"It will never beat Windows on the desktop, but the Linux operating system has an undeniable charm in the world of corporate computing: It's free. Microsoft's Bill Gates may be richer, but when it comes to unvarnished business aggression, no one in the high-tech world can top Larry Ellison, the 58-year-old founder and CEO of Oracle. This is a man cocky enough to fly his own fighter jet, competitive enough to have his minions pilfer Gates' trash, and mean enough to verbally flog his executives in public. He's worth $14 billion, making him the fourth-wealthiest American at last count, and unlike his peers who demur on the subject of money, Ellison isn't afraid to admit that he loves being rich." At Fortune.com.

Gentoo, Lindows and Lycoris arguably were the big surprises of the year in the Linux land, but everyone is waiting the release of Red Hat 8.0 with, possibly, the biggest anticipation ever for a Linux distribution. Since Red Hat posted the Limbo and Null betas, fans of the most popular distribution on earth were making waves and even called this new version a Windows killer. Does this really hold up though? Will Red Hat be successful on their quest to infiltrate the business workstation/destkop market? Read more to find out and view some of the high resolution screenshots we have for you! UPDATE: Red Hat 8 is out! ZDNews has an article about the new release of Red Hat 8.0.

"What is configuration in Linux? What do experienced system administrators do when they need to, for example, modify the access rights to a Web site or change the network settings for their server? Invariably, they're going to login into the machine and edit a text file using a Unix editor such as vi or Emacs. That by itself isn't that bad, but depending on which application you want to configure and which Linux distribution you happen to be using, the location of the file you need to edit (and maybe even the format of the file) could be completely unknown." Read the article at FreshMeat.

A few months back we reported on XPwm, a window manager and a desktop that emulates the behaviour of Windows XP. Today, the project is renamed to XPde, it has a new release, and it now looks more polished. Read more for the message the developer sent us.

As executive vice VICE president of Sun's software group, Jonathan Schwartz heads the company's new unified software business and is leading the charge to promote the Linux open-source technology. Schwartz met with InfoWorld Test Center Director Steve Gillmor and Technical Director Tom Yager to discuss Sun's recently announced Linux desktop strategy and to explain how it's in the industry's best interests to develop an alternative to arch-rival Microsoft.

"For some reason, UnitedLinux attracts FUD the way a dog does fleas. But, now that the public beta is out, we can see that, well, its basically a GPL-compliant, high-end Linux server operating system. In short, this isn't a Linux for playing with at home or running a small business. It, as the developers promised, is a Linux for business customers high-end needs. Now, the question is can UnitedLinux deliver on that promise. And, that is what well see in the coming weeks as potential business customers put this beta through its paces." Read the article at LinuxPlanet.