Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison announced the company's first prominent Linux customer Tuesday: Yahoo. But Red Hat hasn't been pushed aside at the Internet company.
Ellison cited the Yahoo deal as the first real evidence of progress from Oracle's high-profile attack on Linux leader Red Hat that began in October. Oracle is cloning Red Hat Enterprise Linux, selling support for less than Red Hat's list prices.
Progress in the virtualisation world sometimes seems slow. Xen has been the hot topic in the para-virtualisation area for some years now -- the first "stable" release was announced in 2003 -- but the code remains outside of the mainline Linux kernel. News from that project has been relatively scarce as of late, though the Xen hackers are certainly still out there working on the code. On the other hand, KVM appears to be on the fast path. This project first surfaced in October 2006; it found its way into the 2.6.20 kernel a few months later. On 25 February, KVM 15 was announced.
Dell is considering offering the Linux operating system as an alternative to Microsoft's Windows on its personal computers, a Dell spokesman said on Tuesday.
The PC maker said it received more than 100,000 customer requests for Linux in a "suggestion box" posted on Dell's Web site less than three weeks ago.
"We are listening to what customers are saying about Linux and taking it into consideration," said Dell spokesman David Lord. "We are going forward. Let's say, 'Certainly stay tuned.'"
Just a few days ago, Dell launched a site to solicit feedback from customers regarding what they most want to see coming from newer systems. Some of the various feature requests include stock multi-boot systems, an option to have no additional software installed aside from the OS, OpenOffice installations and ? topping the list by a margin of 2 to 1 ? pre-installed Linux. Whether it be with Ubuntu, Fedora Core, OpenSUSE or others, there are more than 20,000 requests for Dell to begin offering systems with Linux pre-installed by default. Clearly, demand for such systems are rising.
Linux kernel maintainer Andrew Morton last week revealed some of his plans for the next kernel version, a few days after the final release of Linux 2.6.20. Developers are currently revving up the development phase of the 2.6.21 kernel, with major additions planned for the next week or two, before beginning to lock down and stabilize the software.
When it comes to troublesome Linux peripherals, WiFi takes the cake. Sparked by the Portland Project's efforts to bring standardization to the Linux desktop, the Linux wireless developer community tackled this problem at its second Linux Wireless Summit last month in London.
The penguin?s come of age. What began as a battle between proprietary and open source Linux software, started by geeks around the world, isn?t plain tech rhetoric anymore. It?s now a mainstream commercial platform ? a technology that enterprises are taking very seriously and looking at as a major cost-effective solution that has scalability and a great future roadmap.
Ask Linux users what they find most annoying about Linux, and many will complain about device drivers. While the vast majority of PC components and peripherals work with Linux, some don't work at all, and others are marginal. A leading Linux kernel developer has come up with a solution.
Six of the world's largest telecommunications companies have officially launched a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating a common mobile Linux software platform.
Founded by Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics, and Vodafone, the LiMo Foundation is inviting membership and participation from application and middleware developers. The collaboration of giants now known as the LiMo Foundation was first announced in mid-June of 2006.
Oracle has furthered its support for Linux users with a new range of free management tools.
The Oracle Management Pack for Linux is designed for Oracle Unbreakable Linux users, the Linux support initiative the firm launched at the end of last year.
Based on Oracle's management solution - Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g - the Oracle Management Pack for Linux provides Oracle Unbreakable Linux support programme users with Linux server lifecycle management, helping to reduce the complexity and cost of managing their Linux OS environments, said Oracle.
