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Mandrake, AKA Geoff Harrison, is a heavy contributor to the enlightenment project and has also left his mark on Gnome, XFree86, and a bunch of other excellent free software projects. In real life, he works for VA Research as (surprise!) a software developer. Mandrake is, without question, one of the leading lights of the Linux and free software development communities. Check his Web site, and post any question(s) you have for him below. Answers to most or all of the highest-moderated ones will be posted Friday.

fremen writes "Yahoo has an article about VA Research starting a new round of fund raising. It mentions that it has gained funding from SGI among other companies. "

First and foremost, we've moved the images to a new box. As many of you noticed, it was running temporarily off a non-standard port on the ad server. This was causing havoc for those of you behind firewalls. The new VA box is in place (blatant plug). It's horribly over powered (Dual P2) for the task at hand so to make things interesting (and to get Jesse to stop whining) we're trying out FreeBSD on it. I've also added several minor features to the comments section, as well as fixed a few bugs. Click the link below to read about them. Reparenting. As many of you noticed, comments that were highly rated often were not being displayed. This was because they were replies to comments that were below your threshold. I've changed it to reparent highly rated comments by defaults. This is an option though so if you liked it the old way, you can Log In and change it.

Its a little confusing at 0 or 1 because you'll get chunks of conversation that seem out of place... well, they are because their parent is missing. But at the higher thresholds its very useful.

Sort Modes I added a few new sort modes (primarily so that jwz would stop pestering me :) that some of you might like. The existing Oldest First/Newest First sort modes still maintained thread structure. I've added new options that blow the threading away for those of you who want to strictly read comments in order.

New Topic Icons if anyone has nice icons that we could use to represent Graphics (A paintbrush?), Education (pencil? those dumb hats?), Media (vomit? a newspaper?), Opinions (a soapbox?) Don't send me crap, but if you have a nice image, I'll make it fit Slashdot. I'm mainly looking for clean photos or illustrations that I can play with.

Moderation I had a few glitches that were causing an unhealthy number of moderation points getting reinsterted into the system. I've tweaked around some numbers and fixed some bugs that should help. A lot of the problems we were having was simply that there were several times the number of points available than I intended. It appears that it is very important to keep the number of points scarce so people take them seriously and don't simply abuse the hell out of their power.

I added an over/underrated option to the drop down list of flags- these options don't change the textual description of the comment, but they do change its value, although they are slightly more limited than the other ratings (You can't "Overrated" a comment down to -1). Hasn't been tested much yet. Trial by fire methinks :)

Misc I've pretty well finished rewriting the Moderator Guidelines at this point so I guess we can consider them out of beta. There are a few minor points that they don't make yet, as well as a few other points they ought to make, but they're pretty solid. Suggestions are welcome.

I put my plan file up on a web link. Since I took finger down (a loooong time ago) nobody really new what I was up to. I don't do a very good job of keeping it up to date.

Ah well, thats all for now. I still need to clean out the quickies bin and then I'm largely caught up... a few Slashboxes need work, a few minor features, a couple major features, and then I can let the dust settle again for a bit. I just got 3 DVDs of South Park and I think I've earned some R&R time. Plus, now that the wireless lan is up and running in the Geek Compound, I can keep an eye on things from my couch. Yum.

Baboshka writes "Check out what Intel has to say about Linux in the future and VA Research in the now in this informative article. Includes a short interview with Brian Biles, VP of VA. "

The little bird flitted in and told me that San Mehat has left Corel to go work for VA Research. One of his cool projects is getting Linux into the bios. Man, VA seems to be collecting all the fun people.

Allright the big beefy new VA Research box (Dual P2/450 with 512 megs of RAM- replacing a dual P2/266 with 256 megs!) is up and running at 206.170.14.76. Go ahead an smash it around a little bit. I need a little bit of that Slashdot Effect before I try actually running Slashdot on top of it. If we don't have any major problems, I'll probably switch everything over later tonight. The old server was handling over a half a million pages per day. Hopefully this one will have muscle enough to support us while I work on the personalized homepage stuff. Update: 03/08 05:27 by CT : THUD. that didn't take long.

VA Research had their little press conference today. They talked about their Linux.com acquisition and their intel investment- they also are reporting that they are going to offer 24/7 on-site service through DecisionOne. Most interesting, is that as part of their intel deal, they'll be porting Linux to Merced (under NDA) and are targetting a complete GPL source release of the port upon the release of the chip. Update: 03/02 06:31 by CT : theGEEK wrote in to link to a wired article that talks about the cost of linux.com. The article basically says less than the top bid of $5 million, but more than a million.

Matt wrote to us, talking about this story. This is some interesting, summary coverage of major announcements expected to be made at LinuxWorldExpo-we've seen a fair amount of these before, but this article also hints at a VA Research and SGI relationship in the making-as well as talking about how Sun has decided to change its' new conference to one-on-one talks. It also mentions that Microsoft won't be attending-I guess Rob and I won't be going then *g*.

chrisd writes "As a service to my readers and the community I've prepared an Open Sources fortune file containing some fun quotes from the book. I only have 35 quotes right now but I'd like to expand it, so if you have a favorite passage from the book, let me know and I'll add it to the master file. And thanks for checking out the book. I've also submitted the file on freshmeat for later updates." Hey, its saturday. Plus RMS and Linus each have some gems in there.

Steve Blood, the pivotal figure for the bazaar has sent over an update about some pretty major changes to the actual. I've posted that below-but some of the good news is that the pricing will be changing dramatically: 175$ for all conference sessions and tutorials, and 100$ for students. That's good news for everyone's pocket book. The Bazaar is going through a major transition which has been brought on by a number of factors which you can read about (if you have any desire to know more about what we've had to deal with) in a ranty, somewhat bitter, open letter I wrote, but decided not to do anything with.

To summarize what's happening: the Bazaar was conceived as a nonprofit conference and expo for free software that would benefit development groups. As it turned out, the dates which we chose specifically to not conflict with LINC Expo or Linux Expo, ended up being very close to IDG's LinuxWorld Expo -- another new show which wasn't announced until after our show was confirmed. Although this was unfortunate we didn't think it was the end of the world.

From the beginning we took a noncompetitive approach with IDG: the Bazaar was, after all, a different show in a different place. Hackers, developers, speakers and attendees liked that approach and we've had tons of support from all over the world.

However, that same approach got us no where with exhibitors and sponsors, i.e. the companies we need to support us so that we can afford to put this show on. Everyone has shut us down, given us the run-around and altogether sent the Bazaar to the brink of its life, except for a few, very excellent companies who believe in the spirit of our show (VA, Patmos, Linux HW).

Anyway, last week I appealed to a couple of leaders in the Linux business community for some help and they told me that competing with IDG was basically hopeless and wished me luck.

Well, our luck was running out, so I contacted a company that was interested in partnering up with us. It wasn't what I wanted to do with the Bazaar, but this company likes our mission and is willing to keep it as a nonprofit event with developers at the center. And they are a major company with the media and capital resources to make things happen.

So please bear with us as we go through some restructuring. If you have any suggestions -- except about the pricing which will change drastically, probably $175 for all the conference sessions and tutorials, $100 for students -- or questions please contact me or the staff.

-steve blood

Been meaning to write this one for a while, but you know how time is. The following is an account of a...misadventure had by myself, OctobrX and Rob Walker of VA Research while at the Atlanta Linux Showcase (which was great, BTW). None of the names have been changed, because, well, no one's an innocent these days. Click below for the story. So, it's the end of the Atlanta Linux Showcase. OctobrX, Rob Walker from VA Research and I are sent on a mission. VA has come along with enough computers to crack the RC5 challenge in a few seconds. Add in a bunch of big monitors, letting lots of people (like us) use their machines in their booth, and one kick-butt looking booth, and they have a shipping nightmare.

I came back from visiting around, and found Rob and OctobrX talking about going to Office Max to pick up shipping plastic. This stuff is like the Samsonite of saran wrap. If you've been to one of the mega-stores and seen their pallets wrapped in this plastic wrap, that's the stuff. You could wrap bodies in this and ship them all over the world--or 21" monitor boxes. Whichever. VA had a distinct lack of this wrap-that is, zero. Rob had been sent on a mission to get it, and since OctobrX was a local, he was co-opted for geographical knowledge. I was just along for the ride.

First stop was the area Office Max. Despite what appeared to be an abundance of office supply products, we met with along zeros when asking about the location of this particular type of shipping material. Rob went so far as to ask the store personnel, who responded with the ever witty "Well, if's not out there, then we don't have it. I don't know who has it. Try Office Depot, or Home Depot."

Never to be stopped in our valiant quest for massive amounts of what is essentially really big saran wrap, OctobrX hurtled up this through rush hour Atlanta traffic, until we pulled around the hill to Avalo....er...Home Depot. Draped across the front of the store was a massive sign stating in exciting letters "Open 24 hours a day". Up in the front, Rob began to drool excitedly at the thought of a 24/7 Home Depot, and verbally fell over himself trying to describe the elation and ecstasy that he felt in his heart. If only he knew the toils and troubles this store would bring down on us.

We entered the store and began excitedly looking at all of the wrapping plastic--ladders, paint, people...er, no. Every pallet in the place had this wrapping plastic around it. We began searching the store for the locale of this fabled substance. One issue-this Home Depot was approximately the size of the greater Chicago land area-I figure it had to be at least two or three thousand acres large. We wandered up and down, admiring the high quality designer plumbing supplies, and finding rolls of the plastic wrapping sitting on top of different products.

Rob, being the ever-resourceful individual that he is, took one as a, ah, "prop". We asked where we could find more and were directed down the main aisle. Here we met Jerome. Jerome would be our contact for the reminder of our Home Depot adventure. Upon encountering him, Rob asked excitedly where we could buy some of this amazing stuff.

The word from on was that we couldn't.

No, apparently this material which was used extensively throughout the store for exactly what we wanted it for--wrapping products, was reserved solely for use within the store. More and more employees gathered around as we began to hold a heated "discussion" about whether or not we could obtain said product.

Even with offers of bribery in the air, Jerome stood firm. After more begging, pleading, and wheedling, we managed to get the manager on the phone. Jerome, OctobrX, and myself stood by while watching Rob on the phone.

For those of you who have never had the pleasure of watching Rob in action, imagine the most persuasive phone voice you've ever heard, combined with someone who will never let you get a word in edgewise, and has that know-it-all voice developed from years of tech support.

It doesn't even come close to Mr. Rob Walker. The phone is putty in his hands.

After literally fifteen minutes of watching Rob, talking about the convention, /. and themes and Linux with the assorted employees gathered to watch the spectacle, the manager was finished with Rob, and wanted to speak with Jerome. Jerome talked, looked at us a few times, and then hung up the phone.

To get a clear picture of this, you should understand Jerome is not a small man. Jerome is stout, well-muscled guy. So's Trae, but hey, it's Jerome's store. Jerome turns to and says in a somewhat gravelly voice: "I'm supposed to escort you out of the store."

Rob looks a little surprised and responded with "No, you don't mean it, right?"

Jerome shook his head, smiles, and told us to follow him-Rob had managed to convince the manager of the value the Home Depot was supplying to us, faithful customers, and what a service they were doing for the community. Well, probably some of that, but also just trying to get Rob off the phone probably had a good deal to do with it as well.

Smiling like me after three or four shots Bushmills, we walked through the store. Rob and Jerome vanish for a few moments, we get our plastic priced, and leave the store. We walked back in a few minutes later to give to Jerome the VA, themes, /., and freshmeat shirt on my back.

So, only a good ninety minutes afterwards, we returned to the convention center, victories warriors. Bottom line is that Jerome of the Atlanta Home Depot went above and beyond, Home Depot should start carrying this plastic wrap for sale for easily, and Tim, the manager of said Home Depot, recognizes customer gold mines when he see's it.

That, and Rob knows how to wheedle people. Congrats to him...

Larry Augustin wrote in to tell us that VA is doing live updates from the Comdex Linux Pavillion. Sounds like a whole mess of crazy cool stuff is happening out there. Check it out.

Larry Augustin wrote in to tell us that VA is doing live updates from the Comdex Linux Pavillion. Sounds like a whole mess of crazy cool stuff is happening out there. Check it out.

Peter Collins gets creds for scooping the story that VA Research will be getting invested in by Sequoia Capital (best known for funding Yahoo amongst others). The press release is attached below. VA has been super cool to us, swapping hardware for banner ads and the likes for awhile. Congrats guys, Its super cool to see a major Linux Systems vendor going at the big time.

Sequoia Capital invests in Linux start-up VA Research.

Mountain View, CA. -- (BUSINESS WIRE) -- November 12, 1998 -- VA Research Inc., the global leader in Linux workstations and servers and Linux systems research, is proud to announce that Sequoia Capital, the Menlo Park, CA. based venture capital firm behind the capitalization of companies including Yahoo!, Tandem and 3COM, has invested in the Mountain View based company and validated its dedication to the Linux operating system.

"We're going to help build VA into the complete systems company for Linux users wherever they are", says Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital.

With Linux rapidly growing in power and influence within the computer industry, VA Research is well poised as the current global leader in Linux information technology solutions to leverage the Sequoia investment and provide truly full service Linux hardware and solutions.

"The investment by Sequoia and other investors will allow VA to extend its reach further and allow it to provide for the customer a collection of Linux hardware, support and services that will help corporations the world over leverage the power of the Linux operating system", says Dr. Larry Augustin, President and CEO of VA Research.

About VA Research:

VA Research (http://www.varesearch.com) is a privately held company that specializes in powerful, reliable, state of the art Linux based workstations and servers. Founded in 1993, the Mountain View,Ca. based VA Research has been at the forefront of Linux development and engineering and is the recognized world leader in Linux based hardware solutions. Visit VA Research at Comdex in the Sands Expo Center at booth S7236 in the Linux pavillion.

Sequoia Capital
3000 Sand Hill Road
Bldg. 3, Suite 280
Menlo Park, Ca. 94025
Main) (650) 854-3927
Fax) (650) 854-2977

VA Research Inc.
1235 Pear Ave. #109
Mountain View, Ca. 94043
Main) 650-934-3666
Fax) 650-964-7668

Press Contact:
Chris DiBona
chris@varesearch.com
Director of Linux Marketing
Main) 650-934-3666 x 108
Cell) 408-489-5345
Fax) 650-964-7668

Ladies and gentleman, both Hemos and I arrived Safely back in Holland yesterday afternoon. After spending all night catching up on 3 days of reply required email, writing a paper, and finishing all my homework, I finally now have a chance to sit back and write a summary of the whole event as best as I can muster. So it that link and read on if you're curious. It was a lot of fun. People everywhere, tons of booths, and penguin merchandise as far as the eye could see. One of my profs (Dr. Jipping: Hello! Don't fail me in small machines!) has a simple measure for any conference- the number of t-shirts you acquire. For me, this was a 7 shirt conference. This means I can eradicate all those nasty shirts with holes in them and frayed edges. I'm afriad I was embarassing most of the city with my warddrobe, so I'm sure they thank all the exhibitors more than I do.

Highlights for me? Well my laptop suffered amazing abuse- From the coke spilled all over the screen and keyboard, to the mystic CD-ROM drive that suddenly stops closing, I knew I was in for a fun weekend. Especially when my D key joined my X key in a unified strike against touch typing- but never fear! Donald Becker came to my rescue. So not only can he write mean ethernet code, but he can fix keyboards too. Thanks a million man! it's great being able to delete charachters in vi again.

ESR has some stories to tell about his Geeks with Guns adventure. He said he'll have some details for us later, but the funniest thing that I heard him say is that RMS is actually an excellent shot. He probably has amazingly powerful fingers from all those crazy emacs key bindings *grin*. They're gonna supposedly do it again at the next show and he's threatening to make me come- hope they have extra large targets for me.

VA Research donated about 6 million t-shirts to Slashdot/Themes.org/Freshmeat which were quite popular. By the end of the show, Scoop and I went on a mad dash throughout the building throwing the remainder of the supply at anyone who would sit still, and tried swapping them for anything we could get (UltraSparcs, 21" Monitors, Switched Hubs- oh wait, no never mind, t-shirts and stickers :)

A few people wrote in to remind me about a bunch of Corel's announcements that apparently aren't getting any major publicity else where. Not only has Corel now joined Linux Interntional, but they are donating a part of the profits from WP8/Linux to LI. They also said that binaries would be available for platforms that had demand (Alpha and PPC were both whispered and shouted, and presumably x86 and Strongarm is planned already). The keynote speech from Dr. Cowpland also mentioned that Corel was going to help with Wine development, and that they would shift to KDE or Gnome when the market was ready. San Mehat also promised to send me a NetWinder after showing off his Netwinder. Mind you his netwinder was a 10 chip beowulf cluster communicating over SCSI. Hot swappable CPUs. Wow. They said they can do 40 of those things, and it still runs cool. Super cool.

There are like 30 sites that people submitted loaded with pictures. Kestrel sent me good one that even features a picture of Hemos & I showing some skin. Gasp.

No Slashdot wasn't tampered with- I obvioisly faked the poll this weekend. I don't really think there are a hundred thousand people who wanted to see OctobrX naked at ALS.

I've got a copy of Oracle sitting on my desk at home to play with, as well as a copy of Applix from Linux Central. I'm looking forward to a free afternoon to play with them. Spare time is mythical for me right now though.

Those caffeinated penguin mints are crazy. Do not take more than 6. After 7 on thursday I crashed hard. Not as hard as Mandrake though. He was hiding out at the Slashdot/Themes/Meat booth for much of saturday shaking off the fun and games from the night before. He also gave me permission to fake his death if I ever decide I'm not getting enough flame mail.

Shook hundreds of hands. Met tons of readers. Had a really great time. I want to again thank Cyclic and VA for getting us all down there, giving us shirts and machines to demo with, and just generally being cool guys to talk to. Lots of people had good suggestions for Slashdot, and many of them will probably be incorporated as soon as I get the machine stable again. Many other people had suggestions for that too, and I'll keep trying. Its definately mysql right now, and I'm working on it as fast as I can. I'm sure once I fix it I'll break something else. I think its time to hire a competant sysadmin, cuz I sure ain't that.

It was especially cool meeting up with OctobrX and Scoop and hanging out with them. Hemos and I both had a great time hanging out with them. Now, back to class. The downside to conferences is that ya gotta go back to real life afterwards to live. At least until LinuxWorld and The Bazaar. Looking forward to seeing everyone there too...

(I probably forgot a ton of things to mention in this article- so much happened so fast, but now I need to go to class. If I forgot something super cool, let me know and I'll make sure to get it in here when I get back in front of a net connected box.)

It's all fun and games out here at ALS, hopefully I can sit down now and actually get the summary out before either netscape crashes again, or something else occurs that forces me to leave the safe haven that is the Slash/Themes/Meat booth. Hit the link and read the deal... I haven't had much time to hit the speakers- running a booth sorta requires that you're actually there sometimes. But I did manage to catch the Raster & Mandrake show. They ran down the status of Enlightenment's development and basically wowed the whole room with all the uber cool features that will be available when DR15 hits the wire. No they didn't announce a release date.

Dr. Michael Cowpland of Corel had a whole host of cool things to say, including the announcement of Word Perfect 8, free for personal use. He talked about the NetWinders (the corel booth actually has a 10 netwinder beowulf cluster running... how many ways can you spell drool?).

So a quick rundown of some of the highlights of the exhibits- yeah Corel has a 10 machine Netwinder beowulf cluster. Christmas is coming... mommy?

All the distributions major distributions are here: Red Hat (of course) is here in full force. The RHAD booth and the Red Hat booth are pretty popular. Debian is here (hey Debian! The Themes/Meat/Slash booth challanges you to quake! Be gentle). Caldera and SuSE are here too. Got a big stack of SuSE CDs to bring back home to the SuSE addicts.

As for hardware, Alta Technology is showing off Alpha boxes that are alltogether far to fast for me to tolerate. VA is here (side note:my presense here, as well as that of Trae & Scoop & Hemos is sponsored by VA Research and Cyclic Software so go buy their stuff) with some quite impressive machines. In fact, I think that most of the machines that I've seen scattered around are VA boxes. Penguin Computing has a fairly scary machine that features 12 fans. Redundancy is always nice *grin*.

It's pretty crazy seeing Oracle, Informix, Sun etc etc here. No doubt that we're definately mainstream now. Very cool.

What else? There's enough Linux and Penguin merchandise to last well after the apocalypse. Stuffed penguins, t-shirts, CDs, fuzzy little penguins, stickers, hats. Jeff and I came here with no spare shirts, and we're still not naked so I guess we're doing all right :)

Crowds are gathering, so I'll wrap this up for now. I'll post more yet before the sun sets.

Hemos and I are seconds away from leaving for ALS. Everyone be good while we're gone! We'll hopefully be back online yet tonight and be able to post live reports from the show. Looking forward to seeing a lot of you at the t.o/fm//. booth. (Thanks again to Cyclic Software and VA Research for getting all of us down there and setting us up)

OctobrX hinted at it, but here's the deal. Slashdot, Freshmeat, and Themes.org are going to be going to the Atlanta Linux Showcase at the end of October. Hemos and Myself will be representing Slashdot, along with OctobrX and Scoop from Themes & FM respectively. We'll have a booth and some VA Research machines to run web sites on. The whole adventure is being sponsored by VA and Cyclic Software. If there is demand I can bring shirts for folks. We're still working out what we're going to do with the booth- the nude interpretive dance idea seems to be a popular choice though.

Larry Augustin writes "A friend and fellow Linux advocate Charles Booher faces the grand jury today on charges that he violated federal export laws by making encryption software available on the Internet. I haven't talked to Charles since this started, but I'm sure he could use your help and support. I've pledged a donation from VA Research. I'd encourage others who can help him to do so in any way they can. I'll post more info on how people can help once I talk to Charles."

Larry Augustin writes "A friend and fellow Linux advocate Charles Booher faces the grand jury today on charges that he violated federal export laws by making encryption software available on the Internet. I haven't talked to Charles since this started, but I'm sure he could use your help and support. I've pledged a donation from VA Research. I'd encourage others who can help him to do so in any way they can. I'll post more info on how people can help once I talk to Charles."

The third-to-last piece of hardware just went in the Slashdot box this morning. VA Research (Blatant Plug Alert:Go Buy Stuff From Them!) sent us some parts- RAM being the important one. The box now weighs in as a Dual P2/266 with 256 megs of RAM. This will mean that the box will still function during heavy posting (ala any time either KDE or Gnome is hinted at *grin*). The last piece is a hard drive/uber fast controller which should be here RSN. Then if we can just iron out the mysql glitch, everything will be spiffy to ship the server out to the land of vast bandwidth. We're getting there folks, so keep hanging in there. As a side note, we had 182,000 hits yesterday- all this hardware should give us some room to grow now.

Sam Ockman wrote in to tell us about some more tidbits about last nights SVLUG. It seems that RedHat, O'Reily and VA Research gave out the first Open Source Award to (surprise!) Linus! Valued at $5k, it included a decked out VA Research Workstation. Sam also mentioned that 480 people attended last night. Wish I lived in CA- would have loved to have been there. Very cool stuff.