Mandrakesoft on Monday announced it will release a transitional Linux product as it absorbs technology from Conectiva, a Brazilian Linux company it acquired in February. The French company also announced that it is slowing down the release cycle -- now to take place annually -- on its Mandrakelinux products in order to give itself and its channel partners more time to develop new features and functions. Mandrakesoft has also concocted a new naming scheme, with products being named after a given year.

The company wrote in a release that the changes are motivated by requests from partners and distributors for a more convenient release cycle. "For a long time, distributors and resellers have asked us to adopt a longer release cycle that is more adapted to their specific constraints," the release reads. Mandrakesoft has also received user and customer requests to slow things down, according to the release.

In an online article at LinuxJournal.com titled "Setting Up a Linux Desktop in a Small Office Network," Tom Adelstein describes how a Linux Desktop can make a neat tool in the small business setting for linking different kinds of systems together. From Win98 to XP, to Mac OS X, to Linux, users can share files, printers, and network devices; and configuration is getting even easier, according to Adelstein.

Resolvo Systems has released a tool it says enables Windows users to migrate to a Linux desktop with a few mouse clicks. The company's MoveOver software provides a wizard-driven interface that migrates various aspects of the Windows environment to Linux, including documents, email, wallpaper, cookies, Internet bookmarks, and user-specific preferences.

According to Resolvo, users need not have any Linux know-how in order to make the switch. For advanced users, MoveOver provides the option to choose the files, settings and emails that they want on a new Linux desktop.

MoveOver is offered in two versions, aimed at personal and corporate users. The $20 MoveOver Standard Edition is aimed at home users and small offices, while MoveOver Enterprise Edition targets migrations of 20 to 100,000 computers, the company says.

Novell Inc. CEO Jack Messman delivered a Linux valentine to CIOs at the opening keynote at LinuxWorld here on Tuesday, taking pains to emphasize that Linux is business-ready in terms of security, certification, indemnification, and being able to run in entire hardware and software stacks, including on the desktop.

"A great deal of progress has been made in the past 13 months alone," Messman told attendees. Whereas in last year's keynote Messman said that IT managers were still leery about Linux, particularly concerned about whom to call if something breaks, now Novell hears "fewer and fewer of these questions," he said.

"The good work the open-source community has done ... has encouraged IT executives to see the light," Messman said. "Many CIOs and CTOs [chief technology officers] agree that open source and Linux in particular is the center of the enterprise."

He pointed to surveys that show that 53 percent of all CIOs said open source will be the dominant technology by 2007, saying that Linux's strategic importance in enterprises will over time continue to bear fruit as Linux moves to the desktop.

The OSDL (Open Source Development Labs) has raised $4 million to seed a non-profit, independent legal center that will provide free services to eligible open source developers and projects. The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) will offer asset stewardship, licensing, license defense and litigation support, legal support, and lawyer training.

The Center will be based in New York, and will be run by Board Chairman and Director-Counsel Eben Moglen, a Professor at Columbia Law School who has long served General Counselor for the Free Software Foundation (FSF, aka GNU.org). Moglen is regarded as one of the world's leading experts on copyright law as applied to software.

The Center will be co-managed by Legal Director Daniel B. Ravicher, founder of the Public Patent Foundation.

The Center will open initially with two full-time intellectual property attorneys o;n staff, with two more expected to join later this year. Its initial clients will include the FSF, and the Samba Project.