SuSE, one of the leading Linux specialists worldwide, is announcing the availability of a beta-quality version of SuSE Linux 6.3 for the Macintosh PowerPC at MacWorld in San Francisco. The sales release of SuSE Linux for Power PC is planned for this spring. Offering SuSE Linux on PowerPC supports SuSE's strategy of cross-platform availability.

Nosey looked up at me from a pile of evening gowns he was stuffing into a machine. "You want what?" I repeated my request: Year 2000 predictions for Linux.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based firm opened an online repository for open-source projects, cut a deal with an application service provider and added a new member to its executive staff.

Inprise Corp., maker of application development tools, today unveiled plans to release the beta version of InterBase 6, the next version of its flagship database product, in open-source form for multiple platforms, including Linux, Windows NT, and Solaris.

Why, that best time is right now. Especially now. Of course, most Linux advocates would find the 365 best days in which to convert one's network to Linux, and from my side of the fence, I can say that yes, they're perfectly right. However, I wish to point out that now is the absolute best time for one great big reason - well, okay, quite a few great big reasons.

A very common proverb states: "Those who fail to learn from the past are destined to repeat it." It's strange to think that Linux, as old as it is, should learn from the past. What could have happened that the Linux community needs to learn about? The answer may surprise you: Microsoft.

Everyone knows that Linux is great for servers, and it's becoming more widely accepted as a desktop solution. But the lingering questions have always been, "Can Linux work on laptops? Can it deal with power management issues and embedded systems? Can it deal with a different architecture? Can Linux be on-the-go?"

For those of you that have never tried text-to-speech synthesis on your Linux computer, you should. It rocks. A word about how to go about doing that and some of the licensing details of the software would be a good place to start.

There will be all sorts of important stories in the new year -- the Microsoft antitrust case, the growth of Linux, the acceleration of wireless and PDA technology, the ongoing e-commerce boom and many others.

There was no five minute outage, not even a five microsecond outage at 00:00 UTC on January 1, 2000. The Linux Today servers have been up and working flawlessly for 150 days to date and were last down for a hardware upgrade in early August.