Slashdot Mirror

arkanoid.dk writes "Sources close to Progeny, Mandriva and Turbolinux report that a new Enterprise Linux distribution is on its way. Apparently, the distribution will be based on Debian 3.1 Sarge and will form the foundation of the next server distributions from the three companies. The three companies hope that the new distribution will enable them to compete with the market leaders Red Hat and Novell Inc's server distributions. An interesting part is that the new system should support both DEB (Debian package) and RPM (Red Hat Package Management) to enable better cross-compatibility with other Linux flavours. The vendor said: 'It will have a nice, Web-based front end for service management, which Sarge lacks. It's basically oriented toward edge-of-the-network type applications, such as ISP software.'"

timekillerj writes "Turbolinux launched a new version of it's Linux distribution today. The key feature is the first commercial DVD player, provided by Cyberlink. PowerDVD for Linux supports menu navigation, Dolby Digital sound, subtitles, and more."

spike-288 writes "According a press release, Turbolinux is the first major Linux distributor to license and ship a media player capable of streaming Windows Media audio and video. The new product, "Turbolinux 10 F..." is based on Turbolinux 10 Desktop but will also include licensed versions of Macromedia Flash, legal commercial DVD playback (via Cyberlink's PowerDVD player), RealPlayer 8, commercial Kanji fonts and iPod support via gtkpod (including enhanced functionality)." Update: 04/28 02:33 GMT by T : Prostoalex adds "The Windows Media codecs for Linux will be available for download for $64, the complete TurboLinux OS will cost $150 in Japan and the United States."

An anonymous reader noted that "Turbolinux just announced they will be distributing TurboLinux 10 Desktop with HP's Compaq business Desktop PCs in 12 Asian countries, including China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam. "

bachoom writes "Today, NIKKEI(Japanese story) announced that Turbolinux Inc. sold worldwide Linux business to SRA, Japanese SI company. Turbolinux has burned through at least $100 million raised across three rounds from a dazzling collection of companies including Intel, IBM, and many Japanese companies. Currently, They were sold by $1 million."

Jon James writes "eWeek is reporting that a number of Linux vendors will announce on Thursday that they have agreed to standardize on a single Linux distribution to try and take on Red Hat's dominance in the industry. " The vendors in question are SuSe, Caldera, Conectiva, and Turbolinux. However, as the article also points out - Red Hat has a very well established lead in the corporate market - and Sun's decision to create Yet Another Linux Distribution (Sun Linux! Now With McNealy Vision!) will make the waters even more muddy.

CarrotLord asks: "Looking at the recent release of IBM's Small Business Suite for Linux got me wondering about distribution compatibility and standards. Personally, I run Debian, and am considering a move to Progeny. However, I am concerned by the fact that many products (particularly commercial ones) are available for only a particular subset of distributions (usually RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, TurboLinux and Caldera, but rarely Debian-based distributions or the BSDs). What is the current state of play, particularly in regards to tools for developers to enable them to create and test installation packages for various distributions?" Such a tool would go a long way in removing the force behind the "Linux fragmentation" argument that most of Linux's detractors often refer to.

"How are the LSB and the FSSTND affecting consistency between distros? What about RPM and APT? What tools are there available for developers of software to ensure that their software runs on the widest variety of systems? Is there some software development or packaging tool to assist developers in making distribution-independant software, so they can create files in dpkg, RPM and tgz formats for any distribution without much additional effort on their part? What about tools to test their software installation on individual distributions, and assist with the resolution of problems? Should this be up to the individual distributions, or should be have a unified approach?"

I recieved this press release at some point in the night (which I've included below). We've talked about it for a while now but the deal has been...consumated. Art Tyde, co-founder and current CEO of LinuxCare will be CTO, while T. Paul Thomas, president and CEO of TurboLinux will remain as CEO. As for the name - they are staying with TurboLinux. My hopes for LinuxLinux as the company name have been dashed.

Turbolinux to Acquire Linuxcare to Create New Enterprise Linux Power

Combined company with blue-chip customers, partners and investors offers enterprise-class range of Linux and open-source-powered Internet infrastructure solutions and services

SAN FRANCISCO, February 21, 2001-Turbolinux®, Inc., a leader in high-performance Linux for Internet infrastructure solutions, and Linuxcare, Inc., a leader in providing comprehensive professional services for Linux and open-source technologies, today announced that they have signed a definitive agreement for Turbolinux to acquire Linuxcare. The combined company will operate as Turbolinux. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The addition of Linuxcare's comprehensive professional services, training, labs and support components to the Turbolinux product line will allow the new company to deliver premier Internet infrastructure solutions to customers around the world.

"Linuxcare is a leader in open-source knowledge and services employing some of the top Linux experts in the world. Together we are a powerful and complementary fit," said T. Paul Thomas, president and CEO of Turbolinux. "This strategic acquisition accelerates and extends our service offerings to give our enterprise customers even greater assurance in building mission-critical business solutions with Turbolinux."

Under the terms of the acquisition agreement, Thomas will retain his CEO position and Linuxcare CEO and co-founder Arthur F. Tyde III will become Chief Technology Officer.

"This combination will create an exciting new force in the Linux and open-source space," said Arthur F. Tyde III, CEO of Linuxcare. "Turbolinux has been a strong partner for the past two years and we're excited about the expanded opportunities we can now deliver to our customers, partners and employees."

The new company will combine a formidable list of strategic partners and corporate investors, including Compaq Computer, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, Motorola, NEC, Novell, Oracle, SGI, Sun Microsystems and Toshiba.

"Dell is a leading provider of Linux-based servers and workstations worldwide because it listens to the needs of its customers," said Rick Hoffman, director and general manager of Linux development at Dell. "These customers are telling us, and our Linux partners, to simplify the deployment and support for their Linux-based infrastructures. These powerful Open Source stalwarts create a single organization that will provide a robust portfolio of professional services and high performance Linux solutions."

Established in 1992, Turbolinux is a Linux market leader in Asia with growing penetration in the North American enterprise market. Turbolinux has worldwide hardware and software partnerships, high ROI mainframe and supercomputing solutions, a global support network and market leadership in clustering and Linux-based next-generation Intel computing platforms.

In addition to having one of the Linux industry's most comprehensive professional services and technical support teams, which includes admired open-source gurus, Linuxcare offers independent certification and testing through Linuxcare Labs and education and training through Linuxcare University. In the new company, Linuxcare services will continue to be vendor independent. By combining the complementary strengths of Turbolinux and Linuxcare, customers receive high-end business solutions that leverage the power of Linux, the world's fastest growing server operating system (IDC). "All of the puzzle pieces fit together," said Dan Kusnetzky, vice president of International Data Corporation's (IDC) system software research group. "Putting together the system software products of Turbolinux with the technical expertise of Linuxcare will certainly strengthen their abilities to deliver complete business solutions that reduce the time that customers require to implement cost-saving Linux and Open-Source-based computing infrastructures." In North America, the combined company has a prestigious roster of corporate blue-chip enterprise customers, including American Red Cross, BMG, Corvis, Digital Island, First Interstate Bank, J.P. Morgan Chase, Pentagon, State Farm Insurance, Verizon, WSE/Honeywell and Xerox.

Turbolinux and Linuxcare are backed by institutional investors August Capital, Deutsche Banc, Hambrecht & Quist Asia Pacific, Kleiner Perkins, Caufield & Byers, and Lehman Brothers. With its planned acquisition of Linuxcare, Turbolinux is withdrawing its registration statement on form S-1 filed with the SEC on October 30, 2000. Deutsche Banc Alex. Brown advised Turbolinux on this transaction.

About Turbolinux, Inc.
Founded in 1992, Turbolinux develops Linux-based software solutions for Internet and enterprise computing infrastructure, including reliable, available and scalable operating systems for workstations and servers and software clustering solutions for computing traffic management and peer-to-peer distributed computing. Backed by more than $95 million in investments from some of the world's leading technology companies, including Compaq, Dell, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, NEC, Novell, Oracle, SGI and Toshiba, Turbolinux is headquartered near San Francisco with offices around the world. For more information, visit the Turbolinux Web site at www.turbolinux.com.
About Linuxcare, Inc.
Linuxcare, Inc. is a leader in providing comprehensive professional services and solutions for Linux and open-source technologies. Linuxcare helps original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), independent software vendors (ISVs), Internet infrastructure vendors and Global 2000 companies maximize their success in putting Linux and open-source solutions to work. The company, with funding from Kleiner Perkins and corporate partners such as ITOCHU, Motorola, Oracle and Sun, hosts http://www.linuxcare.com, a leading technical resource for Linux and open-source solutions. Founded in 1998, Linuxcare is headquartered in San Francisco with offices around the world. The company can be reached at +1-415-354-4878.

lizrd writes "The New York Times is reporting (yeah, yeah, you gotta sign to read it) that several Linux distros will be shipping stable versions of Linux for Intel's new 64-bit Itanium chip on the day that it is released to the public. Microsoft however will not be supplying a version of Windows for Itanium until sometime in the fall of next year, several months after the expected May release of the new processor."

linugen writes "According to this article on LinuxGram, the majority of Linux distributions won't install on the Pentium 4. Apparently this is caused by the CPUID database, which contains no information on the Pentium IV. Currently only Red Hat and Turbolinux have updated versions of the CPUID databases."

websensei noted that Turbo Linux has filed for an IPO. As someone who has been through this, good luck to you guys: I hope only the best for all the companies doing the Linux thing: Turbo Linux has huge market share (although not as much in the U.S.) so they have a good shot. The press release doesn't give any interesting information (number of shares or pricing) but thats normal for this stage in the process.

chamont writes: "Even though Red Hat is still number 1, this article states that Caldera, SuSE, and Turbo are gaining ground fast. The article also mentions that Corel is pretty much history." Interesting to see -- what's cool is that the Linux market, at least what they measured, grew 89% overall. Turbolinux had monstrous growth overall -- you can see a lot more is happening on Pacific Rim.

qbasicprogrammer writes: "Security Portal has a review on the security of Red Hat, SuSE, TurboLinux, and Caldera Linux distributions." Debian and Slackware are absent, but its a decent piece.

Proctors dropped us the following note after jetting home from the Global Linux 2000 meeting in Seoul, Korea. His account is brief, but it conveys a spirit of adventure and fun which only the thought of an RMS / ESR sing-along can.

Back from Korea and Global Linux 2000 with a killer case of jet-lag. All I gotta say is: it was an amazing experience. The show started with a ribbon cutting ceremony: Cliff Miller of Turbo, Tim Ney, the U.S. ambassador, the Korean minister of information and communication, among others, were all handed white gloves and a pair of scissors by a group of young women dressed in traditional Korean dresses. On the count of three, everyone cut the ribbon at once -- in front of a huge crowd of people and a corps of press.

In fact, that has to be one of the most incredible things about Global Linux 2000 -- Here we are: the North and South are reconciling after 50 years, Bill Gates is in town and the media kept showing up over and over in droves to cover the show and conference. It was a media flack's wet dream -- believe me, I know. It showed the enthusiasm of the Koreans for Linux.

But that wasn't the only miracle: ESR and RMS sat together briefly at a dinner reception for the participants in the Linux Greenhouse and friends. It was my birthday and after everyone sang "Happy Birthday," Richard stood up and did his own version -- only to be followed by Eric. I was sitting there, listening to them both sing to me and all I could think was "This is a oner." But it got better ...

The Greenhouse was going fab. The reason I got into this - why I love it (besides the obvious -- the pure genius of the hackers, basic principals of it) was for the enthusiasm. It's catching. And the Greenhousers are no different. This is a multi-national group of people who have companies that are doing everything from programming GNOME for PDAs to teaching GNU/Linux to more than 700,000 adult students in Sweden. They had meetings, they hacked, they danced together on the dancing machines that are the big thing in Korea -- kind of like karaoke for your feet.

Speaking of karaoke -- a bunch of us piled into this bus to go to the night market in Seoul and discovered that the bus was a KARAOKE bus. ESR sang "Deeper Shade of Pale" (he can really sing), and we all sang "We are the Champions." Eric changed the lyrics to "We'll keep on hacking to the end." It was wrong -- very, very wrong.

The night market is a giant, monolithic monument to entrepreneurship that's open all-night, every night. Hundreds of little stalls hawk everything from dried fish to Linux Sport tennis shoes. I do not lie -- someone in Korea named their shoes 'Linux Sport.' We had to buy a pair, really we did.

Did I mention that EVERYONE has a cell phone? Little old ladies, ten-year-old kids -- the young kids decorate them with 'Hello Kitty' charms and costumes (think Halloween for your cell phone). The food was completely wonderful - except the kimchee. I know, I'm a traitor -- but I have a very hard time getting behind rotten cabbage in hot sauce.

Photos will be posted soon on the Greenhouse site and ESR is threatening to add this trip to his travel diary -- where he'll put this little postcard to shame.

TurboLinux, a company best-known for its eponymous international-centered Linux distribution, laid off people across the board today in an effort to do some belt-tightening. We received an anonymous submission about the reasoning and details behind these layoffs. In the interest of 'keeping it real,' I immediately contacted TurboLinux and spoke to their VP of Marketing, Lonn Johnston, to get the story straight. The original submission we received, as well as my conversation with Lonn, is below.

Here's the original anonymous submission we'd received:

TurboLinux, who had just became noticed in the US as a Linux distro, laid off a huge number of their employees. The exact number isn't known, but it is at least 50% of most departments.

Some interesting numbers: Product marketing was trimmed to 2, IT from 12 to 4, large numbers out of marketing and sales. Their security developer was also let go, along with their only build engineer (won't it be interesting to see how long it takes them to release another distro?).

The leaving packages were all pretty much the same, as near as can be told: 4wks. pay if you accept the severance package and sign their NDA/IP contract (for those employees that hadn't earlier).

That last bit is actually important as TurboLinux had a rather draconian NDA/IP contract that some people refused to sign until it was reviewed. It was an affront, the employees felt, to the open source spirit that TurboLinux said it thought was important. Even if it was similar to the IP contract that most big companies have their employee's sign.

Overall, TurboLinux liked the idea of open source, but couldn't make it work well in the US. There are problems of getting the developers in Japan (the original TurboLinux distro is from here) and the US in sync. China had an easier time sync'ing with Japan, but that was still difficult.

It appears that TurboLinux's solution is to have Japan do the US distro, and let whats left over of the US development team work on "Enterprise" products. No word yet on what "Enterprise" might mean in this case, however.

The Japanese office is probably doing better. Open Source Linux is actually pretty popular and the customers are much more descriminating there. A japanese Debian would do very well there, for example. TurboLinux US gave the time, resources, or developers needed to ever make a first class product. One year ago, US development was one person out of 4. Yesterday, US dev consisted of about 25 people out of about 200 people total in the US. This is the opposite of the way most startups grow.

This afternoon, I spoke to Lonn Johnson, TurboLinux's VP of Marketing, and asked him the real deal on what happened today.

Emmett: Did you lay off people?

Lonn: We had some people laid off today, and also, some expenses were cut today.

Emmett: What percentage of your workforce did you lay off today?

Lonn: You're not going to like this answer, but as a privately held company, we just don't release numbers.

Emmett: What other cuts did you make?

Lonn: There was cuts in different parts. Marketing took some cuts, sales took some cuts, some of the international offices took some cuts, but we didn't close any. It's just a little belt-tightening.

Emmett: Is it a major reorganization? The stats we've received is that you've basically cut most of your departments in half.

Lonn: That would be inaccurate.

Emmett: How inaccurate is that?

Lonn: If the statement is that fifty percent of the staff got cut, that's pretty inaccurate. You can specifically talk about the development team. Almost no impact on our development team.

Emmett: We're told you lost someone who does builds, as well?

Lonn: There were only a couple of people in development affected worldwide. It could be one of the people who was a build person. I don't have a list here. That could be.

Emmett: What was the purpose of the cuts?

Lonn: The main reason we're doing it is just market realities. The market has changed. In the old days, not just Linux companies but lots of companies were going as quickly as possible to grab market share, build products, develop technologies, and do all kinds of stuff. The market said, 'That's cool, you can worry about profitability later.' You can certainly see in the last month, that that's no longer cool, and you need to have a pretty clear path to profitability. So, we took some steps today that did involve some layoffs, and some expense cuts to get our bottom line expenses in line with our revenue and profit growth.

Emmett: Do you plan on bringing the people back that you've laid off in time?

Lonn: It depends on what our staffing requirements are. There's no future layoffs planned. Depending on how we grow our business ... gosh, the people who were laid off today are fantastic people. There's no question about performance or capability, just simply minding our bottom line.

Emmett: If you go back into a hiring phase, will those people be given first chance at their old jobs?

Lonn: I don't think we have anything in writing that says that. The answer to that is 'I don't know.' We're not a big industrial company with rules about these things. We haven't gone through this process before. I don't think anybody gave a thought to that.

Emmett: I'm told that the people being laid off today were given four weeks of severance pay if they accepted the severance package and signed the NDA and intellectual property contract, which I'm told is pretty draconian. Is that true?

Lonn: I don't want to get into specifics about what the package is, but everybody received a severance package.

Emmett: I'm told that a lot of the employees felt that the NDA was a bit of an affront to the open source spirit that TurboLinux obviously feels is important. Do you feel that that is the case?

Lonn: No, I don't. It's a standard NDA in the Valley. It doesn't affect people working on open source projects. It's all open source, so intellectual property is immaterial. It's all under the GPL.

Emmett: Any last thoughts for this story? I mean, is there any particular way you'd like to spin this or have it be shown in the press other than what you've already said?

Lonn: The main thing is that there were some layoffs today, and some expenses cut. Little impact on our developer teams, and no future layoffs are planned. The basic gist of this is getting our bottom line in line with our expenses, and on target with our revenue and profit growth. We're fortunate that we're sitting on a large pile of cash, because we raised a record round for a Linux company in January.

Emmett: How much did you get?

Lonn: We raised 57 million dollars in January, and we're still sitting on most of that, so it was not something that was done out of necessity.

Emmett: So, these layoffs and cuts weren't a last-ditch effort to save the company.

Lonn: Oh, God, no. Far from that.

According to a company press release published today on Yahoo!Finance, TurboLinux is now the top-selling Japanese computer operating system. Not just the top-selling Linux distribution, but the top-selling OS, period, with sales almost as great as those of the Windows 98 commercial release and the Windows 98 commercial update combined. If only new commercial OS sales, not upgrades, are considered, things look even rosier for TurboLinux, which claims 24.09% of total market share as opposed to 13.25% for Win98 and 10.23% for Macintosh.

Christopher Cashell writes "Everyone knows about Beowulf High Performance clusters, but it's often remarked that these are impracticle for most business uses, and that High Availability Clustering is still lacking. It looks like the guys at TurboLinux are working on fixing that. First seen on freshmeat"

Pacific HiTech report a recent independent OS survey by as saying they were number two in retail sales of operating system software capturing 7.35% of the unit sales, behind market leader Microsoft with 69.99% and edging out Apple with 6.12%. Pacific HiTech also do TurboLinux in English. Marketshare like this is presumably why they were named as one of the four participating distributions in the Oracle announcement, something which caused quite a few queries on /. Update PHT sent in more details on the survey. I assume this would be for Japanese-language sales only. Like so many of these surveys the original is only available from the data agency (Computer News) on a private basis and only if you pay, however PHT say that if you send mail to info@pht.co.jp they can hand out the details for getting your own copy. The full report was: According to a recent market survey, Pacific HiTech, maker of TurboLinux, was number two in Japan in retail sales of operating system software. Pacific HiTech captured 7.35% of the unit sales, behind market leader Microsoft with 69.99%, and ahead of Apple with 6.12%. The data was compiled by Computer News, a leading data collection firm, using weekly sales figures from over 200 leading software stores of six large retailers through mid-October 1998. This data does not include sales figures from Unix specialty stores, bookstore sales (where Pacific HiTech is strong), or web sales. It is thus likely that total TurboLinux marketshare is significantly higher than what was reported -- probably between 10% and 20% of the marketshare in Japan for OS retail unit sales.

Both TurboLinux and Stampede have announced new versions. Proof positive that Linux is growing and thriving. If the 'Big 3' don't do it for ya, give one of these a shot. Thanks to maskatron and Ola Hakansson for the links.