Behind the scenes, Big Blue is promoting new education, certification and business relationships that could grow the market for certified Linux professionals.

TCS and Dell are making a commitment not only to help each other develop and support the latest Linux technologies, but also to provide those technologies to the open source community.

Slackware Linux 7.1 is out of beta and on the ftp site for you to grab.

Total domination for Linux would certainly make things easier, but the simple fact is that that won't happen with 90 percent of the desktops running Windows. Linux and Windows will have to work together for a while.

Slated for release as a stable product in late summer or early fall, KDE 2 has been completely rewritten from the ground up, and sports hundreds of improvements and many new applications.

Linux's popularity as an alternative to Windows has come about because it successfully ran popular software like Netscape and Apache and not strictly because of the Linux kernel.

Analysts are beginning to take a closer look at the business models of Linux players with an eye to longer-term profitability. Some predict a long haul before the newly public Linux companies show a profit.

Moving to Linux doesn't mean writing your letters in a programmer's text editor. These days, the main Windows features you'd give up would be frequent system crashes, virus threats and expensive software upgrades.

Linux is not an alternative in that sense of the word. In many areas, it is the accepted standard, the highest common denominator, the platform that is the necessity, and not alternative by any means.

Warming up to the idea that an open palm is better than a clenched one, major computing companies are exploring the idea of porting open-source operating systems to their handheld computing platforms.