Using computers for composing music has traditionally been the realm of Windows and Macintosh users. While the popular commercial sound tools aren't available for Linux, quite a few free music software projects have cropped up. Most of them are under heavy development, and features are being added to them constantly. There may not be many fully released music tools for Linux, but the future looks encouraging.

More than half of Australia's corporate IT departments are now making some use of the Linux operating system, but mainly in servers - and few have any plans for Linux on the desktop, according to a survey by trade journal Corporate IT.

In another step toward "mainstreaming" Linux, RealNetworks said it will bundle its streaming media server and player with the Red Hat version of the operating system to increase its use among online content providers, including news and business organizations.

Red Hat, Inc. and Oracle Corporation announced the availability of the Red Hat Linux Enterprise Edition product line that has been optimized for Oracle8i to support high-volume e-business and enterprise applications.

Efforts are under way to make Linux more secure for e-business, now that it's making inroads as an enterprise server platform. Three leading suppliers of Linux systems-Caldera, Red Hat and SGI-last week said they will integrate Tripwire Inc.'s intrusion detection and prevention software into their offerings.

VA Linux Systems (Nasdaq: LNUX) has joined a number of prosperous companies that are pumping up developer resources for the Linux community by announcing a new service to help accelerate the development of Linux applications.

Linux distributer SuSe is developing a high availability version of Linux that uses the FaleSafe technology that Silicon Graphics (SGI) has given to the open source community. Dirk Hohndel, chief technology officer at Suse would be offering a Linux version of FailSafe to make Linux better suited to high-end applications.

Linux is ready to fulfil the requirements of most desktop users, according to the chief technical officer of SuSE Linux and founder member of the XFree86 organisation, Dirk Hondel.

The articles in the 'Portable World' series generated an enormous response from the community; so much, in fact, that I decided to write another series of articles based on reader suggestions. Today's piece covers 'tried and true' laptops sent in by our readers.

Founded by members of the original Macintosh team, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Eazel is working with the open-source Gnome project to build a mainstream desktop for Linux. Eazel will sell online utilities and link to them from the desktop. The Industry Standard asked Eazel CEO Mike Boich ...