A look into the availability of device drivers and specs for Linux. The tangled needs of developers, manufacturers, and the Linux-curious have kept down the tempo of driver development.

One of the common concerns about Linux is the lack of desktop applications. Certainly this concern has some validity. We are first and foremost a community of developers, and we tend to produce the tools that developers need. We have Emacs, but not Word. We have Gdb, but not Excel. But open source, like nature itself, abhors a vacuum, and missing application areas are being filled.

Merlin Software Technologies, a leading developer of Linux based software applications and utilities, today announced continued aggressive expansion of their global distribution network with the signing of an agreement with India's largest Linux distributor, G.T. Enterprises.

Motorola said it will come out in May with Linux servers for telecommunications that will be guaranteed to stay up 99.999 percent of the time--all but five minutes of the year. This level of availability is possible because CPUs, fans, power supplies and cards will be plugged into PCI slots. Computer center managers, therefore, will be able to remove and add them without having to shut the computer down, Motorola said.

A new version of the Linux interface, GNOME, promises to make the chore of keeping the operating system tidy and up-to-date less complicated. Miguel de Icaza's HelixCode on Monday released a beta version of the Helix GNOME desktop which includes ease-of-use features such as an automatic installer and software updater.

Currently, a dearth of applications, combined with scalability issues and the lack of trust among companies in Linux as a platform for business applications, are hindering enterprise-scale Linux deployments.

More than half of Australia's corporate IT departments are making use of Linux, but serving remains the dominant role and few companies have any plans for Linux on the desktop, a new survey has found.

Vehicle manufacturer International Trucks has chosen to port its key business applications to the Linux platform in its branch offices throughout Australia and New Zealand.

A spokesperson for the Trillian Project, a cooperative development among Cygnus Solutions, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, SGI and VA Linux Systems, has said it will port Linux to the new IA64 processor architecture before its release. With key market players like Intel supporting Linux with its most powerful processor yet, the operating system may expand into new markets traditionally dominated by the likes of Microsoft and Sun Microsystems.

In an exclusive interview with Silicon.com, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, vice president of technlogy and strategy, enterprise systems group, IBM, said: "Monopolies were okay before, but we've seen the future, and it's not that. These hierarchical, proprietary companies are trying to kill each other in the market, and Linux offers an alternate vision of the world."