The LWN (Linux Weekly News) has made the final Linux Timeline of all the Linux happenings for the year 1999.

It had a near-death experience early this year after five years of declining sale. Boland is now back with a new name, Inprise Corp., and a new gimmick -- it is an Internet player and a soldier in the Linux revolution.

With its market leverage, Red Hat seemed poised to turn Gnome into the de facto standard desktop, simply by shipping it as default.

6. Linux goes to work. The popularity of the upstart operating system exploded, as it grabbed more headlines, increased interest from Microsoft and the attention of Wall Street. Linux companies--Red Hat, VA Linux Systems, Andover.Net and Cobalt Networks--all had highly successful IPOs.

Despite the fact that Linux-related companies such as VA Linux Systems and Red Hat have recently taken Wall Street by storm, Forrester says it sees no sign of CIOs abandoning existing platforms for Linux any time soon. However, the firm does predict that Linux will continue to grow by dominating new application segments.

Around 30 engineers, consultants, Linux enthusiasts, open-source believers -- and at least one self-described troublemaker -- turned out to express solidarity with the hackers who are being sued by the DVD industry for distributing allegedly proprietary source code over the Web.

Linux Sucks, NT Rocks," the headline blared. "No, no, no, no, no!", the old white-bearded fellow shouted at the new kid. "That's supposed to be 'Use Linux, NT Sucks Rocks'." The diaper-clad cherub chomped down on his cigar. "Look Pops, you gotta get with the times. Your year in the sun is just about over. Linux is old news, yesterday's buzz. Don't you get it, man? 2000 is the year of 2000, Windows 2000, that is.

Inprise Corp. soon plans to outline the future of its InterBase database division, and the possibility of opening the database's source code is squarely on the table.

LinuxOne is expected to launch its initial public offering as early as next month. But the upstart company faces a host of issues that were absent in the highly successful IPOs of Linux companies Red Hat, VA Linux, Cobalt Networks and Andover.Net.

So you might say, "What's wrong with plain telnet?". Well with regular telnet, your password is sent to the other machine in plain text form allowing the sniffing of passwords. With SSH strong cryptography is used for protecting all transmitted confidential data, including passwords, binary files, and administrative commands.