ABC News thinks that there just might be something to this Linux thing, what with that big conference in New York this week and established companies like IBM tossing in a few billion dollars to promote the Open Source operating system. This means that corporate America won’t be far behind.

Canoe reports on Borland’s new Kylix product, billed as a rapid application development environment for the Linux operating system. The latest Borland thingy, Canoe says, “offers a two-way visual development of graphical user interface, Internet, database, and Web server applications.” We believe this means that Kylix does a lot of neat things, and it does them quickly.

Newswire Canada tells us that Dell and Oracle are setting up house together. In a press release issued from — where else — LinuxWorld in New York, the two companies have announced a joint initiative to bring Oracle91 to Linux customers running Intel Linux servers. Part of the plan includes establishing a Linux competency center so that users can test and fine-tune the Linux/Oracle hardware and software configuration that’s just right for their business needs.

It’s too early to tell who will win the prize for generating the most press releases during a trade show, but this latest announcement from MandrakeSoft puts that company up front. This time around, the nice folks running the “trusted interface between users of information technology and open technologists” have joined forces with secure Internet solution provider Bull to “promote and develop Linux solutions.”

Admit it: you’d probably buy a set top box if it had all of the features you wanted. With Open Source protocols becoming less of a rarity, why, as one Slashdot reader asks, don’t you build your very own custom device? Imagine: your very own MP3 jukebox, Divx theater, and high-speed Web service sitting daintily on the top of your spiffy new WEGA.

A press release at LinuxPR notes that there’s a new beta version of the K Desktop Environment available for download. New features in Konqueror and KDevelop and dozens of upgrades and additions to existing features makes this beta slighty more attractive then the average non-final release. Get your hands on the goods at the KDE 2.1 site.

– By Jeff Field –

For years, dual processor x86 systems have only been possible with Intel CPUs, and for the most part on Intel chipsets. AMD has come up with an answer to this, its 760MP chipset. At LinuxWorld, I was given the opportunity to use a dual Athlon system with DDR memory on a prerelease 760MP board manufactured by Tyan, and initial impressions are very positive.

The disclaimer
The system used for this test was a preliminary system from ASL. The system was present in the MandrakeSoft booth with a rather small sign above it that said “World’s First Dual DDR Athlon.” This system is a prerelease motherboard running a prerelease chipset. As such, these results may not reflect the final performance of a similarly configured system. It is, however, a very good estimate.

The setup
The CPUs used in these tests were two AMD Athlon 1.2GHz CPUs. As far as I could tell, these were standard Athlon processors. The CPUs were running on a 266MHz frontside bus connected to 256 megabytes of PC2100 DDR RAM. The chipset was a prerelease 760MP running on a Tyan motherboard. The system was running Mandrake 7.2 with a 2.4 kernel. The kernel used in the kernel compiles was 2.4.0ac12.

The results
For this review, the only benchmarks available to me were 2.4.0ac12 compile times; however, they should more than suffice. The first kernel compile I did was a single processor compile of 2.4.0ac12. The kernel was configured with the default options for “make config.” You can reproduce this fairly easily by typing “make config” and holding down the enter key for a while. The kernel was then compiled using “time make bzImage.” The dual processor results were then done by first doing “make clean” then “time make -j3 bzImage“.

Kernel Compile Times (Minutes:Seconds)

Single/Dual Athlon 1.2GHz
	Single	Dual
2.4.0ac12	4:51	2:00

While the results for the single-CPU compile were good results, what we are really looking at are the dual results. The kernel compile with the single processor was 142% slower than both processors, an impressive increase showing that adding another CPU doesn’t necessarily mean just a 100% boost in performance. Although a two-minute 2.4.0ac12 compile is definately impressive.

Conclusion
As I stated before, this is by no means a production model system, but it is an excellent look at the potential performance of dual CPU Athlon-based systems. Having alternatives to Intel in the multi-processor x86 market can only help the end user, because competition will reduce prices, and Athlons are (for the most part) available for less than the equivilent Intel CPU. Once these systems become widely available, I wouldn’t be surprised if AMD suddenly gained a large piece of the dual processor workstation and server market.

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

– by Tina Gasperson –
Jae Hwang, engineer and team leader for NuxOne, Inc., makes it clear that his company is in no way affiliated with *that* LinuxOne. Here at LinuxWorld Expo, the Korea-based developer hopes that it can stand on its own with its new mass-mailer, NanoMailer.NanoMailer is a simple mailing program that supports MySQL and Oracle type databases. It runs on the Web, so is platform independent, and supports multiple users. It’s a nice tool for big companies that send out frequent mass emails — NuxOne claims that you can send out a million emails a day with NanoMailer. Can you say spam (or targeted advertising)?

One interesting feature of NanoMailer is its comprehensive reporting ability, with which companies can track the effectiveness of a particular mail message. By creating HTML mail messages with imbedded images, says Hwang, the program can easily report back to the owner how many times the message has been opened by the recipient. Simple concept, but a good indicator of just how intrusive merchants can get once they have your address.

If you don’t like the idea of someone keeping tabs on how many times you read your email messages, it’s a good idea to turn off HTML in your mailer, or use a text-based program like pine or mutt. “Most people have HTML turned on and don’t know it,” says Hwang. “But if it’s text, you’ll have no way of knowing” what the recipient is doing with his email.

NuxOne, the company behind the NanoMailer, used to be known as LinuxOne.co.kr. Are they affiliated with that other LinuxOne? “No, no, no,” said Hwang and an unidentified female companion, waving their arms vigorously as punctuation, at their Linux World booth.

They changed to NuxOne in order to distance themselves from LinuxOne.net, the California company that virtually dropped out of sight after claiming it would file for an IPO in 1999, in the midst of rampant criticism from the Open Source community.

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

Another press release from Lineo, courtesy of PR Newswire: Lineo, Inc., a leading innovator in
embedded Linux(TM) systems, real-time and high availability solutions, today
announced it has acquired significant additional products and capabilities
through a merger with Embedded Power Corporation, a leader in real-time
operating systems for digital signal processors and
microprocessors. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed.

From InternetWire: Kargo, Inc., a leading
New York-based wireless infrastructure
software company, today announced the
release of Morphis, its transcoding platform for wireless content. As an open-source
platform, Morphis provides a low-cost means for enterprises to deliver content to the
millions of wireless devices in the market including mobile phones, handheld PCs and personal
digital assistants.