Stories by: Alexandra Krasne

If you're in a sparsely packed Moscone Center auditorium filled mostly with men wearing black hacker and GNU T-shirts and clutching green bottles of Mountain Dew, it must be time for the next Golden Penguin Bowl: A LinuxWorld Expo tradition in which two teams, the Nerds and Geeks, play for bragging rights and the "coveted" Golden Penguin trophy.

Legal efforts by The SCO Group Inc. to license technology that many thought was open source seemed to weigh heavily on exhibitors and attendees at the recent LinuxWorld in the US, but it didn't slow the display of PCs and servers loaded with Linux applications, distributions, and gadgets.

From Linux kernels and chemistry to lawsuits, all things nerdy and newsworthy were fair game at the Golden Penguin Bowl, a fixture of the LinuxWorld conference meeting here this week.

Attendees of the Desktop Linux Summit held last week in San Diego spent two days reveling in the growing number of games, PCs, software applications, and peripherals that are now compatible with the underdog operating system.

Kicking off the Desktop Linux Summit at MP3.com's headquarters, Lindows.com's chief executive highlighted the latest developments on the desktop Linux front.

Big PC shows like PC Expo are predictably dominated by Microsoft and its supporters. But here at this year's PC Expo/TechXNY, Linux stole a bit of the limelight: For the first time, a Linux Boot Camp taught attendees what Linux is, what they can do with it, and how to work with it.

LinuxWorld's own version of the Weakest Link game show, The Golden Penguin Bowl, proves that knowing the difference between TCPIP and CPIP as well as the breed of parrot in Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch can come in handy.

At the recent LinuxWorld Expo, Corel unveiled their latest Linux distribution - Corel Linux 1.2. This release goes a long way to making Linux as user-friendly as Windows with improved configuration and file management tools.

Office suites are like a pair of shoes. If your shoes are comfortable, you'll get where you need to go with nary a thought for your feet. But put on a pair that pinch or bind, and you'll feel it with each step. Similarly, when you install an office suite that fails to meet your needs, crashes, or burdens you with intrusive functions that you don't use, it can turn everyday work tasks into difficult chores. So, what are the shoes for you in the Linux shopping centre?

Corel's WordPerfect Office 2000 made its way into stores in the US on Saturday. Inside the new suite you'll find the familiar assemblage of tools: a word processing program, spreadsheet, and presentation software, to name a few. But there's one thing that sets this package apart from previous versions of Corel's office suites--this one runs on Linux.