08.30.08
Do-No-Evil Saturday – Part II: SUSE Minutes, Turbolinux Releases
SUSE
Apart from that coupons story, which is history by now, the only prominent articles appear to be about IBM and SUSE. Here is the first one from Timothy Prickett Morgan:
While Linux has certainly taken off in the high-performance supercomputing labs of academic institutions, commercial enterprises, and government facilities around the world, many of the supercomputers out there are using home-grown Linuxes and are self-supported by fleets of nerds who, in many cases, know as much or more about Linux than the commercial Linux suppliers. That said, this is a cost and both Red Hat and Novell and their server partners want to get more installations among HPC shops.
[...]
The HPCC 8 Pack bundle is available starting August 22. IBM did not announce pricing, but it should be considerably less per node than the cost of a basic SLES 10 license, which costs $349 list from Novell for a basic subscription with one year of Web and telephone support. The IBM HPCC 8 Pack has Big Blue offering Level 1 tech support and does not have telephone support, but does include patches for the Linux stack and for security updates as well as online delivery of those patches and any ancillary software.
The second article is about SUSE-powered mainframes in education.
While most computer science students learn skills on x86 servers, their counterparts at the University of Arkansas will now get hands-on experience on a new IBM system z900 running Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise.
Lastly, Matt Asay connected some statistics from Utah to Novell’s presence there.
Xandros/Linspire
It’s the same old story. It’s all about Eee PC, but pretty much nothing else. Here is a complaint.
The main problem is that all of the files on the site are in the so-called Click ‘N Run (or CNR) format, which is a quick and easy way to install Linux apps — when the Linux distro supports CNR, that is. Unfortunately for ASUS (and Eee PC users), the Eee PC’s Xandros distribution does not. As some on the EeeUser forums point out, however, Xandros now actually owns Linspire (the company behind CNR), so it would seem to be entirely possible that CNR support could be coming in a future version of Xandros, but that still doesn’t explain ASUS putting the cart before the horse like this.
Another mention of Xandros in this new post.
The Eee PC 900 was released, then the 901, 904, 904HD each of them coming with Windows and Linux variations in multiple colours and with more options and extras than you could shake a fistful of sub-notebooks at. There were Atom and non-Atom CPU options and all this without mentioning the assorted peripherals like the Eee PC writing pad or Wii-alike motion controller.
Turbolinux
Turbolinux 12 has just been released, but the English-speaking homepage only raves about Wizpy and other old news.
Turbolinux Appliance Server 3.0 has also been released (quite some time ago in fact) with anti-virus software. The coverage is not in English though. A translation suggests that the price for the 50-user version is 171,000 yen.
More Turbolinux in the news here, here, here and here, among other places.
Turbolinux is now described in DistoWatch as follows: “Turbolinux distributions are designed from the ground-up specifically for enterprise computing. Turbolinux 7 Server was the first-ever to conform to Internationalization standards to help simplify development of applications that require multiple language support – a critical requirement for software distributed globally. Turbolinux 7 Server also supports the Large File Support (LFS) standard for working with applications that manage or handle up to four terabytes of data – a common requirement for infrastructures serving Fortune 500 and larger companies. Such industrial-strength environments provide the basis upon which PowerCockpit and other Turbolinux innovations were created.” █
