CD-Writers are very popular now and Linux does have good support for your

cd-writer. Your cd-writer should work just fine with Linux unless you have

a really old one. If you have a SCSI cd-writer then it should work right

out of the box. If you have an IDE cd-writer then there is a little more

work involved. You will have to recompile your kernel with SCSI support. This

SCSI support is just a emulation and not an actual SCSI implementation. USB

writers are not supported as of now, though parallel port writers seem

to be.

Providing an easy upgrade to the soon-to-be-available Linux 2.4 kernel, a wide array of improvements, including USB support for keyboards and mice, and new encryption capabilities, Red Hat Linux 7 is an evolutionary upgrade of the operating system but is hardly a showstopper.

In this part of a three-part series, Pawel Leszek looks at open source firewall solutions for Linux.

In the same box, you get support for both Intel and Alpha platforms, along with English and Japanese language versions of the OS. Right now, Kondara is more bilingual than multilingual, but as additional languages become available, Kondara MNU/Linux 2000 will likely carve its own niche in the Linux marketplace.

For enterprise network professionals looking at Linux-based storage products, two recent industry happenings should be of interest: Sun's purchase of Cobalt Networks, and VA Linux's entrance into the storage arena.

The level of ire towards the company has reached new heights with the flaming thread on the linux-kernel mailing list and an actual bug submission to Bugzilla asking for the recall of Red Hat 7.0. Throw in a report on Slashdot about 2,500 bugs found on the currently shipping Red Hat 7.0, and you get the kind of week that makes a Red Hat executive reach for the aspirin.

Compaq last week admitted that Linux needs to establish more enterprise deployments and must gain additional software vendor support if it is to become more than a niche operating system.

A Kansas City Linux firm, Atipa, competing with its Silicon Valley rival, VA Linux Systems, has acquired a company created by the founders of an open-source network management/systems management project.

SuSE has quite a number of developers of Open Source projects on their payroll.

The projects include the Linux kernel, ISDN, ALSA, glibc, XF86, KDE and many others. These developers simply continue the work on their project and don't have to worry about paying their rent.

After almost three years, the most significant visible achievement of LSB is a beta specification called the Linux Development Platform Specification (LDPS). LDPS is a paltry 1,800 words describing an inadequate set of building blocks for Linux applications.