Linux Gram articles from April 2004

Linux Gram archives from April 2004

DR-DOS Redux.(DeviceLogics, Utah based startup offers new version of operating system)
April 5, 2004... In October of 2002, after Lineo, the embedded Linux house and sister company of the SCO Group, wandered too close to the edge and fell off the cliff to its death, the Canopy Group, the Ray Noorda- establish VC fund and Lineo's owner, sold the...

China's Linux Jihad Ain't Turning Out the Way It Thought.(Red Flag Software Company)
April 5, 2004... China's Communist government has reportedly poured upwards of $50 million into the Red Flag Software Company to make it into the "Microsoft of China" and establish a national Linux standard so China could get out from under Microsoft's thumb....

Wal-Mart Web Site Peddles Linux-based Java Desktop.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Walmart.com is now selling four versions of Linux with Microtel's cheap boxes: Linare's, Lindows', Lycoris' and Sun's. We can't think of another instance of the xenophobic Sun bundling its software on somebody else's hardware. The...

No, No, a Thousand Times No.(Sun Microsystems' CEO refuses open sourcing Java)(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... In case any naf was still harboring delusions that Sun might open source Java, Sun CEO Scott McNealy punctured his balloon last week at the FOSE conference. Refugees from a press conference with McNealy, who claimed Sun is the Petronius...

Think Tank Slams Open Source.(Institute for Policy Innovation)(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... The Institute for Policy Innovation, a non-profit libertarian- leaning public policy organization, has put out a short four-page white paper questioning the ability of open source to meet the hurdles of the mass market. It says "Open...

Angstrom Quad Opteron Blade Server Bows.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Little Angstrom Microsystems claims it's got the first quad Opteron blade server, the Titan64 QuadraBlade, which puts 52 blades or 208 Opterons in a rack. Each QuadraBlade chassis holds 13 blades and four chassis, what Angstrom calls...

SCO & IBM Try Various Legal Holds on Each Other.
April 5, 2004... In the latest episode of the SCO-IBM imbroglio SCO asked the court to cut IBM's patent infringement counterclaims out of the base breach-of-contract case and deal with them separately so things don't get bogged down and technical and confuse or...

Linux More Expensive than Windows: Yankee Group.
April 5, 2004... After completing a new study, the Yankee Group says that Linux deployment is more expensive than Windows for large enterprise customers. The Yankee Group/Sunbelt Software study found that a significant Linux deployment or a switch from...

Axentra Launches New Linux Server Appliances.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Axentra has introduced three server appliances for small offices. Part of its OfficeSeries line, the new all-in-one network and Internet servers are dubbed the S-100, S-200 and S-500. The three Athlon-powered widgets are based on...

Fedora Beta Out.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Red Hat says the Fedora Core 2, test2 is available. In case that sounds like a secret code, it's supposed to be a beta of the 2.6-based Fedora Core that supports SELinux or Security Enhanced Linux, which means the security modules endorsed...

OpenOffice Reaches Prague.(Sun Microsystems Inc.)(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... OpenOffice, the free open source edition of Sun Microsystems' StarOffice productivity software, has been upgraded to version 1.1.1, otherwise known as Prague, less than six months after hitting rev 1.1.0. The software is currently available...

Tadpole Tries its Legs.(new Laptop computers )(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Tadpole is looking more and more like, well, like a toad. After years of trying to make a living peddling Sparc laptops, the company has been trying its legs lately and besides its brand new Intel- based Linux box running the Java Desktop, it's...

Sun Out To Snare Windows Developers with Java Version of VB.(Microsoft Visual Basic)(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Sun's Project Rave, now dulled down to something called Java Studio Creator and described by Sun as its "most significant developer tool in years," is being released for "public access" for the first time on April 8. Which is not to be...

CA Hires Ex-Compaq CFO.(Computer Associates International Inc. appoints Jeff Clarke)(chief financial officer)
April 5, 2004... Computer Associates, which has admitted to cooking some of the books and is still mired down in an endless Justice Department-SEC investigation looking for the rest of them, has hired former Compaq CFO Jeff Clarke, the guy who led the HP-Compaq...

CA To Remove its General Counsel from Government Probe.(Computer Associates International Inc.)(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Computer Associates has taken its long-time general counsel off the case that the government's interminable investigation of CA's accounting and revenue recognition practices has been building for going on three years. The company, which...

Microsoft Better at Fixing Security Holes.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Comparing all the Windows platforms that came out between June 1 of 2002 and May 31 of 2003 with all variants Red Hat, MandrakeSoft, Debian and SuSE, Forrester has concluded that Microsoft is better at patching vulnerabilities than the Linux...

LinuxDefender in Prototype.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Romanian-based anti-virus house Softwin, which makes the Windows- oriented BitDefender software, has got a LinuxDefender prototype or proof-of-concept that's based on Knoppix. The company says it incorporates the latest BitDefender...

Project Janus.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Sun evidently has a development effort afoot aptly codenamed Project Janus that's meant to let programs for Linux on x86, such as they are, run unmodified, if a tad slower, on Solaris x86.

Novell Outbid Sun & Red Hat.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... "We're not taking on Microsoft. The open source community is taking on Microsoft. It's the guerrilla vs. the gorilla." - Novell CEO Jack Messman, the guy who bought SuSE and wants to make the Linux desktop a reality, to the Wall Street Journal....

OSDL Does China.(Open Source Development Lab negotiating with China Electrical Standard Institute for standardizing its Linux specifications)(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... The Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) is planning on setting up an office in Beijing in May or June. It's also been talking to the China Electrical Standard Institute (CESI) about standardizing its Linux specifications.

Red Hat's Suit against SCO Put on Hold.(The SCO Group Inc.)
April 12, 2004... The Delaware federal court where Red Hat filed suit against the SCO Group has stayed any litigation or discovery pending the outcome of SCO's $5 billion suit against IBM in Utah. Judge Susan Robinson said that the IBM suit was all about...

SCO Asks for Five-Month Delay in IBM Trial.(The SCO Group Inc.)(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... Since SCO's enemies interpreted the fact that the Red Hat suit was put on a peg as a setback for SCO - wasn't it Red Hat that wanted the case to proceed? - they're going to dine out on this one. SCO has asked the Utah court destined to try...

Lindows To Adopt Foreign Alias.
April 12, 2004... The Seattle court hearing Microsoft's trademark infringement suit against Lindows has told Microsoft that it can continue to sue Lindows in foreign courts on trademark infringement charges so long as Microsoft doesn't ask that the Lindows web...

Red Flag & Miracle Beta Asianux.(China's Red Flag Software Company and Japan's Miracle Linux Corporation develop beta version of Asianux 1.0)(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... China's Red Flag Software Company and Japan's Miracle Linux Corporation, which Oracle helped to set up, say they have a beta of Asianux 1.0, the Linux distribution they hope to make the Asian standard. The twosome has been working on...

Progeny Rescues Red Hat Orphans.(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... Progeny Linux Systems Inc, which was started by Ian Murdock, the guy who lent his name - literally - to Debian, has extended a hand to the orphaned Red Hat Linux 9 and says that it'll be adding security updates for the thing to its Progeny...

Oh My Sainted Aunt! Microsoft Open Sources Code - No, Really.(Windows Installer XML, toolkit for building Windows installation packages from XML)
April 12, 2004... To absolutely no fanfare, Microsoft - well, five developers at Microsoft at any rate - quietly took their internally developed Windows Installer XML (WiX), the toolkit that builds Windows installation packages from XML, and on Monday plunked...

Ex-CA CFO & Reports Face Prison Time; General Counsel Fired.(Computer Associates International Inc., Chief Financial Officer)
April 12, 2004... Three more ex-Computer Associates executives, including the company's former chief financial officer Ira Zar, pleaded guilty to charges of securities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and conspiracy to obstruct justice in a Brooklyn...

This Ought To Keep You Up at Night.(Green Hills Software CEO's crusade against buse of Linux in defense software systems)(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... Dan O'Dowd, CEO of Green Hills Software Inc, the RTOS house, is on a crusade to root Linux out of the Defense Department. "The very nature of the open source process should rule Linux out of defense applications," he says, comparing the DOD...

Loiacono Replaces Schwartz; Green Goes.(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... Sun has tapped John Loiacono, who used to be Ed Zander's boy, to replace Jonathan Schwartz as head of software. Schwartz was elevated last Friday to be president and COO of Sun, the job last held by Zander, who is now CEO of Motorola. ...

Intel Reverse Engineered AMD64: Microprocessor Report.(Advanced Micro Devices' 64 bit processing architecture)(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... Intel and AMD's 64-bit x86 extensions are practically identical, according to an analysis done by the Microprocessor Report, which is exactly what we've said already although Intel discouraged that point-of-view. The Microprocessor Report...

Oracle & Dell Create Turnkey SME Systems.(small and medium-sized enterprise)(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... Oracle and Dell have cut themselves a new global deal that makes Dell the "exclusive" distributor - now there's a stretch - of Oracle's new 10g database, or rather Oracle Standard Edition One, pre-installed on Dell's Intel boxes and targeted at...

Veritas Eyeing Qluster.(enterprise cluster management software start-up)(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... Veritas is reportedly nosing around Qlusters, with a thought of acquiring the three-year-old enterprise cluster management software start-up. Supposedly a large Wall Street firm is putting pressure on Veritas to pick up the Linux operation....

Sun Lays Runway for Solaris 10 Takeoff.(Sun Microsystems)(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... Sun has reached the sixth update to Solaris 9, which, it says, supports the company's new Opteron systems as well as doubling the performance of scientific workloads on x86 machines and fully supporting Intel's Hyper-Threaded Xeons. That...

Sun's Layoff Plans Reportedly Run Deeper than They Said.(Sun Microsystems Inc.)(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... Word leaking out of the Sun boardroom claims that the new layoffs of 9% of its staff that Sun announced last Friday, which isn't enough to buy it profitability, is merely the beginning. The company's got plans on the drawing board to dump 30%...

Bear Stearns' Remedy is McNealy's Head on a Platter.(Scott McNealy, CEO, Sun Microsystems)(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... "While we're encouraged by Sun's restructuring moves to reduce its cost burden, we reiterate our Underperform view as Sun concurrently pre-announced a large/EPS shortfall, current management remains at the helm (despite a new COO) and its...

Mail Bag.(Turbolinux president's response)(Brief Article)(Letter to the Editor)
April 12, 2004... To the Editor O'Gara-san, Do you remember me ? I am Koichi Yano the president of Turbolinux and got an interview from you, when you wrote that Turbolinux will bankrupt which was not true. After your wrong article it has been...

Munich Court Defends GPL.(general public license)(Sitecom Germany GmbH)
April 19, 2004... A Munich district court has hit Sitecom Germany GmbH with a preliminary injunction forbidding it to distribute a wireless access router, model WL-122, unless it conforms to the GNU General Public License. The GPL has only been the subject...

Covalent Breaks Apart; CEO, Top Execs Leave.(chief executive officer)
April 19, 2004... Apache commercializer Covalent - Apache being open source's pride and joy -has broken up into two separate entities and several top executives including CEO John Jack have left. One entity, which will remain Covalent, will continue to focus...

Microsoft Pretty Much Gets its Way with Lindows.(Brief Article)
April 19, 2004... Under pressure from Microsoft's legal counterattack overseas, Lindows, the uppity Windows wannabe, has been taken down a peg, forced to change the brand name of its Linux operating systems and web site call letters to Linspire so it can...

SCO Watch.(The SCO Group Inc.)
April 19, 2004... A hearing is now scheduled for May 11 at 3 in the afternoon where Federal Judge Dale Kimball will decide whether to dismiss the SCO v Novell suit. If it isn't dismissed, he will then decide on whether it should remain in the federal courts...

Schwartz Moves the Deck Chairs on the Titanic.(Jonathan Schwartz, Chief Operating Officer and President, Sun Microsystems Inc.)
April 19, 2004... Sun's shiny new president and chief operating officer Jonathan Schwartz fired some of Sun's top folks and Sun rushed out Thursday to say so maybe to deflect attention from the nasty third-quarter numbers it was posting at the same time. ...

RackSaver Morphs into Verari Systems; Hires Ex-Sun Bigwig; Buys MPI Software.(RackSaver Inc. has changed name to Verari Systems and acquired MPI Software Technology Inc.)
April 19, 2004... RackSaver Inc, the blade house, has changed its name to Verari Systems on the theory that the RackSaver moniker isn't big enough for its ambitions and anyway it's lost any of the distinguishing characteristics it may have had since other...

Itanium Units Cheaper To Broaden Chip's Appeal.(Brief Article)
April 19, 2004... Intel has two new two-way Madison Itaniums that are supposed to perform 25% better than existing DP Itaniums and go into systems that are maybe 28% cheaper than the older Itanium two-ways. Intel says that two years ago a DP box cost $18,000,...

Glaser Willing To Sleep with the Enemy.(Rob Glaser, CEO RealNetworks)(Brief Article)
April 19, 2004... Given Microsoft's penchant these days for settling nasty lawsuits out-of-court, what odds would you give that the billion-dollar private antitrust suit that RealNetworks lodged against the Evil Empire in December never gets heard? Whatever...

Go Ahead, Sue Me, I Dare You; Google Declares Open Season on Trademarks.(Brief Article)
April 19, 2004... Well, it seems that Google, apparently stumbling around in an anti- property miasma that has caused it to take leave of its senses, has quietly notified customers by e-mail that it will stop limiting sales of trademarked words in its popular...

CA Lawyer Bounced after Being Identified with Government's Mystery 'Executive E'.(Computer Associates International Inc.)
April 19, 2004... Computer Associates general counsel Steven Woghin was canned last Thursday right after legal papers filed in court by the SEC mentioned an "Executive E," a person the agency said instructed other CA executives to lie to the company's outside...

Emic Catches Wind To Spread its Wings.(Emic Networks)(Brief Article)
April 19, 2004... Emic Networks, the application clustering house, announced from the MySQL users conference in Florida on Thursday that it had raised $7.5 million in equity capital from Trident Capital and Nordic Venture Partners with Ledstiernan participating...

Opteron Could Run Itanium Programs.(Brief Article)
April 19, 2004... There are supposed to be a thousand programs available for the Itanium, and Intel says the catalogue is on its way to 1,500 entries by mid-year. Considering that no one would mistake the Itanium for a volume platform, we wondered how recyclable...

Got Room for Another HPC House?(TeamHPC Inc., Toto, Kansas based high performance computing provider)(Brief Article)(Company Profile)
April 19, 2004... Ah, just what we need, another dedicated HPC provider. This one's name is TeamHPC Inc and it lives in Kansas. Yes, Toto, Kansas. A perfect place for open source. The organization consists of 68 people and brags that its Linux technologists have...

Berners-Lee Pockets $1.2m Prize.(first Millennium Technology Prize by the Finnish Technology Award Foundation)(Brief Article)
April 19, 2004... Tim Berners-Lee, who when last we looked was being knighted by the Queen, has been given the very first Millennium Technology Prize by the Finnish Technology Award Foundation for creating the World Wide Web and not making any money off of it or...

Green Turns Up at Cassatt.(Rich Green appointed executive VP at Cassatt Corp.)(Brief Article)
April 19, 2004... Ex-VP of Sun's Developer Platforms Group Rich Green, who left last week although he apparently could have been the company's new software czar, is the new Cassatt executive VP for engineering. He starts for real in May. Green has some...

Red Hat Certified Trans-Cultural.(Brief Article)
April 19, 2004... The Free Standards Group (FSG) has certified that Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.3 conforms to the Linux Standard Base Internationalized Runtime Environment, which FSG calls a write-once-run-anywhere-in- the-world paradigm of compatibility across...

MySQL Cluster Coming Soon.(MySQL Cluster, an open source database clustering technology for applications requiring continuous availability)(Brief Article)
April 19, 2004... As expected, MySQL AB launched the MySQL Cluster, an open source database clustering technology for applications that need continuous availability. Based on the NDB Cluster technology MySQL got from its acquisition of Swedish cluster...

SCO Changes Date of SCO Forum.(The SCO Group Inc.)(Brief Article)
April 19, 2004... The SCO Group has changed the date of the upcoming SCO Forum from the previously announced June 27-29 to August 1-3. It's still supposed to be at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. It marks the 25th anniversary of SCO in the Unix business, and Unix is...

Red Hat Library Heavy on Intel.(Brief Article)
April 19, 2004... Red Hat brags that there are now 750 enterprise applications certified on its version of Linux. It and Intel have put together a searchable online catalogue on Red Hat's web site. Red Hat did its sums and says it has sold upwards of 200,000...

Turbolinux Changes Hands Again.(Livedoor Company Ltd., Japanese IT services firm to buy Turbolinux from systems intergrator Software Research Associates)
April 26, 2004... Software Research Associates (SRA), the Japanese system integrator that bought Turbolinux, one of the so-called "Big Four" commercial Linux distributions, out of a financial jam in the summer of 2002, is selling it off to another Japanese...

Money Earned at Microsoft Goes into Linux Start-up.(PI Corporation)(Brief Article)
April 26, 2004... Paul Maritz earned a gazillion dollars running all of Microsoft's software development, becoming one of the richest men in America, according to Forbes, before retiring in 2000. And now he's turned traitor, putting his skills and his fortune at...

Sanjay's Got Separation Anxiety; CA Makes Board Member Interim CEO.(Computer Associates International Inc., chief executive officer)
April 26, 2004... Sanjay Kumar, Computer Associates' erstwhile chairman and CEO, is not going gently into that good night. Ask yourself now, why is he still at CA? Answer: Weak board. Heaven knows why Sanjay wants to stick around tricked out as...

Sun Prices Solaris x86 against Linux & Windows.
April 26, 2004... Sun is trying to set a fire under Solaris x86, effectively its Linux substitute, by dreaming up some competitive price promotions to take on large-scale deployments of Red Hat and Microsoft. According to its latest volume discount schedule, Sun...

Lindows Wants To Go Public.
April 26, 2004... Lindows Inc has filed an S-1 with the SEC to IPO. It's an early move that one might suspect was the whole point of the exercise of starting the company. They're looking for $57.5 million, a sum they figure should last 24 months when it'll be...

Lindows Is Suing Xandros.
April 26, 2004... Lindows says in its IPO prospectus that it's suing Ottawa-based Xandros Inc, Xandros' New York City VC, Linux Global Partners Inc (LPG), one-time Xandros CEO Michael Bego and LGP co-chairman William Jay Roseman claiming they defaulted on a...

Linux-Leaning Non-Profit Seeks To Nix Microsoft Patent.
April 26, 2004... An little-known outfit calling itself the Public Patent Foundation (PPF) that was organized in November to "campaign against patents that harm the public health, impinge civil liberties and impair free markets" is challenging one of Microsoft's...

VC Wants Darl Out.(venture capitalists)
April 26, 2004... You've heard of course about how Baystar Capital Management LLC, the VC operations Microsoft put up to investing $20 million in SCO last year, wants its money back. So much for those nice, pat conspiracy theories about Microsoft...

SCO Gets New CFO.(The SCO Group Inc., chief financial officer)(Brief Article)
April 26, 2004... The SCO Group has hired itself a new CFO, making the incumbent, Bob Bench, acting VP of corporate development after a three-and-a-half- year run. The new guy, Bert Young, was CFO of the Salt Lake City- based Intel spin-off LANDesk Software....

Scalix Gets More Funding.(provider of a Linux based e-mail and calendaring product)(Brief Article)
April 26, 2004... Scalix Corporation has secured $6 million in additional funding taking its total financing to $19.2 million. The San Mateo, California outfit, which provides an e-mail and calendaring product based on Linux, said the money came from Mohr...

Sun Pre-Packages Opterons.(Sun Microsystems)(Brief Article)
April 26, 2004... Sun has started selling a pre-configured bundle consisting its 2p Opteron 1U, the Sun Fire V20z, together with Solaris x86 Platform Edition and its not-very-popular Java Web Server 6.1. The V20z is supposed to be the fastest secure web server...

Archivas Drops Stealth Pose.(Massachusetts based startup)
April 26, 2004... Archivas. Now there's a catchy name for an archiving company. If you've never heard it before it's because it's only getting born. It's been incubating for the last year and its product, the Archivas Cluster, aka ArC, an object-based...

Java Desktop Update at the Starting Gate.(Brief Article)
April 26, 2004... Sun's Java Desktop System (JDS), the thing that's supposed to overthrow the Microsoft dictatorship, or at least make a dent in it, has been shipping since December now and early next month Sun is going to move on to release 2. JDS 3.0 is...

HP Delivering 4p Opteron System.(Hewlett-Packard Co.)(Brief Article)
April 26, 2004... HP on Wednesday turned out the Opteron four-way ProLiant DL585 server that it promised in February, its second Opteron box. Depending on the clock rate of the processors, which runs 1.6GHz- 2.2GHz, the entry price for a 2p 585 model runs...

Sun's Looking for New Low-End Hardware Chief.(Brief Article)
April 26, 2004... Sun Microsystems says newly installed John Fowler is only running the company's new Network Systems x86 low-end server unit temporarily. It claims it's looking inside and out for a full-time executive VP so Fowler can focus on his new day job...

Opteron Turns One.(Brief Article)
April 26, 2004... AMD joined the Open Source Development Lab on Thursday, the anniversary of the AMD64 launch last year. Ironic considering OSDL was originally envisioned as an Intel project. What a difference a year makes. Now Intel is copying AMD designs, AMD...

What Linux Needs is a Blaster Virus.(Microsoft focusing on security features in Windows service pack 2)(Brief Article)
April 26, 2004... Goldman Sachs says Microsoft is diverting development resources to security features in Windows XP SP2 at the expense of Longhorn's timing to protect the crown jewels. Rich Sherlund says if the desktop was hit by an "out-of-the-ordinary...