After talking to coworkers and friends who either had Linux training, or who had used Linux at home, Wayne Bridges decided on the Linux-Mandrake distribution as the most user friendly. He got an off-the-shelf copy of Linux-Mandrake 7.2 and headed home to get started. Here he describes how to install and configure it.

EnGarde Secure Linux features a comprehensive suite of Open Source tools that provide a secure and stable foundation for building a secure Internet presence.

Linux is among the most stable OS ever made. Well I wonder, "How does it act under Windows?" Windows is crash-prone. What would the impression be if someone installs Linux for Windows, and it crashed? They, like many Win users, would blame the application, and not look into it enough to find that it was Window's fault.

"The X version of my notion of a grand package handler would include the things that would enable anyone who cared to do so to learn all about compiling while doing it. In addition to the wonderful things that CheckInstall does, it has caused me to think that my notion is entirely possible, most of it by bringing together things that already exist. I can't think of anything that would better promote Linux, and suck the wind out of that 'steep learning curve' nonsense."

"Here I am talking about an operating system back from the dead and what Linux can learn from it. The operating system is IBM's perennially crippled OS/2. It's back in the form of a very good system with a very bad name: eCommerceStation. I have a beta here, and it works very well."

Linux-Mandrake 8.0 provides 11 window managers and desktop environments to choose from. It uses the latest Linux Kernel 2.4.3 to provide numerous enhancements and new features. There are two ISO images files available in the "iso/" directory. The second one brings more applications. These iso images work and are speed-optimized for i586 (Pentium class) processors and higher.

A handful of developers who were interested in creating games for Indrema have launched the TuxBox project. They have pledged to bring a Linux gaming/multipurpose console to market. And this with more of a community than a corporate focus.

PyWISARD is a WISARD implementation suitable to work with binary images (PPM format). It contains a wisard neural network module in python, a

simple Tkinter GUI and a HTML presentation.

The purpose of maki is to serve XML files via the web. A web developer can specify that the XML data be processed or transformed through any

number of steps. Each step is either a stylesheet transformation or a custom process.

Kevin Dankwardt raises a number of serious issues and concerns regarding the ELC Board's ELC Platform Specification proposal and provides some possible answers, many of which are given as alternatives. Plus he points out what appear to be inherent contradictions in the announced goals and purposes.