Corel's strategy as outlined by Derek J. Burney, president and CEO of Corel includes selling off its Linux distribution while retaining the Linux versions of its WordPerfect and graphics software, paring down its WordPerfect offering from 30 international flavors to 4 English-language versions, and placing a renewed emphasis on its graphics software, especially in the Macintosh market.

HP will demonstrate its upcoming Linux system manageability software, called ProcessResource Manager (or PRM) and ServiceControl Manager (or SCM), at the conference, as well as two Web hosting products, Netstructure 1010 and 1020, which are slated to launch in March.

What good is a Band-Aid if you don't use it? Although software makers routinely release "fixes" designed to plug secutiry holes, the antidotes are often ignored.

The growing disconnect between the success of Linux technology and the success of Linux technology companies hit its widest mark last week when analysts and attorneys decided to pile on flagship company VA Linux Systems.

kHTTPd is a webserver that handles only static (file based, non-cgi/php) webpages, and passes all requests for non-static (dynamic) information to a regular userspace-webserver such as Apache or Zeus. This is benificial because it offloads the delivery of static webpages to the kernel, allowing the userspace-webserver program (such as apache) to do what it does best: deliver dynamic content (cgi-bin, php).

"Sell a really flaky distribution of Linux. Follow it several months later with a new version and claim that it is 20 times as reliable as the previous version. Market it as being a huge improvement, and forget it was junk to begin with. It is amazing how much people will pay for bug fixes, if you claim that it's really a "new" operating system."

"Linux is cheaper, but is it backward compatible? VMWare, Lin4Win and WINE all provide backwards compatibility with Windows, and Dosemu provides backwards compatibility with DOS applications, something Microsoft is threatening to drop from its own offering. Finally, does Linux provide something that the user desires? Yes, stability and security."

Given its dramatic momentum, Linux seems all but certain to play a role in corporate life. Despite its high profile, however, Linux remains a minority OS, and it's still not clear just what will have to happen before Linux becomes a corporate mainstay.

Overall, if you know what you're doing, installing an office full of Linux-operated computers running Nautilus and StarOffice is extremely economical and not all that difficult to do. Figure on allowing three hours per workstation to get them up and running.

"Reiserfs inclusion in 2.4.1 was basically the plan for the very beginning: it was so widely known that it was even reported in the press, so I didn't even bother to point out reiserfs as a 2.4.1 patch."