Corel will soon spill the beans on its plan for recovery - potentially including the sale of the company's Linux business - president and CEO Derek Burney has said. The announcement will be made in three weeks' time.

VA Linux Systems met lowered Wall Street expectations with a first quarter pro forma net loss of $7 million, a loss of about 15 cents per diluted share, compared to a loss of $7.2 million, or 27 cents per share, for the same period last year.

Linux will acquire features better suited for high-end use as a result of Caldera Systems' pending acquisition of technology assets from Santa Cruz Operation.

The Plex86 project is about creating an extensible open source PC virtualization software program which will allow PC and workstation users to run multiple operating systems concurrently on the same machine. It is now able to run Windows 95 in addition to FreeDOS, MSDOS and Linux.

VA Linux Systems has reported record revenues of $56.1 million for the fiscal first quarter, 2001, ended October 27, 2000, an increase of 278% compared to the same period of fiscal 2000 and an increase of 11% compared to the prior fiscal quarter.

The Linux desktop battle heated up Wednesday when the developers of KDE announced wide industry support for the newly formed KDE League. Developers of the competing Gnome open-source operating environment beat KDE to the punch in August when the Gnome Foundation released a laundry list of vendors backing the group.

While the Gnome Foundation has grand plans for common application program interfaces across platforms and operating systems such as Solaris, the KDE League's goals are much more modest. As one KDE supporter put it, "This puts the bread on the KDE hackers' tables."

The companies supplying the federal government with Linux and open source products and services met with the agencies they served in the First Annual Federal Linux Users' Conference. Though attendance was low, organizers and many vendors remained optimistic about governmental use of Linux.

US-based Red Hat has tied up with Clover Technologies, an Indian software company to form Red Hat India Pvt. Ltd, which will offer technical support and training to its customers in India.

Oddsmakers in this town probably aren't betting against Linux, but the operating system's users and vendors both believe that its old-style command-line interface makes it a long shot for moving beyond its current niche as an Internet infrastructure building block.