AOL not bidding for Red Hat, Jan 22, 2002

AOL Time Warner apparently is not making a bid to buy Linux manufacturer Red Hat, said sources familiar with the matter. On Saturday, the Washington Post reported that the media giant was near to cutting a deal with Red Hat in a competitive strike against Microsoft. Sources familiar with the situation emphatically insisted the two companies are not near an acquisition deal, nor have they discussed one.

The number of Asian companies running Linux has more than doubled in the last year, with 15 per cent of businesses in the region now using the open source software.

In 2001, between six and seven per cent of Asia-Pacific companies used Linux, according to research from the Gartner Group.

An almost two-year old bug in AMD's Athlon and Duron processors has been found to trip up Linux users.

Users of the 2.4 kernel have been informed that a problem exists in the Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) video functionality when used in conjunction with an Athlon or Duron processor.

Whether Intel's new 0.13-micron Northwood P4 is a good buy for Linux or Windows users I won't be able to say until I compare it to a similar high-end system by AMD later this week; but for now I can definitely say that, paired with the 850 mobo and 512M RDRAM, it's fast on both operating systems, if not spectacularly reliable.

It's the XP 'product activation' slavery agreement that drove me, finally, to Linux. And fortunately, a lot of the newer Linux distros now install nicely on any x86 machine. I've been able to install it successfully and then refer to the documentation to tweak it properly, just as I used to do with Microsoft's products before the cheap bastards shrank their documentation to a mere glossy advertisement brochure.

I have one copy of SuSE 7.3 Pro. I have it on every machine in my house (there are four). I've broken no law, nor any pseudo-law such as that promulgated in Microsoft's rubbish EULA. My machines are all running very well, as I've since learned, from the copious documentation provided by SuSE in exchange for a modest sum of money, how to tweak my Linux machines in exactly the way I once tweaked my MS machines -- in a long-lost era of decency.

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