Wal-Mart Stores, the world's largest retailer, has begun selling Microtel PCs that come with Sun Microsystems' version of the Linux operating system.
"We are seriously considering Wal-Mart to be the PC supplier for Sun Microsystems," Jonathan Schwartz, head of Sun's software group, said in a meeting with reporters here Tuesday. Separately, he said an unnamed European bank is using Sun's Linux software for 10,000 tellers.
Dr. Larry Augustin was present at a moment in history of sorts—the genesis of the term "open source" in Mountain View, Calif., on Feb. 3, 1998. That was when a small group of Silicon Valley software folks (which also included Eric Raymond and Christine Peterson) sat down to decide that there needed to be an actual name for what this new and uncharted genre represented. So he owns a deep perspective on open source. And last week, he shared some of that perspective at the first Open Source Business Conference here by outlining his eight simple rules for open-source business strategy.
The Device Simulator Framework (DSF) provides an easy-to-use ioctl interface to all your devices, real or imagined. Intended for experienced kernel and device driver software developers, DSF makes it easier to debug and test device code that would otherwise be difficult to simulate or recreate.
Red Hat has abandoned the low-end Linux market, says IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky. Novell offers more options as it herds customers to enterprise Linux and could fill the retail niche Red Hat left vacant. "The question is, can Novell execute this strategy?" he wonders.
Reinforcing its commitment to open source, Novell has offered a series of announcements aimed at open-platform technologies for the enterprise at the company's annual BrainShare conference, including an earlier-than-expected release of the forthcoming enterprise server.
Sun Microsystems, a company that has been making noise lately in the Linux desktop market with StarOffice 7 and Java Desktop, is currently working on an experimental 3D successor to Java Desktop that they believe will change the way we interact with computers, and in the end elevate the popularity of Linux in general.
Looking Glass is still very much in the planning stage, but a demonstration on the Sun Web site offers a glimpse of what it could be capable of.
In the 1990s, Microsoft defeated Novell in the market for server operating systems. Now Novell is taking the battle back to Redmond, Wash., launching an attack on Microsoft's desktop stronghold.
"We're focusing on building a complete Linux desktop as an alternative to what you've been using," Novell Vice Chairman Chris Stone told Novell loyalists at the company's BrainShare conference here. "We believe that in the next 12 months, we will see the widespread adoption of Linux on the desktop."
I have finally found some time to install the brand new Mandrake-Linux 10.0 Community Edition PowerPack (what a nice short name!) on my very powerful and sexy Shuttle (SB65G2, my main PC at home).
I was using previously Mandrake 9.2 as my main desktop and I was very satisfied with it but I knew that version 10.0 will be a huge step ahead so I was eager to make it my default desktop (see my previous quick review of Mandrake 10.0).
SuSE Linux, now part of Novell Inc., on Thursday will announce that its SuSE Linux 9.1 personal and professional editions will be available in early May. The company says these are also the first complete commercial Linux distributions to support the recently released Linux 2.6 kernel.
According to Immunix COO Frank Rego, his company's decision to stop selling Immunix Linux wasn't a sudden shift but "more of a gradual change. We started in the appliance business with Trend Micro and Websense in the middle of last year." There was a layoff this week, but not a huge one. Rego says the company is now down to 20 employees from a high of about 25. He also says he hopes the company can start turning a profit by the end of 2004 -- but admits that he is an optimist.
It's not FUD, it's fact: Linux is every bit as susceptible to malicious code as Windows. Experts say the only difference between the two as attack vectors is the greater prevalence of Windows in enterprise data centers and on desktops. F-Secure Corp., a Finnish antivirus vendor, believes the problems for Linux may slowly escalate, as more CIOs and IT managers introduce Linux into their environments. In this interview, Jyrki Tulokas, business manager at F-Secure, explains the breadth of the current threat to Linux systems from malicious code and predicts how the landscape may change.
