mhoskins asks: "We all know about the problems with NFS security: export/home to a bunch of workstations and anyone with a laptop can switch off a workstation (after looking up its IP), assume the IP with the laptop, mount /home, create user accounts and then su to them." Are there ways to secure NFS systems from this kind of 'exploit'?

Elvis Maximus writes: "Wired News is running an interesting piece on the inroads Linux is making in Africa. The article focuses on the advantages of the 'free beer' nature of Linux, which is good, but neglects the fact that open source empowers people in developing countries to solve their own specific problems. Worth a look." Ironically, if commerical software vendors are vigilant, the advantages of Free alternatives will only be more evident. But licensing isn't as pressing an issue, maybe, when getting access at all isn't easy for most Africans.

msnomer writes: "Debian is planning to replace their installer for Woody, their next release. Plans are to have it be highly modular, using debian packages as the modules. The discussion is going on in the debian-boot mailing list; you can also read the design draft on the web site." This looks very interesting -- as a recent Debian recipient (victim?) at the hands of an expert, I must say the install is pretty intimidating. This sounds like a smart area to focus on, but what would an ideal installer consist of, anyhow? Give examples, double space;)

jdean writes: "I thought I'd take a minute and toot my own horn and mention my article on the O'Reilly Network which gives a roundup of the various Linux certifications currently available. It's part of my series on Linux certification."

An anonymous reader writes: "MaximumLinux.com has a story about Red Hat 7.0 which is coming out on Tuesday. Apparently it will ship with 2 installation CDs, XFree4 is set to default and the USB support is s'pose to kickass." I've finally seen USB work properly under Linux and its sweet. The sad part is that the only USB device I have is a mouse ... with a PS/2 adapter.

Patrick Mullen sent us linkage to a nice review review on the latest Debian release. Frank Smith wrote in to say that Geek news has an interview with him (mega biases earn bonus points) about the Embedded Debian Project which is actually looking pretty good (if you're into that whole embedded thing, which might not be everyone :)

the_quark writes: "According to this ZDNet story, RedHat will be rolling out a subscription update service with 7.0, which will be available by FTP on Monday." They're also announcing the "Red Hat Network" which essentially adds something like Debian's apt-get function that I've been using for a couple years now *grin*. BTW, has anyone played with gnome-apt? Not bad.

iie1195 asks: "Even though you can set up LiLO to dual-boot operating systems, in my opinion, there are better and easier ways to accomplish this, since LiLO isn't very newbie-friendly. There are several commercial boot-managers out there. Among the noteworthy are PQBoot from Powerquest and System Commander 2000 from V Communications (you can read a review on System Commander 2000 here.) Open Source boot-managers have not been plentiful, but there's hope. One of these is Smart BootManager. It has the look and feel of an early version of System Commander, and is fully Open Sourced. I have not tried it much myself, since I'm perfectly happy with System Commander. But since blowing $49 on a boot-manager might be a little steep, the free Smart BootManager seems like a good alternative." Any experiences or testimonials from users of this program? Does it serve your booting needs or are there areas that could use improvement?

Al writes "We all remember RoboCup2000. LinuxWorld.com.au has an article on how Linux was used by different teams to optimise communications, hackup wavelan ethernet and build in sensory and visual intelligence to the Robots. Is it too early to ask for christmas presents?" Anyone else digging on Comedy Central's Battle Bots? I wish they'd ditch the lame sports comentary and replace it with purely technical stuff. And then watch robots smash each other. Somehow I doubt that you could build a winning battle bot based on Linux: it just strikes me that things like hard drives don't respond well to axes and chain saw blades.

Kismet asks: "I've recently been involved in a largish Web application written using Microsoft tools. It consists of a UI layer written in VBScript for Microsoft ASP, a business tier of COM objects, and a backend on SQL Server 7. How can I implement something like this with Linux? It's really easy to use server-side COM objects with ASP, but is there anything that easy for PHP or Mason or something else on Linux? PHP's database stuff is neat, but I'd like to move that out of the site script."

Dante_J asks: "Recently I discovered an old Amiga DOS 1.3 Manual I had lying around. While thumbing through it I remembered all the joyful days of good fun hacking. One thing I particularly remembered was how anyone with 3Mb of ram was considered especially blessed with resources because they could copy all their system files into the ram disk and have a 'trans-warp' fast machine on their hands. In this age of more Ram than sense why are Ram Disks only used for Linux installation floppies? Sure buffers are great, but why not mount /tmp to a Ram Disk, and the cache directory for Web browsers too? Does Linux support dynamically reseizing Ram Disks? Surely they would be vital in remote booting, diskless thin clients."

Floris pointed us to an excellent article over at Freshmeat discussing the problems with RPM. It compares RPM to the other alternatives (mainly Debian's apt system) and discusses where the problems are. It's not a distribution war thing, this is a serious problem that needs discussing. Read the story and chime in.

namelessByChoice asks: "I'm a software developer in a rather large hardware company. We have recently begun using Linux as the OS of choice for in house hardware test equipment. Now since Linux is "free" we don't have to pay licensing fees to anyone, but as a moral obligation we would like to contribute in some way. I'm looking for suggestions on the best way to do this."

Shiraz Kanga writes: "I think this article on suggested hacks for TiVo needs to be reviewed on Slashdot (especially the last section)" A humorous and intelligently written article on the problem with tivo, and why it comes so close to perfect. But also why it is flawed. Great article on the future of television, and digital VCRs.

riggwelter writes: "SuSE has announced a version of their distribution for the Sun SPARC architecture. It's available as four ISO images from their FTP site and mirrors. This mean s that SuSE now supports PowerPC, Alpha and SPARC in addition to i386. Anyone with a SPARC knocking about the place fancy reviewing it?."

chamont writes: "Even though Red Hat is still number 1, this article states that Caldera, SuSE, and Turbo are gaining ground fast. The article also mentions that Corel is pretty much history." Interesting to see -- what's cool is that the Linux market, at least what they measured, grew 89% overall. Turbolinux had monstrous growth overall -- you can see a lot more is happening on Pacific Rim.

pryan writes "rootprompt.org has some interesting articles on locking down a Linux box on a hostile network (read: Internet) and cloaking a Debian box so script kiddies don't find it. Check out fortress building, part 1, and part 2. For you Debian freaks (I'm wearing a Debian swirl t-shirt as I type this), check out cloaking Debian. Of course, the cloaking article is easily adaptable to other distributions. Let's lock down those boxes! "

A singular node from the Anonymous Coward Collective asks: "Several months ago when the storm first blew up about the cracked DVD code enabling Linux users to view DVDs on their chosen platform, Intervideo rode a wave of publicity drawing geeks worldwide to their site by announcing their upcoming 'legal' DVD player for Linux to be available in the second quarter 2000. June came and went and I contacted their sales people who informed me that it would be available at the end of July. It wasn't. I contacted their PR people and was told that it would be available at the end of August. No show. In the meantime, thousands of geeks have gone to their site to be entertained by the wonderful awards they have won for their Windows software. No mention of Linux. The press release has disappeared from their home page as well. Did this software really exist, or was it all just a pathetic publicity stunt? Does anyone out there know the answer?" I'd think quite a few uf us would like to know the answer to this one. What happened, Intervideo?

Well, in my digging through our book review bin, I found this review of The Linux Problem Solver, which somehow slipped through the cracks. Thanks to PotPieMan for doing the review and let's see what he thinks of the book.

Snocone writes: "Here is the first real world application (researching drug effects on the brain, ironically enough) of Terra Soft's 8-way Black Lab Linux cluster. Even if they didn't deserve mad props for standing up proudly against the Lintel hegemony, there's just something fundamentally hilarious about selling an $18K supercomputer made out of iMacs." So - eight Imacs. You could get the different colors, and call it a Lifesavers Candy Cluster?