At thousands of businesses around the world, people have been installing their new copies of Windows 2000, then scratching their collective corporate craniums and thinking, "we actually paid money for this?" As a result, the Linux geeks have their best shot ever at breaking through to the mainstream. But as a business writer, I only want to know one thing - can Linux based companies make any money?

There are about as many ways to build and install Apache as there are reasons to run a web server. As it's our first time out, we'll take the road most traveled and leave the advanced configurations for later columns.

Microsoft took a swipe at the growing Linux movement today as it joined forces with Intel to tackle the emerging market for "server appliances," a new category of special-purpose computers.

Microsoft Office for Linux is one product that will probably never make it out the door. Why? Microsoft has only one, trivial, reason to port Office to Linux: money (which Microsoft has no shortage of). But, if Microsoft were to do so, anyway, they would have to overcome numerous obstacles: fierce competition with Star Office, demonization by the Linux community, and their own FUD to name a few.

Sybase Inc. is rolling out a new version of SQL Anywhere Studio that offers improved data synchronization, broader platform support and interactivity with more data sources. The upgrade, code-named Aspen, also introduces support for Microsoft Corp.'s DOS operating system, used in many handheld industrial devices, as well as Linux.

Caching is an important function for a wide variety of Internet-related concerns, as ISPs, educational institutions and corporations all find that it measurably enhances system performance. There are a host of commercial caching products on the market, but perhaps the most popular is Squid, the open-source cache originally produced by the ARPA Harvest project and now maintained by the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR).

Is this your idea of software nirvana: an application that is reliable, robust, relatively easy to customize, able to run on any computer platform, and free, to top it all off? If so, you don’t have to wait until you get to heaven to experience this kind of software. You just have to use Linux.

Linux could soon fit in the palm of your hand. A South Korean start-up, Gmate, has unveiled a Palm-size device that runs the open-source Linux operating system. The unit, called Yopy, made its debut at the CeBIT show here and is expected to ship by midyear in both Korean and English-language versions, says Lee Sang-Don, Gmate's general manager of marketing and sales.

The GNU Project is looking for individuals to join its volunteer software evaluation group. Experience in building and installing software packages (using standard GNU utilities like gcc, make, etc.) is required.

This article is the last in a series covering the suitability of Linux for different types of device. So far we have covered Linux in embedded devices and Linux as a desktop OS. The potential of Linux as a server operating system, for example for file, print, email and Web services, is generally accepted, so all that remains is to discuss the potential for Linux as an enterprise-scale operating system for mission-critical applications.