Free Republic

IBM switching to Linux destops in Germany according to a Linux Forum 2006 presentation by their head of open source and Linux sales in Germany. Interesting news from LinuxForum 2006During a presentation on IBM's involvement with Open Source, Andreas Pleschek from IBM in Stuttgart, Germany, who heads open source and Linux technical sales across North East Europe for IBM made a very interesting statement... "Andreas Pleschek also told that IBM has cancelled their contract with Microsoft as of October this year. That means that IBM will not use Windows Vista for their desktops. Beginning from July, IBM employees will begin using IBM...

Michael Dell, chairman of Dell Inc. believes in offering Linux on the desktop, server, and workstation. What he doesn't believe in, for now, is giving Linux full support on the desktop. In an exclusive interview, Dell explained his company's Linux desktop strategy to DesktopLinux.com's Steven J. Vaughan Nichols. "People are always asking us to support Linux on the desktop, but the question is: 'Which Linux are you talking about?'," Dell asked.

From our "Linux is for Total Newbies" series, courteousy of Robert Milner for reallylinux.com. Still hesitant to try Linux? I'd like to share a revelation with you. See, for me, Linux adoption always seemed a bit of a battle to get out there on the desktop. No, I'm not talking about getting it installed. The major flavor providers have made stellar strides in set-up, making it a breeze. Take a look for yourself at the powerful and useful features in Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, and SuSe. There are easy to learn graphical interfaces like Gnome, KDE, or XFCE to name a...

Hewlett-Packard has announced that it will certify Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4 as the preferred operating system for its new AdvancedTCA Blade Server, which the company debuted last week at the 3GSM World Congress. The new blade server is HP's most recent addition to its Advanced Open Telecom Platform (AOTP) blueprint, a line based on the Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA) industry standard created by the PCI Industrial Manufacturer's Group (PICMG). The AOTP is HP's suite of hardware, carrier-grade Linux, and software that supports the ATCA standard. HP's bh5700 server is a shelf-management subsystem with a 14-slot backplane made...

Apple's newly acquired OS, NeXTstep was built on the Mach 3.0 kernel, the same microkernel used by GNU/Hurd. Though by then the Mach kernel was largely abandoned, another kernel, Linux, was gaining support and seeing rapid development. The project at Carnegie Mellon to develop Mach had ended in 1994, two years before Apple acquired NeXT. As early as 1991 papers were published documenting performance issues with the Mach kernel. At the time there was much debate over kernel design, 1992 marked the now famous flame war between Linus Torvalds and Andy Tanenbaum over monolithic vs. microkernel design. Even though Apple...

Is Dell is on its way to becoming the first tier-one PC vendor to offer a mainstream business Linux desktop to US customers? It's starting to look that way. In the recent past, Dell has toyed with shipping a Linux-powered PC to the US market. But, when push came to shove, the results -- a Dimension E510n PC shipped with an empty hard drive, a copy of the obscure, open-source FreeDOS operating system and no support if you did install Linux -- were less then impressive. It's a different story for so-called workstations priced nearly as cheaply as desktops. Dell...

The SCO Group Inc. had a couple motions denied Friday in its ongoing case against International Business Machines Corp.       U.S. Magistrate Judge Brooke Wells ruled that Lindon-based SCO should not get more time for depositions of people at Intel, Oracle and The Open Group and denied a different motion to force IBM to provide more documentation in the case. She did give SCO 30 days to file a renewed motion but said it must "narrowly" define areas that have not been covered in documents IBM already has provided to SCO.       SCO has filed a...

Hold on to your hats! IBM has subpoenaed Microsoft! And Sun! At last, we're getting to the core of the matter. We're going to get to find out the whole story. I'd pay for this. No kidding. Feast your eyes on these and don't skip the topics for deposition: * Plaintiff IBM's Notice of Service of Subpoenas Duces Tecum - yes, plaintiff for the countercharge...oops, I meant counterclaims * Exhibit A - HP's (deposition set for March 15, 9 AM) * Exhibit B - Baystar's (deposition set for March 16, 9 AM) * Exhibit C - Microsoft's (deposition set for...

SCO WAS taken out behind the woodshed by Intel a few days ago in one of the more unfriendly court filings in a long and extremely unfriendly case. The 64K question is not what happened, that is more than adequately documented on Groklaw, the real question is why SCO, or its attorneys got so stupid. The short story for those not reading along with PJ, Darl and the gang is this, SCO faced a discovery cutoff in late January, and by all accounts had little or no evidence as the curtains were being drawn. It was desperate for an extension...

Will Apple adopt Windows? By Jack Schofield / Apple/ Windows 01:15pm "The idea that Apple would ditch its own OS for Microsoft Windows came to me from Yakov Epstein, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University, who wrote to me convinced that the process had already begun. I was amused, but after mulling over various coincidences, I'm convinced he may be right. This would be the most phenomenal turnabout in the history of desktop computing," writes PC Magazine columnist John C. Dvorak. Dvorak predicted Apple moving to Intel chips before that happened, but ... Way back then, Apple was trying...

FOSS for OS/2: Keeping the flame alive Thursday February 16, 2006 (06:00 PM GMT) By: Bruce Byfield After a decade of neglect and increasingly reluctant support from IBM, the manufacturer, the OS/2 community persists. Where users of GNU/Linux or FreeBSD have turned to free and open source software (FOSS) for political and philosophical freedom and software quality, the surviving OS/2 community has been turning to FOSS as a means of defending members' right to use the operating system of their choice. The result is a small but surprisingly diverse collection of projects that, to a GNU/Linux user, is a mixture...

Survey: Research has found that administrators are more productive when working with Linux servers rather than those running Windows, but not everyone agrees with the results

Some folks just dote on mystery. SCO must be one of them. It now turns out that, according to IBM's latest Motion to Limit SCO's Claims Relating to Allegedly Misused Material [PDF] and the Memorandum in Support [PDF], while SCO did list 294 items on its final list of allegedly misused material by the December 22, 2005 deadline, it failed to provide "basic specificity" on 201 of them. So IBM would like the court to limit SCO to the 93 items it actually provided particularized information for. Here's IBM's attached Exhibits [PDF]. Exhibit A is Todd Shaughnessy's Declaration from May...

MooBella has put Linux to work making ice cream, in a vending machine that Wallace and Gromit would be proud of. The MooBella vending machine uses Linux 2.4 and a Red Hat filesystem to make 96 varieties of ice cream, on demand, in about 45 seconds per precisely-measured serving. MooBella showed off its Linux-powered ice cream machine at a DEMO event in Colorado today. Once the customer's selection has been made, a quantity of base mix is precisely measured and pumped, aerated, flavored, and sprayed onto a flat rotating surface, where it is flash frozen. The product is then scraped...

Well, *now* SCO's really gone and done it. They got used to IBM's restraint, I guess, and told a story to the Utah court, and now they are being called on it. First, we saw Oracle dispute SCO's story about the subpoenas in its motion to quash in California, and now Intel has filed in Utah a Nonparty Intel's Response to SCO's Motion For Leave to Take Certain Prospective Depositions [PDF], and they are hopping mad. Mad enough to tell Judges Kimball and Wells that what SCO said about Intel is "unfair and untrue": Although Intel takes no position on...

Sun Microsystems' ambitions have grown another size larger. The server and software company launched its servers based on its own UltraSparc T1 "Niagara" chips in December, a major part of a drive to restore its lost luster and financial strength. But alongside the hardware launch came a more quiet software push: an attempt to make the Linux and BSD Unix open-source operating systems a serious option for buyers of Sparc-based computers. To promote the technology combination, Sun is trying to coax an accompanying software business into existence. Sun has had some experience building such software "ecosystems." For example, it's in...

Word reaches the Deeplung ear that Intel's Yonah processor, which ships under the Intel Core Duo moniker, has features that aren't being exposed to the consumer. Intel's Sossaman is the key, and Sossaman is the codename for an ultra low voltage Yonah to be shipped under the Xeon brand, into the server and workstation space. And it transpires that Sossaman supports iAMD64, er, sorry, 'EM64T', symmetric multi-processing with another Sossaman Xeon, and hardware virtualisation. Intel's implementation of the 64-bit extension to x86, SMP and hardware VT are all missing from the official specs of Intel Core Duo consumer processors, despite...

Server virtualization and cost reduction are Red Hat customers' top wants today, says Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens. His team plans to deliver both by delivering commoditized virtualization in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 (RHEL5), the company's upcoming new Linux distribution release. What close-to-release technologies does Red Hat have in the works? Brian Stevens: We're in the middle of our development cycle for our next major release. When you build a major release, you have the opportunity to write to do more compelling technology solutions. What's driving IT is right now is getting ready for the commoditization of virtualization solutions....

Microsoft's row with Korean regulators could boost Linux in Asia, the region's first listed Linux developer told vnunet.com today. "It should definitely have a positive public relations impact for us," said Nobu Okada, chief financial officer at Turbolinux, a Japan-based Linux developer that carried out a successful IPO in September. Microsoft said that it might stop selling Windows in Korea if regulators demand a rewrite of the operating system's code to remove certain features. As regulators from the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) met to discuss a ruling in an antitrust case aimed at Microsoft, the president of Microsoft Korea,...

VMware is getting ready to follow up on its VMware Player with a free server product for Linux and Windows. On Monday, EMC subsidiary VMware will release a beta of VMware Server that it calls an "entry-level virtualization product" to partition x86 and x86-64 servers into multiple virtual machines. Unlike the VMware Player, which has limited features compared to the desktop-oriented VMware Workstation, VMware Server will be a full-featured product that is capable of creating virtual machines and includes monitoring features and support for Intel's Virtualization Technology (VT) and virtual SMP -- which allows the virtual machine to present multiple...