Shares of downtrodden online retailer Beyond.com rose this morning after the company announced it will be a reseller of Red Hat Linux software and services to the lucrative U.S. government and business-to-business markets.

Linux Press announced its newest line of books, How to Install Linux. Part of the popular Linux Resource Series, How to Install Linux will target specific Linux distributions and provide complete and easy to follow installation instructions for the operating system as well as for packages.

NVIDIA Corporation, SGI and VA Linux Systems, Inc. announced their collaboration on the industry's first professional-level OpenGL graphics sub-system for workstations running Linux.

Hewlett-Packard Company and VMware, Inc. announced initial results of their joint promotion of free VMware software on HP VISUALIZE PL450 and XL550 Personal Workstations for Linux desktop customers. According to HP and VMware, approximately 30 percent of HP's and VMware's European customers took advantage of the offer in its first month, December 1999.

Linux, the open source operating system, recently has become quite a hot topic in investment circles and for Internet infrastructure players. Vendors in this segment have had some of the most successful initial public offerings (IPOs) in history.

The Chinese government is probably adopting a wait and see approach towards Red Flag Linux, China's very own operating system. Yet if it captures the public imagination and proves to be user friendly for a still unharvested Chinese IT market, then all these rumors might one day turn out to be less than 'groundless'.

At first glance, portions of this article might appear to be in rebuttal to a nicely written piece that appeared here several days ago, entitled Microsoft: Who Cares? This is not by design.

Configuring a TCP/IP SOHO network initially seems quite confusing. You will have to decide on an IP address to use for each computer, a Netmask, DNS servers, and a lot of other Internet nomenclature. But it is really not too difficult. The Internet infrastructure is logical and well documented. Once the concepts start falling into place, the pace at which you learn will accelerate exponentially.

It is an article of faith among Open Source software advocates that the freely available source code of Linux makes it easier to identify and patch bugs than Closed Source software and hence provide greater overall systems security.

IBM's pledge to increase support for Linux should boost corporate confidence in the open-source Unix variant, said analysts and users. IBM last week said it will substantially expand its use and marketing of the Linux operating system across its entire range of server hardware.