LinuxPlanet reviews the SuSE 7.0 distribution of Linux in this article. ‘…SuSE Linux 7.0, the latest offering from the Germany-based SuSE GmbH, comes in two distinct
offerings–Personal and Professional–as well as an Upgrade version for current SuSE users….[Personal] is definitely a platform aimed at the home or office user who has minimum Linux experience.’

‘…When the 7.0 software was released in late
August, they sold 84,000 units directly to customers on the very first day, which sold out the product. Over the course of the next month, they sold another 40,000 units. SuSE’s success is also blazingly clear according to an independent survey of software sold in Germany that included games and utilities as well as operating systems and productivity
apps. In that survey, Wiegand said, SuSE Linux Professional was ranked number one and SuSE Linux Personal was
number three (Norton AntiVirus for Windows was number two).’

‘…Installation of the Personal edition is touted to be less than 20 minutes, and my number was close: 24 minutes
installing the Default with Office option, which is a base install along with StarOffice 5.2.’

Updated: 1/12/2003 FreePM is now TORCH. Tim Cook of the FreePM project was recently interviewed on www.linuxnews.com. The article by Michelle head quotes Cook as saying: ‘while working in the health care IT field, I saw the abuses that hospitals and
physicians’ offices were taking from closed source vendors of health care software. I don’t just mean the outrageous
pricing of licenses and per-incident tech support. Too often a sales person is the first person sent to a site to address
problems that everyone knows are really tech support issues…’

Jay E. Gold, MD reports on PDAMD.com about an offering by Tuxtops.com of a pre-configured Linux laptop. “I’ve been experimenting for over a month now with a Tuxtop system and, let me tell you, someone will have to pry it out of my cold dead hands. It’s that good.”

For those that support the use of open source software for medical web site development, check out the new release of the Bluefish HTML editor.
I have been using Bluefish for over a month and find it to be the best free HTML editors thus far. An RPM package is available for easy installation on Red Hat Linux systems. Many other distributions are supported, or you can “roll your own” and go with a source tarball install instead.