)
(me)
o Drop experimental iee1284 pnp module loading (me)
o Revert pcnet32 chance causing compile errors (me)
o Remove wrong __init in sunhme (Dave Miller)
o Fix overlarge udely in aironet4500 (Arjan van de Ven)
o Remove non existant parameter from aironet4500 (Keith Owens)
o Kill duplicate aic7xxx include (Andrzej Krzysztofowicz)
o Fix pci2220i scsi compile bug (Matt Domsch)
o Fix module exception race on Alpha (Andrea Arcangeli)
o Disable broken large vmalloc support on Alpha (Andrea Arcangeli)
o Remove dead ia64 config entries (Steven Cole)
o Add kbuild list info to MAINTAINERS (Steven Cole)
o linux appletalk list has moved (Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo)
o Revert wrong mount changes in 2.4.4 (Andries Brouwer)
o Revert drivers/scsi/scsi.c change in 2.4.4 (me)
that subtly broke about 15 drivers
o Fix typo in slab.h (Pavel Machek)
o More correct child favouring fork behaviour (Peter Österlund)
o Only apply pci fixups if there is a VIA 686B (Charl Botha)
o Fix GDT padding error introduced by PnPBIOS (Brian Gerst)
support
o Fix UML build without CONFIG_PT_PROXY (Jeff Dike)
o dmfe wasnt calling dev_alloc_skb (Tobias Ringstrom)
o Further Configure.help fixups (Steven Cole)
o Move pci_enable_device earlier in trident (Marcus Meissner)

2.4.4-ac1
o Merge with Linus 2.4.4
| This wasnt entirely trivial so this is the only
| stuff in this patch
| The following stuff has been switched to the Linus branch
| in the merge: uhci, dcache atomicity, raw I/O

CNET: “Web designers have long
dinged sites that offer bells and
whistles to no purpose, but
lately they’ve begun to target
the technology behind those
perceived atrocities as well:
Flash.”