VA Linux Systems has reported record revenues of $56.1 million for the fiscal first quarter, 2001, ended October 27, 2000, an increase of 278% compared to the same period of fiscal 2000 and an increase of 11% compared to the prior fiscal quarter.

The Linux desktop battle heated up Wednesday when the developers of KDE announced wide industry support for the newly formed KDE League. Developers of the competing Gnome open-source operating environment beat KDE to the punch in August when the Gnome Foundation released a laundry list of vendors backing the group.

While the Gnome Foundation has grand plans for common application program interfaces across platforms and operating systems such as Solaris, the KDE League's goals are much more modest. As one KDE supporter put it, "This puts the bread on the KDE hackers' tables."

The companies supplying the federal government with Linux and open source products and services met with the agencies they served in the First Annual Federal Linux Users' Conference. Though attendance was low, organizers and many vendors remained optimistic about governmental use of Linux.

US-based Red Hat has tied up with Clover Technologies, an Indian software company to form Red Hat India Pvt. Ltd, which will offer technical support and training to its customers in India.

If this were the first time that you installed Linux, you probably, would have

gone the dual-boot way. But you do need a boot manager that will allow you to

switch between the different OS' installed on your system. Linux provides LILO

( LInux LOader ). This is a very simple but flexible boot manager. I use it to

boot multiple OS' and to check out various Linux kernels.

When your computer starts up, the BIOS executes a bootstrap program which lies

in the Master Boot Record (MBR) of your first hard drive or your floppy. The

Oddsmakers in this town probably aren't betting against Linux, but the operating system's users and vendors both believe that its old-style command-line interface makes it a long shot for moving beyond its current niche as an Internet infrastructure building block.

The partnership allows for a co-branded service where Red Hat users can access the range of tools, functionality and content offered by Guru.com. The alliance will take full advantage of Guru.com's project matching capabilities and offer Red Hat corporate customers access to some of the most qualified open source IT talent available.

IBM announced at Comdex Las Vegas that IBM would join the new KDE League and partner with Trolltech, Mandrake and others to continue work on IBM's ViaVoice voice recognition software for the KDE desktop.

Ericsson says the appliance will become more of an open platform, and Red Hat is working on a seamless way of downloading appropriate applets, making this the first Linux appliance with pretensions to being a platform, rather than somewhere where the Penguin remains hidden behind the curtains.