Well, we've gotten a massive number of submissions with the haps at LWCE. I've distilled some of the good ones below: Chanc_Grokon wrote to us with the press release from Ximian about the monthly charges for Red Carpet, their installer. He also raises the "Why not just use apt-get?" point. A number of people wrote pointing out LinuxLookup.com's Day 1 coverage and Day 2 coverage. Of particular interest to Daeslin was Larry Lessig's attack on overly strong intellectual property laws. A number of people, Krismon included, have voiced some disappointment at the excitement of the show - not being there, I make no judgments. Sun has unveiled more details about StarOffice 6. Compaq's CTO also made comments about Linux improving in the enterprise. jrbw sent in Linus' thoughts (dismissive) of .Net/Hailstorm. And KDE has won the "Best Open Source Project" award. Newsforge has also got a round-up and coverage piece. More news as it happens.

Andreas "Dre" Pour wrote to say that KDE's long-awaited version 1.1 is out, and asks you to check the dot for some more details. He also points to this temporary fixed-for-Netscape announcement as well as the official announcement. Dre continues: "The dot link includes commentary by me (including a call for Open Source office developers to collaborate on filters!)"

Slashback brings you updates tonight on Brian K. West, Clockless computing, and the state of GCC -- hope you enjoy them. There's at least some good to take with the bad :)

keegnotrub writes: "Mandrake just dumped 8.1 Beta on their servers. Along with updated software (KDE 2.2, kernel 2.4.8, etc) they have reworked their control center to include many new features." Word to the wise: there are some reactions to this beta -- as well as a list of known bugs and fixes -- at mandrakeforum.com. What I'd like to know is if a Wacom Intuos USB tablet will work out-of-the-box on 8.1, since I just bought a refurbed one ;)

Well, we had covered it being tagged last week, and now, after a hardware problem with one of the main download servers, KDE is ready for download. Except that you'll probably want to go to the mirrors to actually get it. You can get more about it about it from Dre's dot.kde post, or you can read the KDE announcement - and have a good time!

A few weeks ago, dot.kde.org featured a great why-should-this-be-amazing story about Linux being used as the day-to-day desktop operating system for city employees in Largo, Florida. Roblimo got a chance to see the system in action to find out how ordinary office workers are proving that the old "Linux is tough to use" shibboleth is nothing but FUD, and how a medium-sized city is saving buckets of money by minimizing the tax dollars spent on licenses and hardware. Oh, and they've also pre-empted the kind of costs (in hassle and money) that can face any organization that Microsoft suspects may have some licenses out of order. This is the kind of thing every elected official should have politely waved in his or her face by concerned taxpayers. The Largo system uses KDE on Red Hat, but since both KDE and Gnome are paying much attention to user interface, similar systems could easily be running on various combinations of hardware / distribution / desktop system.

ByTor-2112 writes "According to dot.kde.org, KDE 2.2 has been tagged out. Awesome." Plans were originally to release 2.2 today, but scheduled release is now next Monday, to allow some time for more stability/speed work. 2.2 rocks my world. Excellent work on the part of all the KDE developers. Other dates mentioned are 2.2.1 in September, and opening work up on 3.0, which will hopefully come out at the beginning of 2002.

Chromatic slipped this review under our door. You need a few laughs at this point in the summer (ok, Northern hemisphere residents at least) to distract you from the heat of summer and the cost of air conditioning, and Joy of Linux has some esoteric geek humor in store, even if it's intended mostly as a mostly serious field guide to Linux nerddom for amateur anthropologists, like parents, girlfriends and bosses.

JigSaw writes "AtheOS 0.3.5 has just been released. Lots of changes to the core of the OS, but the most important upgrade is the port of the Konqueror web browser (the author had to wrap around X/KDE/QT calls in order to port it). AtheOS is a modern OS, written from scratch using OOP and C++, it features a 64-bit journaled/attributed filesystem and (surprise) it doesn't use X, but rather its native GUI system (screenshots). Changelog is here, while you can download it here (only around 23 MB for the basic installation). There is already a number of posix software ports and third party native software available."

jdfox writes: "SuSE announced more layoffs on Friday: 10% reductions in Germany, or about 50 (mainly non-technical) staff. This follows the February layoffs of 30 out of the 45 US staff in Oakland. Perhaps a merger with MandrakeSoft is in order? Both are RPM-based, both offer KDE-based admin tools. OTOH, as MandrakeSoft is right in the middle of an IPO, it might not be the best time to be thinking about a major acquisition. I mainly use Debian, but SuSE is an excellent distro, and I would hate to see the company go bust."

Last week, you asked Shawn Gordon questions about his venture TheKompany, an outfit which has been (fairly) quietly working on a small flotilla of software for GNU/Linux systems, and some cross-platform applications as well. His responses are below; you might be surprised at a few of them. (And some lucky Debian hacker might even pick up a job.)

Linux won't ever be accepted as a truly mainstream OS by most vendors. The reason for this is quite simply the users. And I'm not talking about everyone, I'm talking about the 31337 h4x0r kids with the bad attitude. They're posting right here on this system, intermixed with others who often share the attitude, but also have a bit more civility. I saw this once again while learning about the Hewlett Packard 3300C flatbad scanner ... which has zippo Linux support from HP. And I don't see that changing. Keep reading and maybe I can explain why.

Slashback slung at you tonight from 36 deg 02.412N 083 deg 24.61W with Debian pictures, the word on KIllustrator (which is not "KIlladobe"), a vague promise from Psion that they will return with consumer devices eventually, and an interesting exchange regarding the proper choice of tracking database for your local nuclear materials facility.

We sent 10 of your questions to IBM Linux exec Scott Handy a while back. Here are the answers. As is common with corporate types these days, a PR person had a hand in what was said, so please take that into account as you read on. But I don't think anything much was changed (I can usually tell) in this case, though.

BorrisYeltsin writes " A story here at InformationWeek about a guy who has equipped his 3500 feild engineers using the new Agenda VR3 palmtop's. It brings up an interesting issue about the Sharp Linux PDA and how the different libraries and API's will cause problems for developers." Having now seen the iPaq running Linux, KDE, and even Konqueror, I now believe its possible.

brunes69 notes that you can read the news that konqueror is supporting ActiveX. I saw it being done at at LinuxTag (as well as wine running The Sims!) so its coming. This ought to do a lot to give Linux users compatibility on sites the force shockwave or other obnoxious activex plug-ins.

metalhed77 writes: "A new version of the Nautilus file manager (1.0.4) has made its way out to the gnome ftps. here's the article on linuxtoday. It includes various improvements which are described on linux today, these primarily consisted of bug fixes and speed ups." Good to see that the effort that went into making Nautilus friendly wasn't wasted. But if you want to browse more than your hard drive, HeUnique points out another interesting project which is not distributed with the official KDE package. It's called: KDENOX ("KDE No X" -- you can use it with X or with framebuffer and QT Embedded: here's a screenshot). The gain? You get Konqueror without KDE, with SSL, cookies, proxy, bookmarks, fonts, and without KDE itself. The executable is small (4MB), doesn't take much RAM, and it works very nicely on low end machines ... (grab it from KDE CVS). Update: 07/08 01:17 AM by T : Here's a screenshot elsewhere; first person to mirror gets a lollipop.

Reader tempestdata indicates this CNN story, writing: "It appears Microsoft is facing quite a bit of opposition for its new licensing program." It looks like Redmond is granting a one-fiscal-year reprieve to the many companies who were caught off-guard by the announcement of new Microsoft licensing plans. Perhaps some of those companies would be interested in the new KDE 2.2.beta1 -- at least KDE and GNOME don't seem likely to institute monthly subscription fees.

Lots of software houses write software for GNU/Linux, but one company that's taking a different approach to products (and an unusual approach to licenses, too) is theKompany.com. TheKompany have released many open source projects, like PyQT/PyKDE, a Python binding to QT and KDE, and KoreLib, cross-platform C++ library for developing modular applications. They also combine Open Source licensed projects with plugins that they're selling: Aethera, Kivio, and closed-source products: Data Architect, (ERD & advanced SQL Editor), Kapital (a Quicken clone for Linux), among other things. Here is your chance to ask theKompany CEO Shawn Gordon questions about theKompany, Open Source, and the Linux from the commercial eye. We'll forward the best questions on to Shawn, and print his answers as soon as he gets them back to us.

These are Robert's answers to questions about GnuCash you posted on June 18th. He says, "Some of the answers to the questions here were the result of discussions with the other people at LDG, where others were more qualified to speak on various topics, so the readers are really getting the benefit of our collected wisdom (well, we hope it's wisdom :) )"