Todd R. Weiss

The first UnitedLinux standardized Linux distribution, announced six months ago by four Linux vendors that teamed up to work together, was unveiled Tuesday by The SCO Group Inc. at Comdex.

The Six Continents Hotels Inc. and Inter-Continental Hotels Corp. chains have pulled up their welcome mats and are hauling an unwanted visitor into court, charging that online marketing company The Gator Corp. is illegally adding its pop-up ads to the hotel's Web sites and confusing customers.

The first version of the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) has been ratified by the standards group OASIS, giving Web site developers an open standard that will allow users to visit multiple unrelated sites after logging in with a secure single sign-on.

Enterprise collaboration capabilities have come to SuSE Linux AG, as the company recently unveiled SuSE Linux Openexchange Server, which includes a full range of communications and groupware features.

To encourage software developers to invest in building a wide range of business applications for its upcoming SCO Linux Powered By UnitedLinux operating system, The SCO Group Inc. has unveiled a program of incentives and marketing moves to help make that happen.

As IBM Corp. continues to build new machines in its Blue Gene line of powerful supercomputers, the operating system of choice from now on will be Linux.

Procter & Gamble Co. has confirmed that outsourcing vendor Electronic Data Systems Corp. is again negotiating with it on a major outsourcing deal, just two months after EDS walked away from earlier talks.

A new hardware-based user authentication capability will be available in Intel Corp.'s upcoming Banias microprocessors, due out next year in notebook computers.