Kernel release: 2.4.25-pre5, Jan 15, 2004

2.4.25-pre5 has been released today.
See changelog for full details.

Files added: 307
Files changed: 1371
Files removed: 39

Lindows.com founder and CEO Michael Robertson reveals his plans to take LindowsOS to the business desktop.

Lindows.com Inc. has been popularizing an inexpensive Linux desktop for the public, LindowsOS, for years with low-priced bundles at Wal-Mart, but this year founder and CEO Michael Robertson is planning to introduce LindowsOS Professional, an operating system for business users.

In an announcement Monday, the administration of Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney finalized its new open standards for IT acquisitions, basing the criteria for government IT procurements on "best value" and setting guidelines to help reduce the total cost of ownership of systems, "while enhancing flexibility and performance," the administration said. The new policies went into effect on Tuesday.

The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.1.5, a maintenance release for the third generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux and other UNIXes. KDE 3.1.5 ships with a basic desktop and seventeen other packages (PIM, administration, network, edutainment, utilities, multimedia, games, artwork, web development and more). KDE's award-winning tools and applications are available in 52 languages.

2.0.40-rc7 has been released today.
See changelog for full details.

Files added: 5
Files changed: 216
Files removed: 2

Computerworld: How do you feel Linux on the desktop is progressing?

Linus Torvalds: Last year was good but I’m seeing a lot more noise about it this year. The server space is easier to tackle first with any operating system as it can be applied to specific tasks such as mail serving; however, the desktop is harder to sell.

IBM on Wednesday announced it had sold a supercomputer based on Advanced Micro Devices' 64-bit processors to pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Meyers Squib, giving a boost to AMD's Opteron technology.

The supercomputer, a cluster of 64 IBM eServer 325 machines running Linux, each packing a pair of Opteron processors, will be used by Bristol-Meyer for drug and healthcare treatment research, said the two companies.

Hewlett-Packard Co. said Thursday that its Linux-related revenue was more than $2.5 billion in 2003, a figure that it said places it in the top tier of companies vying for leadership in the rapidly growing market for the freely available operating system software.

Linux is an operating system that can be copied and modified freely, and is now moving upstream into more complex computing needs at corporations, said Nick Collins, director of marketing for Linux at Palo Alto, California-based HP.

Despite growing corporate interest, other figures demonstrate that Linux is still a geek's paradise.

The most commonly used distribution amongst attendees is Debian, a non-commercial distribution, followed by Red Hat and Mandrake.

And despite the increasing efforts put into developing user-friendly desktops and interfaces, the simple bash command line is generally the most popular interface choice amongst the vast majority of conference visitors.

The first lawsuits are now only weeks away, according to Sontag. "I would expect within the next few weeks we will have a number of Linux end users who we will have identified and taken legal action (against)," Sontag told ZDNet UK. "We will probably see that ramping up over time."

The Linux operating system will pervade the desktops of the corporate world during the next two years, Linux guru Jon "Maddog" Hall has forecast.

Hall is the executive director of Linux International, a non-profit association of computer vendors which supports and promotes the Linux operating system.

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