Linux Orbit\'s own Joshua Marshall got to visit the LinuxWorld Expo show in New York City this week and he turns in this report on the shindig (pictures included).

France\'s MandrakeSoft has teamed up with Hewlett-Packard in the open source camp\'s latest foray into the desktop PC market. The agreement, announced on Tuesday ahead of the LinuxWorld Expo, will see HP build and promote Mandrake Linux-based desktop PCs for European and North American businesses.

Linux is in the running to power the world\'s biggest computer, we learned this week at LinuxWorld Expo. A bid is being prepared to provide the computing power behind the US government sponsored Project Purple, which will pool a vast server farm to the three leading US research labs, which is scheduled to come on stream by the end of 2004.

\"Please don\'t write anything which will make people want to buy the new pocket Sharp PDA,\" implored the product manager. \"We don\'t have enough to sell. And it\'s not ready.\"

Mainframe Linux offers benefits beyond the zero licensing cost. It\'s a matter of operational overhead. In most environments, it takes roughly one person per shift to support 5 or six servers. If you consolidate tens or even hundreds of servers into one or two mainframes, the staff requirements diminish dramatically.

Sure, there are your usual cosmetic changes, but let\'s get this straight-Linux is Linux. You can bake it in the sun, you can dip it in hot fudge topping, heck, you can even add those candy coated sprinkles to the top of the CD, but one thing hasn\'t changed-it\'s Linux. It will, for the most part, always be the same in theory-no matter what you do to it.

The first thing a PC user notices about SuSE is that it comes with the kind of documentation that Microsoft has almost - but not quite - eradicated from the far reaches of your long-term memory.

With the 2.4 release of Linux come a host of new filesystem possibilities, including Reiserfs, XFS, GFS, and others. These filesystems sound cool, but what exactly can they do, what are they good at, and exactly how do you go about safely using them in a production Linux environment? Daniel Robbins answers these questions by showing you how to set up these new advanced filesystems under Linux 2.4. In this installment, Daniel takes a look at ext3, a new improved version of ext2 with journaling capabilities.

Whenever I discuss the dynamics of the open-source community, someone inevitably asks, \"Who pays the salaries for all of this software development? How can these programmers survive by writing free software?\"

Hewlett-Packard was developing three low-end Linux handhelds, including a wireless device, but the projects have been sacrificed in the recent round of layoffs, a source says