Ben Collins has been elected leader of the Debian Project, and in this interview, he talks about his plans for the project and his predictions about the future of the GNU/Linux operating System. Read this interview at OLinux.

An anonymous reader writes: “Universal plans to morph EMusic into its recently announced Duet service, a partnership between themselves and Sony. The EMusic acquisition means the two record labels don’t have to tackle the cost and time demands of building a Net music delivery service from scratch. They also start out with an instant customer base of 10,000 user with a history of paying for Net downloads. More at MP3Newswire.“

Steve Mallett writes “We are proud to launch OpenSourceDirectory.org today. We are a site that promotes “stable, open-source apps”.We decided to build the site after a quick email to a certain higher mammal at OSI. Right now we are in the first growth stage which is to get authors to register their stable releases. Come one, come all.

The basic idea of the site is to provide one hub where someone will know the software they are looking at is open-source and is developed to the point it should work.

We hope to reach the developers/authors through NewsForge to get the word out. You can reach the site at www.opensourcedirectory.org and .com

We’ll also be on irc.openprojects.net #osd to chat. (spaceman) (RobBbot)

“

CNET: “Mountain View,
Calif.-based Handspring
said it doesn’t see an
immediate need to use
other operating systems,
such as Linux or
Microsoft’s Windows CE, a
smaller version of the
Windows software on
which about 80 percent of the world’s personal computers operate.

That’s because Handspring has been successful in adding functions to its handheld
computers with Palm’s software, Dubinsky said. Handspring’s Visor handhelds feature a slot to
add hardware attachments, turning them into mobile phones and even portable music players.”

“The third Linux worm this year, which tries to exploit lax security on Web sites
running the open source OS, has been discovered.

Adore, which is similar to the earlier Ramen and Lion worms, scans Linux hosts on
the Internet to determine whether they are vulnerable to well known exploits.” More at The Register.

From LinuxPR: Beta participants of the Linux-Windows-based Internet
Exchange Messaging Server (IEMS) 5 shall get a US$300 price off if they purchase
the messaging solution now than wait for its forthcoming official release. IEMS5
developer International Messaging Associates gave this announcement recently to
give value to their current beta users and development partners.

A press release at LinuxPR has the info. TurboPrint is a high-quality printer driver system for Linux built on existing
standards (e.g. ghostscript). It is designed to produce maximum quality photo
printouts as well as high-speed text documents. Printer set-up and configuration
is as simple as on Windows or MacOS, even network printers can be easily
configured. All printer features are supported, e.g. photo print heads, duplex
mode, etc.

From LinuxPR: Date: Thursday, April 12, 2001; time: 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.; where: Radisson Hotel South, 7800 Normandale Blvd., Bloomington, Minn.

The 2001 Twin Cities Linux Conference is the only Linux conference of its kind
hosted in the Twin Cities area. Sponsored by Real Time Enterprises, this second
annual event is dedicated exclusively to Linux, a free Unix-type operating
system that is rapidly gaining popularity – even beyond the IT department.

GonzoJohn tells us about an article at LinuxOrbit.com: “Screen-Grabbers! Catchy name isn’t it?
Both KDE and GNOME are full of helpful small applications for specific tasks. ‘Screen-Grabbers’ are applications that will take a picture of your desktop or a window on your desktop, and save the picture as an image file, like a PNG or JPG.

What can screen-grabbers be useful for? Well, for one thing, they make documenting applications a lot easier. And of course, technical writers like myself find them indispensable. Linux desktop users can also take advantage of these screen-grabbers to capture error messages for hunting down the solution to problems.”

Ismet Kursunoglu tells us about the Linux at LAX meeting coming up April 14 at 10 a.m. in Torrance, Calif. “Christopher Smith gives two presentations, one on hardware and one on
software. For details please see

Linuxatlax.org. On the hardware side he will talk about the various wireless networking solutions currently
available, with an emphasis on 802.11b wireless networking (Wi-Fi). This provides 11 Mbps of
bandwidth in a fairly cost-effective manner.

In his second talk Chris will describe how Linux’s multitasking works. The presentation will
start out slow, defining terms like ‘process,’ ‘threads,’ ‘tasks’ and ‘signals’ in the context of
the Linux world. Depending on time and interest, discussion will move on to the good and the
bad of the Linux approach to these concepts, and strategies programmers can use in the real
world to get the best performance out of available hardware.”