Coverity's founders, four graduate students from Stanford University and their professor, recently grammar-checked the entire Linux 2.6.9 kernel operating system and found a respectably low 950 bugs in 5.5 million lines.

FORBES: Magazine Article

Compaq, HP, and IBM have inked partnership agreements with all the major distributions, but managing multiple documentation sets, utilities, and installation packages for essentially the same operating system kernel may weed out some distributions over time.

CNN: The big business of Linux

After some investigation, the problem appeared to be in the Linux network file system (NFS) kernel, the piece of the operating system responsible for some basic server functions.

CNN: Linux gaining with mission-critical systems

Fixed kernel panic issue that system goes into a non-responsive state.

ENGADGET: Netgear PTV3000 updated, supports Miracast-ready Android devices

In addition to checking daily for security updates, Mountain Lion includes app sandboxing to keep misbehaving apps from compromising your system, and kernel ASLR for improved protection against buffer overflow attacks.

ENGADGET: Apple brings Dictation to the Mac, tells Siri to stay in the car

Ubuntu is the most popular operating system to be based on the Linux kernel - the code that lets software and hardware work together.

BBC: Ubuntu operating system comes to Android smartphones

Both of them are less of a "boot" and more of a "wake from hibernation" sort of thing, but most of the issues are the same -- you still have to boot a kernel, whether or not you're gonna populate the system with a saved state when it's ready.

ENGADGET: Lineo's Warp 2 boots to Fedora on Atom in 4 seconds, MPC Data's SwiftBoot warms up embedded Linux in an instant

On January 4th, Linus Torvalds, the Finnish programmer who co-ordinates the development of Linux (see article), quietly released the latest version of the Linux kernel the software that, as its name suggests, is at the core of the operating system.

ECONOMIST: Computing