Upside Today profiles Red Hat and its finally concluded search for a CFO, who the company plans to introduce at tomorrow morning’s investor meeting.

How do you tell others that you’ve discovered Linux? Linux Journal’s Gaelyne Gasson shares her thoughts on “how to share your enthusiasm without causing riots or total disinterest.”

Can’t make it to Comdex this year? ZDNet offers its Webcast schedule of events for the annual Las Vegas technology conference. Bill Gates kicks things off on Sunday night, followed by HP CEO Carly Fiorina and Dell chairman Michael Dell on Monday.

InfoWorld reports that Eazel and Linuxcare have announced a partnership to provide support services. Linuxcare will provide e-mail support to users of Eazel’s upcoming Network User Environment. The company will also maintain an online knowledge base at Eazel’s Web site.

Progeny Linux Systems has announced the first public beta of Progeny Debian. The distribution features a new installation program, and new tools for administration, configuration, and package management. The beta is being released as an upgrade to Debian 2.2; the next beta release will be significantly larger in scale.

LinuxNews interviews Miles O’Neal, creator and maintainer of the frequently asked questions list for the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). “It’s at a difficult point in its lifecycle; people expect it to keep growing really fast, and all the bugs to get fixed, and the performance to increase by an order of magnitude, all at the same time. It has become extremely popular all of a sudden, and there are a lot of demands for features and improvements. Far more than there are new volunteers, as far as I can tell.”

With Linux gaining momentum in applications from wristwatches to supercomputers, its backers are redoubling efforts to expand the reach of the operating system and development environment while avoiding a re-enactment of the “Unix wars” on the Linux front. From the full story at EETimes.com.

From CMP Techweb: “The Linux movement is expected to reach another milestone next month when Linus Torvalds officially sanctions the long-awaited Linux 2.4 kernel for commercial release.”

ZD Net’s Anchordesk goes through the history of chip-maker and Linus employer Transmeta, step by step.

Salon.com reports: “The three remaining watermarks in the Hack SDMI contest weren’t all ‘successfully’ broken after all — or so goes the news that is coming out of the SDMI meetings Wednesday in Washington. Although all three watermarks had hacks that passed the ‘oracle’ test (which examined whether or not the watermark had been removed) …”