The biggest news concerned BSDi (Berkeley Systems Design, Inc.) and Walnut Creek CD-ROM, which is the primary backer of FreeBSD. The two entities will merge, forming a company called BSD Inc. The end result will be a combination of FreeBSD and BSD/OS, available in both commercial and freely available versions.

Support of the Linux operating system is one of the critical issues that face many organizations that consider deploying Linux in their corporate environments. Support of an operating system typically, over time, turns out to be the most significant cost over the life of the system. However, Linux offers many features that help to reduce this cost. Linux, having been derived from Unix, shares many of the administration tools and utilities that traditional Unix systems have offered for years. Some of these tools can be used to help maintain the Linux kernel itself in the ways illustrated here.

Change is a great way to polarize any community. It should come as no great surprise that when Inprise announced plans to develop RAD tools for the Linux platform, the responses from the Borland developer community were stereo cries of "Oh Yes!" and "Oh No!" - with a background channel of "uh, what?".

Responding to the rising tide of interest in using the Linux operating system in embedded applications, representatives from dozens of embedded technology firms announced formation of the Embedded Linux Consortium, or ELC, a vendor-neutral trade association dedicated to the advancement of Linux-based solutions in embedded applications.

Chili!Soft Inc., the market leader in platform-independent Active Server Pages (ASP), today announced the general availability of Chili!Soft Active Server Pages for Linux. With Chili!Soft Active Server Pages for Linux, users of leading Web development tools, can easily build and maintain dynamic Web applications, using Active Server Pages for live database connectivity and dynamic content, that leverage the rapidly-growing installed base of Linux servers.

When Yodlee.com was looking for an operating system to power its Web site, the company -- founded by former Microsoft and Amazon executives -- bypassed Windows NT and turned instead to Linux. The start-up, which aggregates and manages online accounts for Web surfers, needed tough, reliable software that could serve up information from a multitude of sites. And they needed it on the cheap.

Corel Corp. Chief Executive Michael Cowpland reassured jittery shareholders at the firm's annual general meeting on Wednesday that he is confident a merger with Inprise/Borland Corp. will succeed despite the resignation of a key executive from the California software developer's board.

Created in 1991 by Andrew Tridgell, Samba 2.0.6 edged out Compaq's Advanced Server for Unix on the basis of platform support, performance, ease of configuration and ease of debugging. Its support for login control and a WINS (Windows Internet Name Service) client and server also put it ahead of the competition.

Two years ago, most IT folks would have been hard-pressed to find a basic Linux operating-system course for the taking, and the concept of certification wasn't even discussed in Linux user groups. Today, Linux courseware is a growing field, and the first classes of Linux certified system and network administrators are taking home their diplomas.

There's been a lot of fooferaw about UNIX viruses recently, and more specifically Linux viruses. A lot of it is complete garbage. Many of these articles seem to have gotten a hold of virus experts, which is good, but it seems these virus experts generally have little knowledge of UNIX, which isn't surprising as most viruses and anti-virus software is written for Windows.