Networking software maker Novell on Monday boosted its Linux portfolio with the acquisition of Linux software maker Ximian for an undisclosed sum.

Red Hat escalated the legal war over Linux on Monday by announcing that it has filed a lawsuit against the SCO Group.

Red Hat has put out a beta for version 3 of its enterprise class operating system, offering up support for a host of processors.

The Open Groupware.org (OGo) project, a sister organisation to OpenOffice.org, has announced the formation of an international development community and an initial release of Open Source groupware server software, writes Martin Langham of Bloor Research.

Oracle will launch a Web-based center for Linux application developers working with the Perl, PHP, and Python programming languages. The site will initially provide sample source code for Perl only. PHP and Python code will be added later, in that order.

Intel joins other major platform companies such as Hewlett-Packard Co., Oracle Corp., SAP AG, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Borland Software Corp. and a host of others in the IBM Corp.-sponsored effort to create an open platform for Java-based tools integration.

Scribus, a new desktop publishing and layout program for Linux, is the most impressive new free software application I've ever seen. Period. No contest.

One of the key attractions of Linux is that it's reliable, capable, continuously improving and free. Millions of Linux servers are installed in corporations, and desktop Linux is beginning to get some notice. If SCO has its way, however, the Linux community will suffer a setback but longer term will prevail.

On the brink of losing a pivotal account to an ascending rival, Microsoft last March dispatched CEO Steve Ballmer to the rescue. The German city of Munich was balking at a $36.6 million proposal from Microsoft to upgrade 14,000 desktop PCs to the latest versions of Windows and Office. Instead, Munich -- Germany's third-largest city and a technology hub for Central Europe -- was leaning toward a switch to Linux, the upstart computer operating system whose open-source code is continually improved by volunteer programmers worldwide.

Red Hat released a new test version of its Linux operating system on Monday along with a new development process that's designed to include outside programmers.