Bloomberg News reports that Symantec's CEO John Thompson said his company is considering a move to Linux desktops company-wide. At a New York conference on Wednesday Thompson reportedly stated that Symantec is evaluating open source Linux as a replacement for the company's Microsoft Windows machines.

Industry watchers expect many firms this year will be evaluating Linux systems for lower costs and to avoid vendor lock-in. The Bloomberg News story quotes Symantec's Thompson as saying that he is looking at open source as "an alternative to the monopoly position that Microsoft has on the desktop."

The Cupertino, CA-based anti-virus software maker has more than 5,000 employees, according to its website.

Linux software makers IBM and Novell have also announced major in-house desktop migration strategies.

DestinationCRM's expert column features an essay that demonstrates how companies can migrate successfully to Linux. Recognizing that companies moving their CRM applications to Linux-based networks can achieve substantial savings quickly -- reportedly an "ROI in Linux five to six times faster" -- the article offers simple steps to integrate open source software into your business. Moving forward with a step-by-step migration to Linux is a key to achieving a nondisruptive and successful open source deployment, notes the author.

This article is intended on helping those that are interested in either switching to Linux or are curious as to what Linux has to offer. I will try to cover the basic components of a desktop and how Fedora can perform these basic tasks. We will cover the installation part of Fedora, to playing music, surfing the web and chatting. A bit of info on what Fedora is..."The Fedora Project is a Red-Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source project. The Fedora project is a merger between Red Hat Linux and Fedora Linux."

This has gone largely unnoticed, but hp has been selling desktop PC's bundled with Mandrake Linux for a while now.

In this example, the d325 microtower, we find an AMD Athlon 2600 with good specs and a nice nVidia graphics card for $558 (US).

For all you Microsoft-roadkill-watchers that's, what, $107 (US) less than the same machine bundled with Windows XP.

This is a fine machine for quotidien tasks including Web-browsing, office-ing, IM-ing, and e-mail-ing. What's more, the box bundles Mandrake 9.2, their business distro, containing lots of goodies but none more critical than OpenOffice.org 1.1 and its native open "OASIS XML" file format.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Linux and open source software advocates have gotten the corporate world's attention. Now, they have to compel CIOs to take action. That's the tall order placed by a panel of experts at this week's Open Source Business Conference.

The panel -- Winston Damarillo, CEO of Gluecode Software; Dave Dargo, consultant and former Linux vice president for Oracle Corp.; Al Nugent, CTO for Novell Inc.; and Cliff Schmidt, director of open source strategy for BEA Systems Inc. -- brainstormed on a set of messages that could give CIOs reason to switch to Linux and open source.