There seems to be a lot going on in the Linux world right now. The upcoming release of the 2.4 kernel, major headway in the area of DVD support, expanded support for hardware in general and much more.

CNN: When the antitrust suit waged by the federal government and 19 states against Microsoft culminated in Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's historic, 207-page finding of fact, it was cause for celebration among many in the Linux community. After all, Microsoft had recently begun to bring its heavy guns to bear on Linux.

IBM has ported Linux to its S/390 mainframe platform, but is keeping the news - which could send shockwaves throughout the industry - under wraps for now. An attendee at a mainframe conference held earlier this autumn said that IBM, "talked about but did not announce Linux/390. The future technical session showed foils about Linux/390."

VMware's system emulator lets you run up to five OSs on one box simultaneously. Rawn Shah checks out VMware's latest system emulator, version 1.1. It promises to let you run a Linux host OS, then switch -- without rebooting -- among up to four other guest OSs that operate inside virtual hardware created by VMware.

The Provo, Utah company, which recently announced it would publish its own open-source license for its DigitalMe, NDS for Linux client, and the management interface to its Internet Caching System (ICS), is now opening up the source code for select portions of one of its crown jewels, NetWare Directory Services (NDS), said several sources at Comdex.

Kenwood makes state of the art home and car audio systems, but its back-office computing system was as obsolete as eight-track tapes.

AT Comdex 99, non-PC devices are stealing the show, industry leaders are spouting off about the supremacy of Internet computing over clunky PCs, and Linus Torvalds and his open-source operating system, Linux, appear ready for primetime.

I've spent the past three days exploring the products, companies, and technologies on display at Linux Business Expo, which was held concurrently with Comdex Fall '99 in Las Vegas. Many of the companies at the expo made product announcements; I've tried to detail them in previous dispatches.

An Introduction To The Free Operating System at VarBusiness.

There was an article published recently on Linuxpower.com that stated, in essence, that Linux will cease to improve in quality if there is no Microsoft monopoly to compete against. I strongly feel that this is not the case.