O’Reilly Net has an article describing dealing with latency in Linux. “Latency can be defined as the elapsed time (delay) between the generation of an event and its realization. If the delay is great enough to be perceptible, you have a latency problem. Here are a number of easy-to-implement adjustments that will dramatically reduce latency times on Linux systems.“

Slashdot readers talk about an announcement that LinuxPPC has released a beta of its next product,
while SuSE has announced it will ship SuSE 7.0 for PowerPC on
November 20.

Aleksandar Stancin aka D’Pressed in this article at net-security.org discusses, in brief, compiling of a new Linux kernel, or an old one, which ever pleases you most, on a example of the upcoming kernel 2.4.0, by using the 2.4.0-test9 version, and some references on new and improved firewalling implemented in it, called iptable. –LogError

Oreillynet.com has a how-to: “The configuration system that PHP uses for installation is one of
those nice, simple things in life that makes it rosy. At first it might
seem a little confusing, but it’s really very easy.”

Linuxdevices.com has a story on several annoucements by embedded Linux company Esfia: “A brand new embedded Linux software company has just joined the growing number of Asian companies that are
embedding Linux within consumer Internet and information appliances. Timed to coincide with last week’s Comdex
extravaganza, Taiwan-based Esfia unleashed a volley of product and technology announcements and launched its
new website.”

“www.userlocal.com is a new slackware user site that is banner-free, 100% lynx compatible, and run by volunteers. If you use slackware linux then come on by! Userlocal features slackware geared articles, news, help, links, propaganda, screenshots, and anything else we can think of or you can suggest. All suggestions and feedback are welcome. Hopefully userlocal will become a focal point for the online slackware community.”
–neskoy@userlocal.com

A few distributions have security updates for the recent modutilities hole: Linux-Mandrake and SuSE Linux both have updated packages. Debian is unaffected by this problem, as is Slackware 7.1 and up (which uses a recent modutils version). Earlier Slackware versions should obtain the updated package from -current.

The next release of GroupIT, v0.96.1, has been released for testing. The press release on Linuxpr.com talks about some of the features of the package, as well as links to sites using it, and where to download the tarball.

“In this and the next few columns, George Lebl will discuss Bonobo and other related component-model technologies. This series begins with an introduction to some Bonobo basics like the C API for CORBA.”

The full article is available on IBM’s developer works.

C|Net reports on the Caldera/SCO merger. Included are the plans for updating the Linux kernel with more high-end features, and some the clustering services they will offer.