Linux creator Linus Torvalds, who often comes across a bit sheepish anyway, tried even harder to blend with the herd at Wednesday's unveiling of Crusoe. Linus explains why he joined the mobile chipmaker.

The two first Linux certification organizations are enjoying great popularity and support, but it remains to be seen how they will get along with each other.

Lineo, Inc., the leading developer of embedded Linux system software, announced Lineo Embedix PDA, a Windows CE-compatible embedded Linux software solution. Embedix PDA will provide a Windows CE-compatible layer on top of Lineo Embedix Linux, allowing Windows CE applications to be easily ported to Lineo Embedix Linux, a stable, compact and low-cost OS.

Magic Software Enterprises announced that it will be introducing its new Magic Enterprise Edition V.8 development environment for Linux at the Linux World Conference and Expo.

This week, the subject of Zope came up again. I'd been pounding my head against the wall trying to figure some things out, and finally posted an exasperated plea to my newsgroup, in which I detailed some problems getting Zope's ZCatalog search engine to search Zope's own source code.

Sun Microsystems is expected to eliminate licensing fees for Solaris 8 to boost its appeal against Linux and Windows NT, say sources close to the company. Sun is expected to make its "free Solaris" campaign the centerpiece of its Solaris 8 unveiling, which takes place this Wednesday in New York City.

On Dec. 7, 1999, Sun announced plans to ship Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition for Linux in the first quarter. On Monday, IBM beat Sun to the punch with deals bringing Java to Caldera Systems, Red Hat and TurboLinux's Linux operating systems.

India is rich in talent (human talents) but poor in talents (the ancient currency of India; in other words: money). India, and many other third world countries, have ample resources of brains - brilliant software developers - but poor means of paying for the licensing of software.

Sun Microsystems will debut its newest version of Solaris Wednesday, part of a reinvigorated effort to fend off Windows, Linux and other competing operating systems.

In my last article covering MySQL and Web servers, I talked about creating a guest book that would allow our visitors to leave a message for everyone to see. This was all fine and dandy; however, there is more that we can do with a Web site using mySQL and Apache. In this article covering the creation of a mySQL-based Web site, we'll be talking about using mySQL as a user-authentication database.