After some last minute technical difficulties, GNOME 1.4 "Tranquility" is finally released. This release includes a number of fixes and doc and translation updates relative to RC1. It also excludes Medusa.

Atipa, which began building a presence in the end-to-end Linux hardware market in 1999, has laid off 40 of its 50 Kansas City employees in recent months, including most of its technical staff. The layoffs are said to be a part of a move to shift Atipa's focus from computer hardware to software as company officials feel that the Linux market is too crowded for long-term success.

Lineo Embedix SDK 2.0 provides more comprehensive processor support as well as a new "snap-in" architecture for the dynamic addition of new hardware and software support and features. Embedix SDK 2.0 is tested to run on all major Linux distributions as well as Windows NT and 2000.

Themes, a capability supplied with Linux desktop environments, provides users the ability to personalize the look of the user interface of their desktop. Its integration into Open Motif will improve the usability of enterprise applications ported to Linux while allowing them to continue to be developed with the highly reliable Motif user interface toolkit.

Updated Kerberos 5 packages are now available for Red Hat Linux 7. These updates resolve a linkage problem introduced in RHSA-2001:025.

Velocity, a powerful template engine written in Java, is ideal for web development and is a great alternative to JSP, ASP, PHP and other dynamic server-side web technologies. It is useful for general templating tasks such as the generation of source code, SQL, and XML documents, as well as XSLT-like XML processing.

The Linux USB subsystem, integrated in the kernel and already supported by most Linux distributions, supports all necessary features like plug-and-play, USB bandwith allocation and more than 100 ports per bus and is key to the emerging Linux desktop market.

"Amiga's next-generation operating system is at long last to get a home of its own: Sharp's upcoming Linux version of the Zaurus PDA. The two companies have entered into a "long-term partnership" that will see Amiga develop "content" for Sharp's new PDAs."

"This is one of the best moves the Dutch parliament ever made with regards to Information Technology" said Luuk van Dijk, spokesman on software patents for the Dutch Open Source Society. In a novel display of hacker political power, the Open Source Society has been effectively lobbying parliament on the software patent issue.

This new comprehensive educational series provides business partners with in-depth Linux training. It includes technical sessions, certification guidelines, incentives, technical support programs and an overview of IBM's e-business solutions.