MSNBC reports on the first space tourist flight coming up in just a few days. Space agencies other than the Russian agency as well as astronauts had voiced their oppostion to the plan, but it will go ahead anyway.

KDE Dot reports that kdelibs 2.1.2 will be released ahead of schedule next week thanks to build problems with the latest version of KOffice and kdelibs 2.1.1.

Computer World reports that Singapore Air has fitted a Boeing 747 with web access for all its passengers and with that has launched satellite-connected email and web access from the sky.

Linux Journal has a short item about a publication called the Open Source Reader. “To make the task of understanding open source easier for a group of CS students, I put these key readings together into an easy to read, print and
distribute package (an 80-page PDF book), called The Open Source Reader. Now, I want to share this compilation with everyone and pay back a
little to the Open Source community I enjoy so much. To download The Open Source Reader, go to www.csaszar.org/interesting.”

An anonymous reader tells us about this story, “Linux, like the Internet, exists beyond the United States, Western Europe, and industrialized parts of Asia. The Linux OS has taken hold wherever computer users desire freedom, and wherever there is demand for inexpensive software. Latin America fits that description perfectly; current projections from IDG indicate that by 2003, 33 percent of computers in the region will be running Linux.” The

story is at ITWorld.com.

CNet has a short item saying Slashdot (like NewsForge, part of OSDN) has signed a deal with Digital Paths to get its news
and commentary distributed to handhelds.

Salon.com reviews the new Linus Torvalds autobiography, “Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary.” From the review, “If I wanted more from “Just for Fun,” perhaps it’s because my
standards are too high, after four years of covering free software
and pondering the significance of Linus Torvalds in a world
packed with greedy corporations and fierce wars over intellectual
property. Or maybe there’s a less respectable explanation. It could
be that I’m just jealous of coauthor Diamond. He got to spend a
year drinking beer and sitting in hot tubs with Linus.”

From Gartner Viewpoint via CNet: “The announcement that IBM is acquiring Informix’s database
business is less about Informix and more about IBM’s attempt
to compete head to head with Oracle.”

From kernel hacker Alan Cox. It’s at ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/2.4/. Intermediate diffs are available from http://www.bzimage.org.
Cox says, “This isn’t a proper release as such, it should just deal with most of
the compile failure/symbol failure problems.”

2.4.3-ac14
o Merge read-only veritas VxFS support (Christoph Hellwig)
o Fix missing return in broken_apm_power (Alex Riesen)
o Remove bogus rwsem hacks from usbdevice_fs.h (Alex Riesen)
o Fix umount/sync_inodes race (Al Viro)
o Make new xircom driver report when promisc used (Arjan van de Ven)
o Fix acenic PCI flag set up (Phil Copeland)
o Make nfs smart about passing max file sizes (Trond Myklebust)
o Add initrd support to User Mode Linux (Jeff Dike)
o Fix timer irq race in User Mode Linux (Jeff Dike)
o Fix UML for semaphore changes (Jeff Dike)
o Update thw W9966 parallel port camera driver (Jakob Kemi)
o Further dmfe SMP fixups (Tobias Ringstrom)
o Kernel manual pages in man9 (Tim Waugh)
o Work around BIOSes that implement E801 sizing
but don’t implement the CX/DX values part (Michael Miller)
o Fix atp driver build (Arjan van de Ven)
o Fix irda poll handling (Dag Brattli)
o Remove unused buggy pdc202xx code (Arjan van de Ven)
o Clean up iphase ATM (Arnaldo Carvalho
de Melo)
o Setup slave PDC20265 controller on fasttrak (Arjan van de Ven)
as normal IDE
o Add __init/__initdata to most net driver (Andrzej Krzysztofowicz)
version info
o SDDR09 config entry was missing (Phil Stracchino)
o Configure.help NFS updates (Andrzej Krzysztofowicz)
o Netfilter updates (Rusty Russell and co)
o Update 2.4 ipconfig to support dhcp (Eric Biederman)
o es1371 setup updates/error check/pci bits (Marcus Meissner)
o Fix buzzing ymfpci (Nick Brown)
o Update nm256 audio driver (Marcus Meissner)
o Blacklist updates (Arjan van de Ven)

From Business Wire via Wide Open News: OpenTV, the world’s leading interactive television and media solutions company,
today announced an expansion of its technology roadmap — the availability of its core technology products tied to the
Linux operating system. OpenTV’s technology group announced their commitment to make available the company’s key
embedded products to integrate with the Linux operating system, including OpenTV’s proven interactive television
middleware solution; OpenTV’s Device Mosaic browser technology; and OpenTV’s MHP implementation that is
under development.