Sun announced that it is making the Solaris Operating Environment Network Driver Porting Kit for Linux Drivers available free of charge. This kit provides scripts and guidelines to let developers convert PCI-based Linux driver source into a binary Solaris driver for the Intel platform.

MSC.Software announced that it is to provide scientists, engineers and technical designers with a pre-integrated and optimized turnkey Linux Cluster solutions based on its MSC.Linux appliances and HP VISUALIZE Personal Workstations.

Red Hat announced the IA-64 JumpStart Program, which provides all the software,

tools, support and training needed for independent software and hardware vendors to quickly develop solutions for Red Hat Linux on Intel's new Itanium IA-64 architecture.

HP and IBM both pledged last week to support Linux applications on additional variants of Unix, so that Linux binaries could become an almost universal format for deploying applications.

IBM is embracing Linux with a vengeance and, in the process, tossing a challenge to Microsoft. As the prospect of a Microsoft breakup looms closer, competition

is heating up the already bubbling Linux market.

Software suppliers at LinuxWorld Expo rolled out products aimed at embedded applications ranging from set-top boxes to cellular phones to flight simulators.

Linux may be moving off the farm and onto a PC or high-end server near you.

SCO made a series of announcements at its user conference designed to demonstrate both the software vendor's increased commitment to Linux and highlight the transfer of two of its divisions to Linux distribution company Caldera Systems.

SCO says that it will deliver a Linux-compatible environment based on the UnixWare kernel by the end of the year. It is claimed that it can already host Linux applications with far better performance results than can be achieved by running

the same Linux software on a native Linux kernel on identical hardware.

Linux is predominantly found on Intel boxes, but if this year's Linux World Expo is any indication, it is making steady inroads into the Mac community.