In what could be the world's first, Singapore's CWC and Ericsson Singapore have jointly developed a handheld computer that runs on Linux OS. Called DelphiPad, it's a PDA-lookalike that comes with a 10-inch touch-screen, weighs 1.3 kg, and is set to debut commercially in Q3 this year at below US$1,000.

This round up of Linux news includes information about an a new open-source software converter, an award to a Linux company by PC World Magazine in Denmark and the latest on company alliances.

"The unfortunate reality of being a Systems Administrator is that sometime during your career, you will most likely run into a user (or lus3r if you prefer) whom has an IQ of a diced carrot and demands that you drop everything to fix their system/email/whatever. This article focuses on how to deal with these kinds of issues."

Under an agreement between the two companies, which are expected to announce the deal later on Wednesday, IBM and Turbolinux will jointly market, distribute and support IBM's DB2 database, WebSphere, Lotus Domino, Tivoli Framework and IBM's small business suits for Linux software programs.

Database giant Oracle Corp. has said that its leading 8i database and recently released 9i application server are available for the new Linux 2.4 kernel.

In the second part of this series about Linux on the Mac, you will learn how to back up your Mac OS, repartition your hard disk, and install the LinuxPPC 2000 distribution on your Mac -- How to set up dual-boot and Linux-only configurations.

"We now use computers for things vastly different from what the original desktop designers envisioned, such as for entertainment, audio and video ... and cruising the Internet. Individual users commonly now have thousands of files on their computers and access to billions more on the Internet. Their "view," however, is still typically the single document or file on the screen, a metaphor appropriate to a printed page but not to the myriad ways we use the global universe of networked, multimedia information now readily at hand."

Consumers who attend Macworld Expo Web will have multiple course options to choose from. But the first course offered to "Mac Managers" is called "Linux for the PPC." That sums up the situation for the venerable Macintosh as the alternate operating system in corporations these days. No longer is it considered the long-shot underdog among the fire-breathing opposition to anything from Microsoft. Linux now plays that role.

Linux has already progressed further and faster than sceptics predicted, fuelling speculation that operating systems would become "transparent" and that the long-running operating system wars were experiencing their final battles. The battle this time is at the enterprise system end of the scale.

The year 2000 saw Windows NT steaming ahead yet again as the most hacked web server operating system, after a majority of defaced pages were found to be sitting on compromised NT boxes. As NT is one of the most popular options for web servers, it appears that it is attacked most, however a number of companies running web sites on variations of Linux also suffered the embarrassment of defacement.