Microsoft Corp. , trying to protect its software empire from open-source rivals like Linux, on Thursday said it is expanding a program to share the underlying code of its Windows operating system.

An introduction to the RULE project, which aims to bridge the gap between programmers rolling their own and newbies installing everything.

FreeDOS was a project started in 1994 to counteract Microsoft\'s stated intentions to do away with MS-DOS and move everyone to Windows. It employs no Microsoft code and is designed to be a work-alike equivalent to MS-DOS.

FreeDOS was a project started in 1994 to counteract Microsoft\'s stated intentions to do away with MS-DOS and move everyone to Windows. It employs no Microsoft code and is designed to be a work-alike equivalent to MS-DOS.

The goal for most desktop-oriented Linux distributions in the last few years has been to build a reliable desktop that works out of the box. However, in OfB Labs experiences, most Linux packages fall short of this goal - if only by a small bit. Please notice that I say \"most\" and not \"all\" in the previous sentence.

Look at the list of names among Datamation Product of the Year 2001 Award winners and you\'ll see companies long familiar to enterprise IT executives -- Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Dell, Palm, Compaq. But it\'s the appearance on this year\'s list of one relative upstart -- Red Hat -- that underscores the major shift under way in the enterprise.

Alan Cox is one of the most influential IT innovators in the world. A graduate of the University of Wales, Swansea, he has been a key developer of the Linux kernel for nearly a decade. Here ITW asked him about his changing role at Red Hat, and learn about the benefits Linux brings to business.

QuickHelp is a development tool for quickly creating and distributing online help for Linux applications. QuickHelp consists of a Builder for creating the help topics and a Viewer for deploying them to end-users. The help information resides in a single XML file distributed with the QuickHelp Viewer. For the end-user, QuickHelp supports a table of contents, an index with automatic search field, word searches across topics, color highlighted topic text with hypertext links and context sensitive help from applications.

Infomart saw an opening between the high-end high-cost Pocket PC PDAs, and the low-end low-cost Palm PDAs, and created a new PDA called \"Kaii\" to fill that gap. \"We wanted to make a PDA with the features of high-end PDAs, but at an affordable cost,\" said Devesh R. Agarwal, managing director of the Bangalore, India based development company. \"Our initial target market was India only, but as we progressed further into the development cycle we realized that there were opportunities in the global market also.\"

DesktopLinux.com founder and executive editor Rick Lehrbaum speaks with Gaël Duval, Founder of Mandrake Linux. Duval relates the history of Mandrake, explains what makes Mandrake unique, discusses the company\'s market focus, describes Mandrake\'s philosophy with respect to open source, and offers his vision of the future of the Desktop Linux Market and what will help its success.