Luring Windows users to Linux. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. It may not be loud enough to cause real worry for Microsoft yet, but the drum beat continues for the open source operating system Linux. Walmart has expanded the line of low priced computers it sells that run Linux instead of Windows. At SuSE Linux, a German based company launched by four students a decade ago and is now up to 380 employees, Americas general manager Holger Dyroff thinks consumers will join businesses in giving Linux a look...

"If you look at the consumer space, we have a lot of people who are working at home, kind of small office, home office environment. That's an area where we absolutely fit in and what you need there... you need email, you need a Web front end, you need office applications and of course, things like multimedia applications."

And Dyroff says SuSE is bundling photo editing applications and such with its Linux desktop. How big can it get?

"That's a good question. If you look at the desktop area, right now Linux has about 2 to 2.5 percent market share and it's expected to exceed Apple's market share during this year. So the analyst's predict, and we predict as well, that by the beginning of the year 2004, the market share on the desktop for Linux will be about 4 to 5 percent."

Still small, but growing. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.