Up until about a year ago, most investors had never heard the word "Linux." Seeing dollar signs, investment bankers quickly took a few Linux companies public, notably Red Hat (RHAT: news, msgs) and VA Linux Systems (LNUX: news, msgs). Both had stunning debuts.

The first release of Bowstreet's software, which automates the construction of extranets, was called Web Automation Factory and supported Sun Solaris and Windows NT operating systems. Bowstreet officially plans to embrace Linux next week, adding its support for the open source operating system.

A handful of companies, which have spent large amounts of time customizing Linux into their own distribution package, are now cashing in the Linux craze. Is this a good thing for the Linux "revolution" and is it fair that a few profit from the work of so many?

The purpose of this article is to explain how to create an installation CD-ROM from one of the Linux distributions. We will limit ourselves to IDE CD-ROM writers, any ftp program, the program cdrecord, and the pre-made ISO images from various Linux distributions. We will also be touching the /etc/lilo.conf file.

Linux has really come of age. It already serves millions of web pages, hosts filesystems, and recently has started to migrate onto desktop systems. However, my main interest for this adolescent OS is one market that is currently out of it's reach: the content creation workstation.

Unlike Windows, Linux is inherently modular and can be easily scaled into compact configurations — barely larger than DOS — that can even fit on a single floppy. What's more, since Linux source code is freely available, it's possible to customize the OS according to unique embedded system requirements.

From downloading to installing to configuring, find out how to make StarOffice work for you on the desktop or across the network.

Sure, if you don't know your serial bus from the crosstown express, Linux might not be the ideal desktop for you. But the software to do most anything you want to on Linux is available -- and almost all of it is free.

Hewlett-Packard has won an important endorsement in its heated battle against Sun Microsystems over the use of Java. Lynx Real-Time Systems, a major provider of operating systems used in non-PC computing devices, has signed a deal to use a Hewlett-Packard clone of Sun's Java software in its version of Linux for embedded devices.

Have you been trying to install DB2 Universal Database on a Linux-based workstation? Did you run into some troubles? As I scan around the DB2 and Linux newsgroups, I hear from many of users who are getting frustrated when trying to get DB2 running on Linux. How did this problem get so big?