Toshiba will enter the hot but crowded server appliance market in the first quarter of 2001, the Japanese electronics giant will announce at the Comdex trade show. The machine will use Red Hat's version of Linux.

Inprise is expected to announce, at Comdex in Las Vegas this week, plans to release the source code of its Kylix Linux rapid application development tool to the GNOME Foundation. Inprise officials said support for GNOME will be added into Kylix, so that applications developed with Kylix will adjust to the look and feel of the GNOME desktop.

The Ottawa-based company will announce within a few months new server and enterprise editions of its Corel Linux operating system that will enable Corel to sell "solutions rather than applications," CEO and President Derek Burney said last week in an interview.

At the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas this week, e-commerce software vendor Exterprise Inc. and marketing startup PartnerAxis Inc. will unveil a Linux-based e-marketplace for Linux vendors, resellers and users. This follows the announcement last week by IBM that it has rolled out its WebSphere Commerce Suite Start 4.1 high-end e-commerce platform for Linux.

The aim of the project is to construct a scalable architecture for online services and applications that can run on next-generation Internet devices. The fault-tolerant Ninja architecture relies on a cluster of more than 100 workstations, all running the Linux operating system on Intel Pentium III components.

Linux is spreading further into the business computing world, but Microsoft need not worry about its effect on Windows just yet. That's one conclusion from market researcher Zona Research's latest study of US IT professionals.

Bob Young, chairman of alternative software company Red Hat, is a boyish billionaire from Canada. Over a drink this week, he explained his latest creation -- the Red Hat Centre, which is taking on Washington's excessive patent and copyright protection laws.

Linux power Red Hat wants to be your buddy, your pal and your partner. The company's new Red Hat Certified Service Provider Program offers specialized consulting and co-marketing programs, as well as technology and support services for ASP, ISPs, Web hosts, and other types of service providers.

A wave of Linux clustered machines has been anticipated since 1994, when the Goddard Space Flight Center produced the first Beowulf cluster. But only recently have the tools become available for the Linux cluster to become a more manageable engine on the Internet.

The most aggressive expansion plans for Linux deployments will come from small companies and large organizations over the next year, according to a new research report from Zona Research Inc.