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IBM Invests $50M in Novell, May Ship SUSE Linux
dave writes "Novell announced that it has finalized a $50 million investment from IBM, and that IBM can now begin shipping SUSE Linux on all IBM server platforms. Historically, IBM has been a 'Red Hat shop,' and one has to wonder if this is a harbinger of things to come."
HP and Novell are putting SUSE on it's desktops and laptops.
> Historically, IBM has been a 'Red Hat shop,'
This would explain why we have been running SuSE on our mainframes for the last two years then.
IBM has had marketing agreements with Red Hat, SuSE and and TurboLinux for quite some time. It may favour Red Hat in the States, but it seems quite agnostic about which distribution to recommend to customers.
You must have been out of the IT world for quite a while. IBM sells:
- intel servers (running linux or windows)
- AMD opteron servers (SUSE has an AMD64 port)
- power processor boxes (running AIX and linux)
A press release from 2000: SuSE delivers Enterprise Linux for IBM RS/6000
They are THE major player in the very large server market, however they are still a formitable competitor in the medium-sized to Pentium-class server market.
And for good reason. IBM packages their servers with a LOT of goodies. IBM Director (formerly known as Tivoli) comes free with every server. And now we're getting SuSE.
This isn't the first time IBM gives SUSE a hand.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
IBM has been far from a "Red Hat shop" in the past. SuSE has had -- until the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 -- better mainframe support, and SuSE's Enterprise distros for the Power architecture (pSeries & iSeries) has also been better.
/. anyway; why clutter a good post up with verifiable facts). IBM has also had a relationship with Red Hat (Hardware Management Consoles for the partitionable pSeries boxes use a customized RH distro), so it's not like they've been *only* SuSE.
You've been able to get SuSE Enterprise for Power with your pSeries box for a while now (sorry, no time to look up specifics, and this is
Remember, at one time, in the not-to-distant past, IBM was a "partner" with 4 different Linux distributors: Red Hat, SuSE, TurboLinux, and (gasp) Caldera. So, you might as well say IBM's been a "SCO shop" for a while, too.....
Out of the IT World? More like off of the planet!
IBM is the #3 server vendor in the world behind HP and Dell. They have about 15% market share. IBM has been investing billions into Linux and the types of servers that would support it best (notably blade servers -- perfect for grids).
In December 2000 IBM committed to invest $1Billion in Linux software, hardware, services, the open source community and partnerships during 2001. That's only 2001! If anything, they have only increase their rate of investment.
Add to all of this their strong commitment to WebSphere and Java, and you have a company that has more than embraced Linux. When IBM invested 2.5 Billion in a new semiconductor manufacturing facility,they automated the facility using Linux.
Come back to our world where Big Blue is bigger & bluer than ever!
Remember that the first industrial-strenght implementation of a Linux system on the mainframe has been a joint effor by SySE and IBM.
The s390 source tree in the linux kernel was developed at the IBM Research Lab at Boeblingen (Germany) around 1999.
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
Harbinger of things to come is the latest phrase from the department of redundancy department.
A harbinger describes things to come, so this phrase is equal to "A fortelling of things to come of things to come". Not only that, but Merriam-Webster (my online dictionary of choice, since dictionary.com implemented annoying popups and banners that give people siezures) lists 2b (n. one that foreshadows what is to come) as a precursor to the modern definition (one that pioneers or initiates a major change). Not that "an initiator of major change to come" makes much more sense, as "initiator of major change" already implies something is to come.
~Will
sig?
Been there, done that and believe me, asking a woman if she wanted to come to your place to see your 3 foot inflatible penguin will _not_ get you laid.
Reliability. They are also faster than x86, especially in read/write to the HDD. Stripped arrays are fast.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Interestingly, from SuSe's FAQ:
Will there be a PPC edition of SUSE Linux 9.0?
Answer: no.
Although Suse once had a PPC port, it is clearly stagnant; this investment from IBM very likely means that it'll be revived, but that'll take a least some doing. Yellow Dog Linux remains the best choice to run Linux on your Mac, apparently, even the one with an IBM processor.
--
$tar -xvf
NOVELL has decided to go with KDE as desktop rather than GNOME.
Read more here. This is a direct quote from Novells Chris Stone.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
According to http://rootprompt.org/article.php3?article=6115
Yes it does exist, and has existed for quite some time.
Yes it is based on code from another popular distribution in the wild.
I have it and have used the last 3 releases. Latest release is still in beta but they basically have taken the "unnamed distro" and layered on IBM software and customizations.
Latest version is beautiful, and lightyears ahead of the last release that is about 1yr old by now.
Customizations such as on first-time boot, it will detect your windows partitions, search out you Bookmarks, My Documents, and Lotus Notes ids and migrate them over to your linux install.
very slick...new customized splash screens desktops, openoffice templates, etc.
and yes i said Lotus Notes 6.5 running under linux with a customized version of wine. (based on opensource code from codeweavers i believe)..
Just taking a sec to put rumours to rest, no screenshots, as its an internal product under development and we all tend to like to keep out little secrets to ourselves. Sorry.
But yes Blue Linux is alive and well.
www.bluelinux.org : no route to host
bluelinux.sf.net: Rebellious fingers owned u
We wanted to license SuSE for a 16 processor machine. A commercial license for SuSE was $4000 (4x 4proc $1000 license), EDU license was much cheaper, $400. It took 2 weeks to PO a SuSE vendor who supported EDU pricing.
After installing the system with SuSE and running their update utility, the new kernel installed by the utility doesn't boot, even after contacting SuSE enterprise support, they had no answer, except to boot the old vulnerable kernel.
RedHat EL was $50, and we downloaded ISO's the same day we paid.
We arn't running SuSE anymore.