While businesses such as Red Hat and VA Linux Systems have generated billions of dollars for their founders and stockholders, the benefits have flowed the other way as well, the founder of Linux said today. Linux has been technically strong, but the influence of the business world has forced it to become usable as well, said Linus Torvalds, founder and still leader of the collective effort to develop the operating system, at a keynote address at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo.

Linux.net, a choice parcel of Internet real estate, has been acquired by Infostrada Communications, publisher of the Linux Magazine, the company will announce tomorrow. Fred van Kempen, who registered the Internet address in 1994 along with Linux.com, sold the site for an undisclosed sum after a bidding round involving about 15 companies, Infostrada said in a statement.

When Linus Torvalds takes center stage at LinuxWorld on Wednesday, he will no longer wear the hat of the impartial shepherd of the Linux operating system, but that of the creator of a new Linux distribution, Mobile Linux.

At Linux Expo in Paris, France, Inprise/Borland announced VisiBroker for Java 4.0, the Linux version of its CORBA ORB. Based on open industry standards, Inprise/Borland's VisiBroker 4.0 for Linux, delivers the ideal foundation for customers to expand their presence on the Web and provides them with the technology infrastructure needed to support enterprise-scale eBusiness applications.

Now that Transmeta have laid their cards on the table, it seems to me a good time to start a debate about whether and how Linux should be extended to better exploit code morphing processors. I'm sure that this question has already been discussed within Transmeta, but they are in the awkward position that any suggestions that they make in this regard will be branded as self-seeking.

Recently, Rick Collette was nice enough to sit down and talk to Geeknews.org about SPIRO Linux, one of the latest Linux distributions to come onto the scene. Rick is the head developer for SPIRO Linux and offers us some insight as to the roots of SPIRO Linux, their recent successes and of course their Fox mascot.

Dell now has begun selling two models of its laptops with Linux preinstalled, the company said today. The products, the Latitude CPX and the Inspiron 7500, come with Red Hat Linux 6.1 and are certified by Linuxcare, a representative said. The Inspirons with Linux are available now, but the Latitudes will be available Feb. 4, according to a company representative.

Compaq Computer joined IBM, SGI and others in reaffirming its commitment to Linux with new tools and services designed to increase the acceptance of the upstart operating system in the corporate world.

This week at LinuxWorld, Maxspeed will roll out a $149 machine called +One that's about the size of a pack of cigarettes. At the same time, Vega Technologies is developing a technology to share one PC's processing power among multiple thin clients -- for about $199 per station.

Though still primarily a server operating system, Linux is showing signs of slowly morphing into a desktop environment for everyday users.