future directions. He has written extensively on migration strategy, assessments, 

and application selection.

Tom Schwaller 

is a Linux IT Architect and EMEA Linux Desktop Technical 

Leader living in Munich, Germany. He studied Mathematics and Theoretical 

Physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and been a research 

assistant at the Technical University of Munich in the field of high performance 

computing (using Linux Beowulf clusters). After that he was editor in chief of the 

German Linux Magazine (from 1996 2000) and site manager of 

linux community.de. He is also cofounder of the Linux New Media AG and joined 

IBM in 2001. He has worked with free software for more than 15 years and with 

Linux for more than 10 years. He is a big fan of scripting languages like Python, 

Ruby, Groovy, and Boo, and is a Linux hardware collector (Intel Dual Celeron 

and two Thinkpads, Xbox, AMD 

K6 and Athlon 64, several Alphas (DEC 

2000/PC 150) AXPpci33, LX 164, Sun Ultra 5, Motorola Powerstack, Apple G3, 

IBM 43P 270, IBM B50, SGI Indy R4000, Cobalt Cube, HP PA RISC 32/64, 

StrongArm PDA, Amiga, and hopefully some Power4/5 and zSeries machines in 

the not so distant future).

Acknowledgements

The following people provided significant support for this project:

Stephen Hochstettler

, ITSO Project and Linux Team Leader: For his vision and 

support.

Greg Kelleher

, Senior Program Manager Worldwide Linux Desktop Strategy 

and Market Development: For sponsoring the project and guiding development 

of the content outline and scope for this book.

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