chromatic is back with a mini-compendium of introductory Linux texts -- and yes, they have the famously protected "Dummies" trademark. Don't scoff at the nature of these books, though; the skill of translating the arcana of any computer topic (and boy are they all arcane to the uninitiated!) into language that mom, kids and the guy down the street can understand is not a common one. If you don't know what a root prompt (or an editor) is, or why you might want one, it's hard to do much else with your system.

Paul Bristow writes "I've been using a Headless Linux server at home for years and years, but I always find myself putting off doing a distro upgrade. It always means digging out the old graphics card, keyboard and monitor, dusting them off and plugging them in, just so I can have a console to upgrade on. Are there any linux distributions that will allow remote upgrades? You know, log in as root viua ssh, webmin, whatever, run upgrade prog, remotely reboot, off we go. ;-) I know I'm not the only one running a headless server, and I *know* how stable it is, but occasionally RedHat (in my case) come out with a nice new feature that I might want to upgrade for. Also, with just one server it might just be possible, but how do you upgrade a headless server farm?"

An unnamed correspondent writes:"Transvirtual has released PocketLinux for the iPaq. It features Video4Linux, mp3 playing ability, web synchronization, Kaffe OpenVM, GUI Themes, and displaying in standard or portrait mode. PocketLinux runs on VTech's Helio, iPaq's, and various other platforms." PocketLinux V.P. of Engineering Peter Mehlitz took some time off from the LWCE booth the other day to tell me about Pocketlinux -- read on for some details.

The ongoing debate between KDE and GNOME has calmed down a lot in the last year as each system became stable and usable. Recent announcements regarding the Gnome Foundation has caused some tension (ranging from words to DNS hijaacking). Kurt Granroth, a KDE Core Team Member, and the KDE US Press Rep has submitted his opinions on the subject, are in some cases very good points, and in other cases extremely inflammatory, but in both cases, worth reading.

Jacek Fedorynski writes "Indrema (the Linux gaming console guys) and Red Hat have announced that they have formed an alliance to "jointly manage branding and distribution" of DV Linux, a Linux distribution for gaming consoles."

Ant Mitchell was first out of the gate with the submission revealing that C2Net had signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by RedHat. An e-mail message was sent to all registered Stronghold customers. Interested in the details? Check out the FAQ.

drift factor asks: "I work for a small company with about 200 Linux desktops, all identical aside from hostname and IP information running Redhat from a kickstart install. Currently, when something needs to be changed on all of them (say, the default gateway) we either have to ssh into all of them and do it manually, or write a Perl script to do so for us. Is there a good remote configuration system that will also allow some level of automation, i.e., I tell it what IP I want the default gateway to be on each machine and it updates them for me?" If you manage a large server farm and have used or written utilities that do this, please share your experiences.

As the title says - Yahoo released their Yahoo Messenger for Linux and for FreeBSD. You can find it here. The Linux versions have been tested on Redhat 6.0,6.1 and 6.2. I really hope that Yahoo will think more about Linux/BSD users who want to use other Yahoo's services like Yahoo's Financevision service. Do you hear me Yahoo?

It's quickie time! Let's get into the action with some blood and guts. cthulhubob told us about Overkill. In light of all the irritating infringement news, An anonymous coward pointed us at http://www.groucho.com. I don't know why, but Jesper Skov thinks that having turbojets on model airplanes is a fantastic idea. Hey Doc, are you reading? Gabriel Golden submitted The Boomtrain Manifesto. leviathan shared the l33t surfer. According to our anonymous source, "Wired News is reporting that Danni Ashe has become the Most Downloaded Woman on the Internet. In your face, Cindy Margolis!" Bluedove (with a little help from Wes) showed us how to pirate music and video without a computer. alienmole gave us the origin of @. Mantis! is a Sega Saturn obsessive. Check out his site. Garth, while busy turning it up to eleven, told us about the upcoming re-release of Spinal Tap. On a personal note, just wanted to tell my friend Raja to get well, and that we're all thinking about him.

KS writes: "Old time GNOME hacker and Slashdot familiar Guillaume Laurent has finally written up an explanation on why he left the GTK-- project. In summary, he disagrees with some of the fundamental features of GTK-- but sees a bright future for Red Hat's Inti. I don't know why but I always find these sorts of things eye opening." Update: 08/10 02:50 PM by H :Guillaume wrote me asking me to mention the an update to the story.

topdown writes "I just noticed that AOL released Instant Messenger Beta for Linux (rpm format for RedHat, SuSE, and Mandrake). Don't know about you, but I'll be sticking with gaim for now." Wow, this is fantastic news. Way to be on the cutting edge, AOL. Sorry, but this release doesn't even warrant a copy of our home game. I still don't forgive you for using the Jetsons theme music in your commercials.

Eugene Cabanopscotch writes: "I run a Web-hosting company that is seriously looking at managed co-location in the U.S. as a means to get content to overseas clients without the delays of using NZ's congested international links. I clicked through from the popular Slashdot banner ad Rackspace.com and also checked out digitalNATION and saw that they offer managed RedHat boxen. Now, not wanting to start any sort of holy flame war or anything (moderators, start your engines) I thought "that's great and all, but I want a Debian GNU/Linux box" so I quickly fired off a couple of e-mails to the listed e-mail addresses asking whether they would be willing to install and manage a Debian box. I got back flat refusals to manage Debian machines. Does anyone know of a managed co-location provider that is willing to work with Debian?" I find it odd that places will restrict co-locations to specific distributions of Linux. It's not that hard to manage a Red Hat and a Debian box, is it?

stuyman asks: "I'm amazed that I haven't been able to find a good source of information on this sort of subject, but it seems that all anyone ever says is that it needs to be determined based on "certain factors" on an individual basis. No one ever says how to evaluate those factors. I need to set up a whole bunch of new Linux servers. How big should the partitions be? Anyone have any formulas or ideas? I'm open to superstitions, too (heads, root is 300, tails it's 60). Some quick details about the setup: We've got a 20.5 gig HD and we want to have separate partitions for /, /var, /usr, /usr/local (maybe), /home, /opt, and /tmp, as well as a sufficient amount of swap. The servers will run RedHat 6.2 with Apache stronghold, and will also need X installed. We're currently leaning towards having huge /usr and /usr/local, with about 2 gigs for var. Also, how much /var would one suggest for a syslogd server that'd be serving logs for 50+ boxen? (running mostly RH or SunOS) Awaiting this thread eagerly..."

spell_caster asks: "I have an HPNA 2.0 network at home (10M LAN over ordinary phone lines). I am experimenting with Linux, but I can't find any drivers for HPNA 2.0. Is anyone working on this? Has anyone else tried the HPNA cards?" For those of you searching for this type of support, there might be some good news for you.

qbasicprogrammer writes: "Security Portal has a review on the security of Red Hat, SuSE, TurboLinux, and Caldera Linux distributions." Debian and Slackware are absent, but its a decent piece.

Last Tuesday you asked Ingo Molnar, Red Hat kernel hacker, about the means by which his TUX Web server recently achieved such fantastic results in SpecWeb99 . He was kind enough to respond with at-length answers addressing licensing, the reality of threads under Linux, the realism of benchmarks, and more. Thanks, Ingo!

Greyfox asks: "I'm looking for a good set of C++ bindings for ORBit. The only thing I can find seems to be OrbitCPP, which doesn't appear to be particularly robust yet. Are there any other projects out there to implement C++ bindings for ORBit?"

jmsohn wrote in with a link to a press release announcing the launch of Wasabi Systems, formed to provide a commercial channel for sales, support, and service for NetBSD. With me in the Usenix terminal room is Perry Metzger, NetBSD's release engineer, and CEO of the new company, to talk about the company's plans.

Several people noted that Red Hat is now partnering with Dell and offering Red Hat as one of its strategic operating systems, as well as shipping Linux web/proxy boxes to Lexus and Toyota dealerships. But thats not all... Big Blue apparently is now shipping T20 Thinkpads with Caldera and Star Office preloaded.

Günter Bechly sent in an interesting open letter to the KDE project regarding KDE, and its current exclusion from Debian (this is of course due to the licensing issues over which wars have been waged, lives lost, and kittens strangled). The letter is attached... he offers a $3k "Bonus" or "Reward" or "Bribe" depending on how you look at it, if KDE will be included with future versions of the distribution. Its an interesting one because the license issues are fuzzy to begin with, but it also shows that there is a strong demand for the software. Then again, I wonder if just hosting the debs and a line for a sources.list might suffice ... or just inclusion in non-free?