Everyone has greeted the new kernel with joy and relief, pending a thorough road test. But less certain is the response of the corporate user base that the kernel has been so carefully groomed for. Nor is it entirely clear exactly when usable 2.4-based products will be available for them to deploy.

While VA Linux has become a poster child for the Silicon Valley downswing, its employees -- who view their company as part of a larger computing revolution -- are remarkably stoic. Despite their heavy dose of shock therapy, VA Linux employees seem to be holding up just fine.

"I will be looking at three solutions: Trustix, WireX's ImmunixOS, and the NSA's "Security-Enhanced Linux" (an impressive-sounding name). I will not be directly comparing them, however, as all three are aimed at solving very different problems. Rather, I'm going to cover what they do well, and what they don't do so well."

What's happening, at least in the US, is the traditional Linux model for penetrating a large bureaucracy. Linux enters at the bottom, with early adoptions by individuals scattered throughout the organization. They install Linux to do standalone jobs, such as Web serving, handling email, or doing specific kinds of calculations. Unless it is a high-profile application like a Beowulf supercomputer, even people using the services may be unaware that they are using Linux.

This paper describes the evolution of the Linux operating system, and studies dynamics of socio-technical change using Linux as a case example. The paper analyses the growth and development of Linux and its development community, and shows how the development community evolves into an ecology of community-centered practices.

"In spite of the magic that Windows programmers can do using Microsoft?s suite of operating systems, many of us feel a little like muggles when confronted with Linux. Tough installs, arcane commands, and a dearth of productive development environments keep many of us in our comfortable Windows world. Inprise?s Borland group is trying to entice us onto new platforms using a little bit of magic called Kylix."

As we look at Mac OS X in general, and Darwin in particular, I think we begin to see a trend. So much of Mac OS X is based on open source technology, like BSD for example, that Apple may finally have found the magic formula of open and proprietary ingredients to broaden its following of cutting-edge developers.

Searching for an easy way to speed up huge compilations or scale up your Internet services? Take a look at MOSIX, an open source clustering project from Hebrew University that features power without a price.

This article takes a tour through FreeBSD's ports collection on the hunt for the obscure, the amusing, and the useful.

The demand for more memory is only going to grow as Linux moves higher up on the enterprise computing chain. Fortunately, the Linux 2.4 kernel promises to expand the memory capabilities of Linux. The question is whether that expansion will be enough for memory-hungry enterprise systems and applications.