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The key supporters of the single Linux standard are Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Intel - companies that are taking advantage of the growing acceptance of Open-Source software. Adoption of LSB 2.0 promises cost-savings for hardware makers, as they only need to test their products on a single standard rather than for each distribution.

And there are many. Red Hat and Sun are members of the Free Standards Group, as are Novell's SUSE, Japan's TurboLinux, the South American Conectiva, France's MandrakeSoft and embedded

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Linux developer MontaVista, among others.

Detractors of the system warn that the fragmentary nature of so many different versions of the software will result in 'forking' - so that one version of Linux is incompatible with another.

Indeed in April such an argument sparked in-fighting, when Sun Microsystems' COO Jonathan Schwartz suggested that leading Linux vendor Red Hat had made so many changes to its version of the core Linux kernel that it was 'proprietary'. But the rest of the Linux community was adamant that as long as Red Hat makes the source code available, it's Open Source.

So a unifying initiative like the LSB will give potential Linux customers the confidence that such claims are unfounded.

LSB 2.0 adds support for the 64-bit architectures of Power PC and Athlon64 and Opteron processors from IBM and AMD respectively. It already supports Intel's 32- and 64-bit chips.

It also adds an Application Binary Interface (ABI) for the C++ programming language.