Information has come out about Transmeta’s Mobile Linux distribution being prepared for release by the company. Linuxdevices details the announcement first made public at LWE.

ABCNews takes a basic look at how Linux support companies make money.

Slashdot has an item about a reader getting Linux running on the Intel 80200 XScale CPU. “We did the final
bug fixes in a hotel room in New York.”

Marc Beneteau sends us this: Peoplink.org has just released the first beta of the CatGen Platform.
The Catgen Platform catgen.com includes the CatGen client software as well as host services such as payment, shipping, fulfillment and order-tracking.
It is an open-source software designed specifically for non-technical users with low-bandwidth (or expensive) connections to create their own web catalogs and sell their products and services domestically and overseas. It is currently in development and is scheduled to become operational by the end of the second quarter of 2001.

CatGen is a “database-to-web-catalog” application. Users will enter information about their company, products and services into their local database. This information may include html text, images, sound and video. After registering at CatGen.com they may, at the click of a button, download this information to a central database which will create their web site and enter their products and services into a global searchable database. Their web site may be created at CatGen.com, on another site that runs the CatGen-Server software, or (later) on any other host via ftp.

Our goal, is to produce an open-source (as much as possible) e-commerce framework that can be adoped by anyone to provide catalogs of products or services anywhere in the world, or even simply to create home pages for themselves or their organization. The client software (CatGen) will always be completely open-source, and the code that we develop for CatGen-Server will also be entirely open-source.

CatGen.com will be operated by Peoplink (http://peoplink.org), a non-profit organization training and equipping grass-roots organizations to market their wares while showcasing their cultural richness, and by partner organizations.

Linux Today reports that Linus has released Linux kernel 2.4.2-pre1.

Trolltech has released QT version 2.2.4. QT is the central toolkit involved with the KDE project.

Avleen writes “14 IRC Networks have joined forces, and admins have decided to talk to each other about IRC operations.
The server admins have come together to talk about anything and everything IRC related, but concentrating primarily on cross-network issues such as persistant and problematic users and DoS attacks.
If you’re interested in the IRCNetops project, or wish to join, visit http://www.ircnetops.org/“

Amit writes “Beta drivers for the motorola sm56 pci softmodem are now available at http://mylug.virtualave.net. These are precompiled binaries; no source is available though.”

Alan Cox has released 2.4.1ac2. This update fixes a few accidental reverts, some drivers, and updates documentation. Thanks to LWN.net.

LinuxPlanet looks back on LinuxWorld: “Beyond just the look of conference was the tenor. It’s changed quite a bit. Almost everyone I talked to
recognized it in some fashion or another. Linux, it seems, has grown up. Marty Larsen of VA Linux (which owns NewsForge, by the way) actually
made the best articulation of this phenomenon when he observed to me that Linux has matured, not as a
technology, but as a community. We are all nine years older than we were when Linux first made the scene, and
while the open source and free software movements are still going strong, the need to make some money has
become a much more dominant notion for Linux.”