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But while the corporate world was beginning to rally round the platform, MandrakeSoft, vendor of one of the most user-friendly distributions, filed for the French equivalent of Chapter 11-style bankruptcy protection.

Even worse followed shortly, when speculation that a company called SCO had hired a high profile lawyer to look into revenue opportunities from its Unix IP turned out to be entirely true.

Come March, SCO filed suit against IBM alleging the company was in breach of contract by misappropriating copyright Unix code into the Linux kernel.

Still, that didn't dent Linux's growing confidence: Red Hat announced new products for its enterprise servers, Mandrake, Slackware and SUSE brought out new versions and a study commissioned by OpenForum Europe showed that Linux was being taken ever-more seriously at boardroom level.

Even so, SCO's posturing had some effect: its next set of results gave it its first ever profit - pushed into the black by licensing revenues, with Microsoft having purchased a Unix licence. A small victory though came in the form of German GNU/Linux group LinuxTag winning a restraining order against SCO for unfair competitive practices, to which SCO responded by pulling its German site from the Web.

Red Hat's results also put it into the black, but from strong revenues, not from litigious shenannigans.

We're now in balmy June, and Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, quits Transmeta to take a full-time role as 'Fellow' at the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) - an organisation that would find increasing influence and backing as the year progressed.

Things got even hotter in July, when SCO announced it was selling a licence to commercial users of the Linux operating system to cover them against its claims of IP infringement in the kernel. And it wasn't cheap.

Linux on the desktop also got the first of many boosts, with the news that HP was to offer Mandrake Linux on its office systems.

Then at Linux World in San Francisco the Linux community united: IBM filed countersuit against

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SCO and Red Hat filed a formal complaint against the company for its 'unsubstantiated' statements.

In the background, Novell had been quietly focussing on Linux. It had already embarked on a strategy to port all its advanced network services for business on Linux, and now it picked up Ximian, a well established desktop suite of PIM apps such as calendar and contract management.

And despite SCO's antics, Novell's faith was well placed. IDC figures in September showed Linux server shipments continued to rocket, 42 per cent year on year.

Sun also put a lot of weight behind the platform, announcing a new product range and strategy that included the SUSE-based Java Desktop. The company said it would also ship a home-grown Solaris-based version in 2004, though, too.

And in support of AMD's launch of the Athlon64, SUSE had the only 64bit desktop OS around. And we had exclusive interviews with SUSE's Chris Schlager on the battle for MS users and SUSE's 64bit story.

October saw the next major release of the OpenOffice office suite, and the announcement that the UK Government was to begin trials of Open Source software, beginning with IBM and offering discounts on Linux-based products.

Then in November Novell wore its Linux heart on its sleeve, with the purchase of SUSE, the second largest vendor of the Linux operating system. A move described by Forrester Research thus: 'when the high-tech history of this decade is written, this acquisition will mark a turning point in Linux adoption'.

Indeed, things looked even more rosy for the platform with the news that a government-sponsored initiative in China had landed Sun with an order for some 200 million SUSE-based Java desktops.

Come December, the UK Government wanted a piece of the action too, announcing it was extending its Open Source trials to include Sun's offerings. The NHS too said it would trial Sun's desktop software.

More good news, for Linux users, was that SCO had been given 30 days to provide the specific evidence and documentation asked for by IBM in order to build its defence and argue its countersuit.

And the year was rounded off with the first new production Linux kernel for nearly three years, with the release of 2.6.