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Following is an email received by a commercial software company offering products for (among others) the Linux platform.

The Free Standards Group (FSG) announced today that Computer Associates (CA), NTT DATA, and Open Country have signed on as members to the group. The group also formally announced the release of the Linux Standard Base (LSB) 3.0, and support for the standard by major vendors. Executive director Jim Zemlin said that all the major distributions had "come out and certified or are certifying to the LSB 3.0." The list of vendors and organizations certifying their distributions includes Red Hat, Novell SUSE, the DCC Alliance and Asianux.

What utility do practically all Linux users use -- regardless of their job or expertise? A boot loader. In this article, see how a boot loader works, meet two popular loaders -- LILO (LInux LOader) and GNU GRUB (GRand Unified Boot loader) -- and review the pros and cons of each.

The "Name" brands do not manufacture their own laptops. They buy them from Original Design Manufacturers (ODM). These ODMs sell their computers to DELL, Toshiba, IBM, HP, Compaq, Sony and others. They then put their label on it and market it. You can find the same laptops and buy yours without an operating system.

John "Overcode" Hall died this weekend from his fight with cancer.

Novell, Red Hat and Debian alliance announce that they will certify operating systems to comply with new version of Linux Standard Base.

So far, the Open Source applications have been Softpedia users’ number one applications. Last week, Firefox won the Battle of Browsers, being rated as the best application for Internet browsing. Now, another Mozilla product has been awarded the Softpedia User’s Choice title.

After several of my favorite operating systems and distributions failed to properly connect to wireless hotspots without a lot of command-line tweaking, I found Netapplet, a great little GNOME applet in Novell's SUSE 9.3 Professional that scans for 802.11a/b/g wireless networks and shows you their signal strength and ESSID. You can then select the hotspot of your choice (if several are available) and continue on to the Internet from there. Yes, you can do the same thing from the command line by using iwlist and iwconfig, but it's nice to have it done automatically. Although Novell engineers created Netapplet for SUSE Linux, it can be installed on any GNU/Linux distribution. Once you've got this program on your GNOME-based laptop, you'll wonder how you ever did mobile computing without it.

Piper Jaffray reiterated a "marketperform" rating and $8 target price on BEA Systems (nasdaq: BEAS - news - people ), saying it expects the company to continue feeling pressure from the open-source movement. "We believe open-source offerings from JBoss and Gluecode will continue to pressure BEA in the app server market," Piper said.

Microsoft has accused Linux of having "support issues" as the Redmond giant unveiled the first beta of its Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Solution operating system for high-performance computing (HPC).

"As far as whether there's a new browser in town, I think the numbers speak for themselves," says Blake Ross, one of the co-creators of Firefox. "But I never look at this as a 'browser war.' Firefox is not a war on Microsoft; it is a war on complexity."

"By working closely with Eclipse, and proposing a new open source mobile development tools project, we will provide the more than two million registered developers in our Forum Nokia program with complete integrated tool packages optimized for Nokia platforms," said Pertti Korhonen (pictured), EVP and CTO of Nokia as it was announced this morning that Nokia has joined the Eclipse Foundation as a Strategic Developer and Board member. As Korhonen says, Nokia will support the work of the Eclipse open source community by contributing software and developers to a proposed new Eclipse project.

Red Hat has said that its Global File System (GFS) is now supported by Oracle for use in Oracle RAC solutions, EMC CLARiiON® networked storage systems, EMC Celerra® iSCSI network attached storage (NAS) systems solutions and NetApp for SAN interface solutions. Red Hat GFS is the first third-party cluster file system supported by Oracle for RAC solutions on Linux.

New Session Clustering Solution and Enhanced PHP Management Ensures Superior PHP Application Availability and Response Time

Founded by tuXlabs' ubergeek Jonathan Carter, Skubuntu adds games, educational tools and a host of localised school-ready tools to Ubuntu Linux to make it the distro of choice for educators.

PCs loaded with Novell's Suse Linux are to be withdrawn from Dion stores in Johannesburg because of low sales. Suppliers say most entry-level PC users aren't ready for Linux yet and more work needs to be done to educate potential users.

The Free Standards Group, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to developing and promoting open source software standards, and the LSB workgroup today announced the availability of the Linux Standard Base (LSB) 3.0, an essential component for the long-term market success of Linux. The Free Standards Group also announced today that Red Hat, Novell, the Debian Common Core Alliance and Asianux are all certifying to the latest versions of their operating systems to the LSB, marking the successful deployment of a true global standard for Linux.

System z9 is the ninth generation of IBM's z-series mainframe platform, which IBM says has twice the capabilities of its predecessor. The company is aiming System z9 at the world’s largest companies and the government sector,...

Hans Reiser [interview] sent an email to thelkml titled, "I request inclusion of reiser4 in the mainline kernel". He provided a list of objections raised earlier, noting that all had been addressed. Among the listed issues, Reiser4 now works with 4k stacks. "There have been no bug reports concerning the new code," Hans added.

The request was followed with some suggestions by Christoph Hellwig, including general comments about the coding style. This was one of many issues that led to debate in which Hans commented, "most of my customers remark that Namesys code is head and shoulders above the rest of the kernel code. So yes, it is different." Alan Cox [interview] replied that while the kernel coding style isn't his own style, he tries to follow it when working on the kernel, "one big reason we jump up and down so much about the coding style is that its the one thing that ensures someone else can maintain and fix code that the author has abandoned, doesn't have time to fix or that needs access to specific hardware the authors may not have." Much of the rest of the thread was less friendly, leaving the question of merging Reiser4 into the mainline kernel still up in the air.

The primary author of systhread.net is hoping this year's Ohio Linuxfest will be better than before. With IBM and Novell among the many names in attendance - it should be good.