China's Ministry of Education is preparing to announce

significant procurements of software for the Linux

operating system, according to an executive involved with

the plan. There are more people in school in China, than

there are people in the U.S. There are 260 million primary-

and secondary-school students in the mainland.

The key to Microsoft's domination is not in its predatory business

practices, it's in the mindset of users. Everyone else seems to use

Windows. How can anyone hope to run a business in the 21st century,

without the ability to open Microsoft's proprietary file formats?

The new Linux kernel, version 2.4, likely will be released in August or September, said Linus Torvalds, founder and leader of the Linux movement. Torvalds initially had hoped 2.4 would be released in 1999, but in February he amended his prediction to July, 18 months after the current 2.2 kernel was released.

Red Hat chief fights back "I feel badly for PC Week's John Taschek ("Open source is an open road to nowhere"). Not understanding one of the biggest shifts in the industry since the PC in the early '80s is a career-limiting mistake for a journalist who specializes in covering technology."

This series of articles are a follow on to the Checklist for Newbies. They assume that you have installed one of the Linux distributions on your computer and are now raring to go. But wait, with all the hype that currently surrounds Linux, you've lost sight of the single most important question, what can I do now?

Irving Wladawsky-Berger has a near evangelistic take on Linux, which normally wouldn't be unusual, considering the growing popularity of the free, operating-system software. However, Mr. Wladawsky-Berger is technology and strategy vice president in IBM's enterprise systems group. He believes the Linux operating system, currently popular for running Web servers, will widely be adopted over the next few years to run other types of servers and a variety of gizmos and appliances.

Makers of the operating system hope to throw off a geeky image says Paul Talacko. Linux, the upstart operating system that many IT experts believe will one day rival Microsoft's Windows, may be the toast of Wall Street but it is still run on only about 3 per cent of desktop computers.

This month LinuxGO brings to you Mr. Phil Hughes, publisher of LinuxJournal and founder of SSC.

After calling off its initial public offering and replacing its chief executive officer on the same day last month, Linux services provider Linuxcare is still not in any rush to jump back in line to go public.

Independent software vendor (ISV) enthusiasm for Linux is not uniform. ISVs are

warming to the future prospects of Linux, but many key ISVs still harbor reservations

and do not yet see sufficient enterprise demand according to a recent Gartner Group

Study.