From TheStreet.com: “The piling on is under way for VA Linux, the software company that became a symbol of the initial public offering craze a year ago. It’s now threatened with becoming a poster child for everything that went wrong with late 1990s IPOs.” (Disclosure: VA Linux owns NewsForge)

Anonymous Reader writes “When I started college working on my bachelors in Computer Science the first programming language they taught me of course was Visual Basic. Like most college students majoring in CS this is the first language you touch, which is one of the reasons it’s so popular. Now, I was already an avid follower of the developing Linux project and was quite fluent in C, but my fellow VB programmer friends had a hard time getting into Linux. Primarily because they’re favorite easy to use-programming language wasn’t on it. So in this article I’m going to cover some basic interpreters/IDE that are available for Linux. Complete Story“

From Australian IT: “Sydney developer Century Software has launched a Linux-based financials package for small to medium companies. Called FoxOnLinux, the package is the culmination of three years development. It is a cut-down version of Century Financials – the accounting system in Century’s modular enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.”

ZDNet UK reports that Sony will use Be to power its e Villa Internet appliance: “Under the agreement Sony will use the BeIA Client Platform, a version of the Be operating system (BeOS) specially tailored for Internet appliances, on its e Villa device, which will be designed for Web surfing and basic tasks such as word processing.”

From PR Newswire: “SGI (NYSE: SGI) and
Platform Computing Inc. today announced the availability of the SGI(TM)
Electronic Design Automation (EDA) Technical Compute Farm for Linux(R), a
complete solution designed to bring enhanced speed and power to the burgeoning
EDA Linux operating system-based market. Platform LSF (Load Sharing Facility)
software, an industry leader for batch job management, will be a key component
of the offering.”

Intel is set to debut a new laptop processor later this year; one designed from the ground up with power conservation features to prolong the life of mobile devices. Supposedly named “Banias” (after an archaeological dig in the Middle East), the new chip will be the first that Intel has designed “from the ground up” to power notebooks. CNET News.com reports.

CNET News.com reports: “German Linux seller SuSE expects to become profitable in 12 to 18 months, considerably later than U.S. rival Red Hat, but the company would much rather stay on its side of the Atlantic. “The Linux market in Germany is so ahead of the U.S.,” Chief Technology Officer Dirk Hohndel said in an interview during the CeBit trade show in Germany. “This is the best Linux market there is.””

From The Linux Gurus: “One of the more exciting, yet least hyped features of the new 2.4 kernel is the built-in facility for handling software RAID arrays. In the not-so-olden days of the 2.2 series kernels, one had to manually add a number of specific patches as discussed on www.linuxraid.org. The new 2.4 kernel distribution includes all of the latest software RAID enhancements, currently stable at version 0.9. “

The Open Cluster Group has been working for some time now to develop a clustering system that’s easier to use than current solutions. The fruits of OCG’s labors, Open Source Cluster Application Resources (OSCAR) make their debut in the V2001 beta version of MSC.Linux. Full story at Enterprise Linux Today.

LinuxProgramming posts a message from Guido van Rossum: “On time, and with a minimum of fuss, we’ve released Python 2.1b2.
Thanks again to the many developers who contributed!”