It was a week of new beginnings in the Open Source community. Red Hat and Mandrake, two of the top Linux distributions, released new versions, both with the 2.4 Linux kernel.

Red Hat’s announcement of its 7.1 version came Monday and included promises of “improved SMP support for superior performance” on Intel multi-processor platforms, and new configuration tools that “enable users to effortlessly set up and administer DNS, Web and print servers.”

MozillaQuest.com also noted that the new Red Hat comes with KDE 2.1, but shipped with Netscape 4.76, not the 6.0 version of the browser. Red Hat spokespeople responded by saying that Netscape 6.0 was too cumbersome, and that they’d stick to 4.7X for now, thank you. Elsewhere, a ZDNet UK headline writer was apparently a bit confused when penning a headline saying “Red Hat to ship Linux 7.1.” There are some in the Open Source community who believe Red Hat wants people to think the company is Linux, but that’s not the situation just yet.

Mandrake, for one, might raise an objection. Copies of the French Linux distro began hitting the download sites mid-week. ZDNet UK recovered from its Red Hat headline enough to say that the new Mandrake was packed with goodies. PCTalk.org said Mandrake has outdone itself with an easy-to-use and -install distribution.

The Phoenix metaphor, recurring

Two NewsForge stories this week made reference to the old Phoenix legend, perhaps appropriately. After the Indrema gaming console project folded up shop last week, a group of developers vowed to continue the work. The TuxBox project founders are confident a community model of development can succeed where Indrema failed, though some doubters surfaced when the story was posted at other sites.

Also, the founder of the Independence Linux distribution has recently resurrected the project. Independence Linux vows to make Linux easier to use than the “out of touch” developers from other distros.

No need for the Phoenix metaphor

Loki Entertainment Software went on the offensive this week after recent rumors that it is headed toward demise. Company President Scott Draeker gave interviews to LWN.net and ITWorld, essentially saying the same thing both times: We’re not making money yet, but we’re not going away. In fact, Loki just began a marketing campaign that offers volume discounts to Linux user groups.

Linuxgruven update: Founder arrested

Y’all remember the , the St. Louis training company that laid off a bunch of staff and left students wondering if they would be refunded? Well, founder James Hibbits was arrested on a two-year-old fraud charge this week.

New in NewsForge

Stories you could find only in NewsForge this week:

2.4.3-ac12
o Rewrite the i2o post handling code to fix (me)
DMA memory scribbles
o Handle IOP constipation in the i2o_block layer (me)
o Fix bugs in the i2o table query causing reboots (me)
in i2o_proc on the DPT card
o Add quirks for i2o cards that handle large I/O (me)
queues badly [Promise supertrak100]
o Add cache heuristics to the I2O block driver (me)
| We don’t cache large writes (assume seq)
| We writeback small writes (random, metadata)
o Disable use of writeback caching if there is (me)
no battery backup
o Merge Linus 2.4.4pre6
o Further semaphore fixes (David Howells)
o Correct ‘void main’ to ‘int main’ in rtc doc (Jesper Juhl)
o Hopefully fix bugtraq reported netfilter ftp
flaw
o Fix unistd.h for ARM (Russell King)
o Fix pre-emption of rt tasks (Nigel Gamble)
o Fix revalidation bugs in cciss/cpqarray (Charles White)
when rereading partitions
o Acenic updates (Jes Sorensen)
o Fix MAINTAINERS sort order (David Woodhouse)
o Restore DVDRAM fix with cdrom init fix too (Jens Axboe)
o Fix irda disconnect timeout bug (Dag Brattli)
o Experimentally reap dead swap harder (Dave Miller)
o Remove dead low mtu checks from drivers (Arnaldo Carvalho de
Melo)
o Add missing sk_chk_filter export (Byeong-ryeol Kim)
o Quieten pci printks, send them to log (Arjan van de Ven)
o Hopefully fix fastrak oops (me)