Christmas is coming soon, and then the new millennium. Of course in the computer world, the first thing people think about when they hear about the millennium is the Y2K bug.

Will Apache, popular "open-source" server software for running Web sites, become the next Linux? Covalent Technology certainly hopes so. The 12-person Lincoln, Neb., company has received $5 million in venture funding that it plans to use to emulate red-hot Red Hat, which operates in a related market.

Creative Technology Ltd. , the leading provider of multimedia solutions for personal entertainment and productivity, announced expanded support for the Linux OS. Creative plans to include support in its popular line of Sound Blaster Live! audio cards and Personal Digital Entertainment (PDE) Solutions.

Eicon Technology, a leading worldwide provider of remote access products, announced the release of Linux drivers for its PCI bus ISDN server adapters, the DIVA Server BRI-2M and the DIVA Server PRI-23M. The new drivers will work with Caldera's OpenLinux 2.3, Red Hat Linux 6.0, and SuSE Linux 6.2.

It seems like everyone in the computer industry is championing Linux to sound the death knell to the Microsoft Windows monopoly. Yet, despite the hype, a large percentage of the user community doesn't even know what Linux is. Ask ten average computer users about Linux, and eight of them will tell you that it is a character in "Peanuts."

As Linux gets older, parts of it get older as well, with little or no modification or updates. One of these components is the ext2 file system. With the size of hard drives quickly growing to far beyond what anyone ever imagined four or five years ago would become standard, ext2 was developed.

Bitstream Inc. and Corel Corporation announced that Corel has licensed a Linux font server currently being developed by Bitstream. Corel will integrate this font server into the office and graphics suites that it is currently developing for Linux.

The K Desktop Environment (KDE) Team is happy to announce KRASH, an unstable developers release of the upcoming KDE 2.0 Desktop Environment.

Rolling out GNU/ Linux in a big company is not an easy task, specially if you are trying to do this alone. Even worse, if your company is Windows-only, and you are the only soul that knows something about Unix. Hey!, even if your company is a mix of Unix and Windows, you have to watch your step.

From Java to "dot coms," investors have a way of latching onto the latest tech trend and driving stocks to dizzying heights--and Linux companies are the newest darlings of Wall Street.