Ottawa, Canada-based Corel said it plans to acquire a 30 percent stake in privately held Linux start-up Newlix. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Corel has been on a Linux tear in the past few months. Last month it acquired a one-third stake in Philadelphia-based LinuxForce.

Dave Whitinger is a co-founder of Linux Today, a continuously updated sourceof Linux news for the community. He recently started Linsight, a site providing information for Linux users.

CNET, Inc., the source for computers and technology, announced today the launch of CNET Linux Center, the site for Linux professionals interested in leveraging the power of Linux for their businesses.

1999 was the year Linux catapulted from obscure hacker obsession to mainstream phenomenon, up there with e-commerce, dot-com anything and Pokémon. Witness VA Linux Systems? record-breaking IPO stock performance and Linux's star billing at the Las Vegas Comdex convention. But Linux has achieved fame mainly for its stellar performance on servers. Can it seriously challenge Windows on the desktop in the year 2000?

Linux is hampered by a lack of drivers for some pc devices, notably printers. In an effort to help correct this, Libranet is collecting signatures to a petition which will be submitted to the major producers of PC devices.

The company, flush with funds from its record-setting IPO, has launched an ambitious plan to become one of the leading providers of servers to the Internet, said CEO Larry Augustin in an interview with News.com. Intel's upcoming Itanium processor and improvements to the Linux OS will be the first steps in the company's expansion, and plans for Europe and Asia will follow.

This is release 20000109 of Wine (WINdows Emulator), a free implementation of Windows on Unix. This is still a developers only release.

I express in this text my personal opinion on the danger I think could arise if the famous company from Redmond wins the streaming war against RealNetworks as it won the browser war against Netscape. The fact that I didn't read anything on that subject yet makes me wonder if I'm completely wrong.

Most of you are probably saying: "SPIRO Linux? I have never heard of it". Well, you probably will soon. SPIRO Linux is based on Red Hat 6.x.

Linux, which has quietly been gaining ground in the commercial and government sectors for the past few years, appears poised to become the government's operating system of choice for mission-critical applications.