The National Weather Service and the Forecast Systems Laboratory have begun research and development necessary to migrate critical components of AWIPS to Linux. The current AWIPS hardware is approaching ten year old technology and will be insufficient to handle the processing, display, and communications loads envisioned. Already, existing Unix workstations are experiencing significant performance problems during severe weather events. These workstations are also not capable of handling the anticipated work load of interactive forecast preparation on high resolution forecast grids. The National Weather Service has developed plans for a systematic migration of AWIPS to the Linux operating system. A limited demonstration of the first phase which incorporates a Linux workstation onto the AWIPS LAN was completed during 2001. This paper will summarize architectural changes and prototype and development activities to evolve the workstations, applications servers, data servers, and communications systems.