– by Tina Gasperson –
Here’s a specialized site for you. Linux Telephony covers everything about getting tele-connected with Linux.Linux Telephony has stepped neatly into the role of the place to go for information about Linux hardware and software that will enable connectivity. I guess you’d call it a portal — if you happened to like the word portal. We’ll just call it a good resource.

At Linux Telephony, there’s information about telephony-related mailing lists, plus articles, news, links, questions, books … even jobs. But don’t bother with the jobs section, it is woefully out of date. Guess there aren’t often openings in such a specialized field.

It has a nice section on drivers too, but the last entry was posted about a year ago. I started to wonder if the site had been abandoned, and double-checked the front page — no, it’s quite current, with a story about the International Softswitch Consortium posted 2/7/01, and every few days before that.

There’s an entire section devoted to something called OpenH323, which I learned is a project that “aims to create a full featured, interoperable, Open Source implementation of the ITU H.323 teleconferencing protocol that can be used by personal developers and commercial users without charge.”

Wait, that sounds interesting. Evidently, OpenH323 is working on providing businesses with the capabilities of Microsoft’s NetMeeting protocols, but for free. Kind of like Jabber — but that’s another story.

Linux Telephony doesn’t fail when it comes to providing links to outside resources, both telephony and Linux-related. I found the site to be thorough, informative, and educational, if somewhat neglected in parts. As always, your mileage may vary.

Go visit LinuxTelephony.com.

If you know of a site worthy of the spotlight at Newsforge, email me.

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

A ZDNet column goes looking for evidence of Linux use in big business and doesn’t find much.

ZDNet UK has more information about the layoffs, which apparently aren’t “total rubbish” as SuSE has claimed. SuSE says the layoffs will not affect is commitment to the U.S. market. “Jasmin Ul-Haque, commercial director for SuSE in the UK, says that
marketing and support for the US will now be operated from the
company’s German head office. She says the layoffs are designed to
make SuSE’s operations more efficient and key members of staff have
been retained to drive sales in the US.”

From PR Newswire: American Power Conversion
(Nasdaq: APCC), a global leader in end-to-end availability enhancement
solutions, announced today that APC has been named the provider of power
protection solutions for Penguin Computing Inc., a San Francisco, Calif.-based
provider of reliable Linux systems for Internet serving. In an effort to help
maximize system reliability and uptime, Penguin Computing will resell APC
surge protection and uninterruptible power supplies to its workstation
and server customers worldwide.

Anonymous Reader writes “Subscription revenues increased modestly while losses continue to be high, over $8 million last quarter. With only $16 million left in the band, will EMusic be able to survive until Napster changes over to a pay service this summer?

http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2001/emussub.ht ml“

“The Global File System (GFS) is a 64-bit shared disk cluster file system for Linux. GFS cluster nodes physically
share the same storage by means of Fibre Channel or shared SCSI devices, and makes the entire file system
appear to be local on each node. GFS is also fully symmetric, meaning that all nodes are equal and there is no
server which may be a bottleneck or single point of failure. GFS uses read and write caching while maintaining
full UNIX file system semantics and supporting journaling, recovery from client failures, and many other features.” Read all about it at LinuxProgramming.com.

From CNET: “Rock star Bruce Springsteen has lost his bid to
evict a fan club from a Web site sporting his name, according to
an arbitrators ruling Wednesday.”

CNETNews.com: “The EFF argues that the right to speak
anonymously is constitutionally protected and should not be given up just because companies
want to unmask critics. Furthermore, the groups are urging the court to first decide whether the
plaintiff has a claim and then balance the potential harm to the anonymous speakers with the
need to know their identity.”

From Wired: “The digital age has rendered the pretenses of copyright protection irrelevant. That’s the argument of Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman. But can the alternative of copyleft be legally defended?”

“GRUB, unlike LILO, is able to read filesystems and recognize kernel images too.
While LILO requires the physical location of the kernel on your drive, GRUB does
not. Even the latest filesystem ReiserFS is supported. This means that you don’t
have to re-install GRUB every time you make a change to the config file or install a
new kernel. If your BIOS supports LBA then there is also no problem reading
beyond 1024 cylinders. There’s some good support for network booting of diskless
clients. On the other hand, GRUB installation can be a bit of a problem. Maybe
we’re all too used to LILO or maybe GRUB still has some way to go? Little of both
we think.” From FreeOS.com.