SuSE's US operation today laid off roughly three-fourths of its staff, paring the unit down to a skeleton crew of 12. SuSE President Volker Wiegand confirmed the report, although the company's public relations people previously denied it, an exercise in untruth and "bad communications" that Wiegand feared "will have consequences."

"The Linux revolution is past the hype stage, past the cries of surprise from the tres duh press. Linux is a better mousetrap and the world is realizing this. No amount of FUD from Microsoft is going to change that."

A plug-in is a software module that adds new functions or extensions to a host application, without the need to recompile the program. The plug-in functions are stored within a shared object file (*.so in Linux, *.dll in Windows) that may contain one or several plug-ins. The application provides the entry points to dock an object, and the new functions are immediately available. The user accesses the plug-in as a normal part of the host's interface.

The 2.4 kernel systematically addresses and remedies the main weakness that has kept Linux from winning more servers in the enterprise: scalability. This article looks at the changes and improvements to the 2.4 kernel and also how it compares to the network operating systems that currently dominate the enterprise.

Mr. Cowpland said that his faith in the Linux programming language still has not died and that ZIM would be using different programming languages and operating systems, including JAVA and Linux, to make sure that ZIM's products work on numerous different computer networks and technologies.

Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, the German investment bank, was planning to release its Openadaptor software to the open source community. But, the software is not based on Linux and Apache as claimed by news reports.

"In the future, all network content will be defined in XML ... Jabber is just a generic XML routing framework." XML, then, becomes not only a key enabler of innovation, but also a driver for innovation.

Ximian, a commercial Gnome services company, will customize the Gnome desktop for HP-UX, and give the hardware company an "enhanced, tested" version of Gnome. Ximian put together the demo for its monkey-themed booth at LinuxWorld in nine hours, but the full-functioning version of Gnome for HP-UX will take a couple of months.

"The 2.4.0-test releases received a lot of testing. So far it worked fine on all machines I installed it on. I'm particularly happy that we got integrated most of the m68k (Amiga, Atari, Mac, Sun-3, ...) port. As you probably know, Linux/m68k was the first port of Linux to a non-Intel platform (yes, it's even older than the Alpha port)."

GRUB, unlike LILO, is able to read filesystems and recognize kernel images too. While LILO requires the physical location of the kernel on your drive, GRUB does not. Even the latest filesystem ReiserFS is supported. This means that you don't have to re-install GRUB every time you make a change to the config file or install a new kernel. If your BIOS supports LBA then there is also no problem reading beyond 1024 cylinders. There's some good support for network booting of diskless clients. On the other hand, GRUB installation can be a bit of a problem.