I am proud to announce what I believe to be the first ever Linux-based class to be held in any public school. Today begins the start of Linux' inroads into the mainstream educational arena here at the Davis Applied Technology Center.

Hardware support has always been one of the biggest concerns for the Linux platform. Although Linux supports an incredibly wide variety of hardware platforms, specific hardware device support can sometimes be sketchy at best.

In a move to escalate its challenge to Linux vendors Caldera Systems and Red Hat, TurboLinux announced this week that it has pulled in close to $57 million (US$) in a second round of funding.

Shares of downtrodden online retailer Beyond.com rose this morning after the company announced it will be a reseller of Red Hat Linux software and services to the lucrative U.S. government and business-to-business markets.

Linux Press announced its newest line of books, How to Install Linux. Part of the popular Linux Resource Series, How to Install Linux will target specific Linux distributions and provide complete and easy to follow installation instructions for the operating system as well as for packages.

NVIDIA Corporation, SGI and VA Linux Systems, Inc. announced their collaboration on the industry's first professional-level OpenGL graphics sub-system for workstations running Linux.

Hewlett-Packard Company and VMware, Inc. announced initial results of their joint promotion of free VMware software on HP VISUALIZE PL450 and XL550 Personal Workstations for Linux desktop customers. According to HP and VMware, approximately 30 percent of HP's and VMware's European customers took advantage of the offer in its first month, December 1999.

Linux, the open source operating system, recently has become quite a hot topic in investment circles and for Internet infrastructure players. Vendors in this segment have had some of the most successful initial public offerings (IPOs) in history.

The Chinese government is probably adopting a wait and see approach towards Red Flag Linux, China's very own operating system. Yet if it captures the public imagination and proves to be user friendly for a still unharvested Chinese IT market, then all these rumors might one day turn out to be less than 'groundless'.

As of this writing, the latest stable version of Samba is 2.0.6. You will need the source distribution, it is called samba-2.0.6.tar.gz, grab it from the Samba homepage.