Linux Gram articles from February 2002

Linux Gram archives from February 2002

Fancy That: VA Sold its Hardware Operation on the Sly.(California Digital Corp buys server operation)
February 4, 2002... Now isn't this odd. VA Linux Systems, a public company and one-time Linux bellwether, dramatically exits the Linux hardware business amid massive write-offs and lay-offs, and doesn't think to mention to anyone that it's "sold" its server...

Foo Equals WSI.(Microsoft, Bea Systems and IBM)(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Sources say Microsoft and IBM are scheduled to wheel out the so- called Foo initiative on Thursday, February 7. At press time BEA's participation was looking a bit dubious. There were talks with the company, but evidently it didn't make the...

Red Hat Dumps E-Commerce Suite.
February 4, 2002... Despite denials from senior executives in the last few days, Red Hat has dropped its E-Commerce Suite for mid-sized enterprises barely five months after it was launched. The software has already disappeared from Red Hat's web site and the...

Caldera Slashes OpenLinux Server Prices 70%.(OpenLinux Server 3.1.1)(Product Announcement)
February 4, 2002... Caldera has drastically cut pricing on its OpenLinux Server reportedly out of channel pressures. The latest OpenLinux Server - rev 3.1.1 - is now $249 with 60 days of e-mail support. A few weeks ago, the old rev 3.1 was $799. Some of...

Mono Trades GPL for More Commercial License.
February 4, 2002... The leaders of the Mono Project, the Ximian-led open source effort to produce a Linux version of Microsoft's C# programming language and its little friend, the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI), the stuff that ECMA standardized for...

Red Flag To Resell GraphOn.
February 4, 2002... GraphOn, which supposedly cut a tripartite deal with Compaq and Red Flag Software 18 months ago to penetrate China, that mother of all marketplaces (CSN No 355), a deal that apparently went nowhere, now says it's got a reseller agreement with...

HP Debuts New Linux Offerings.(Opencall SS7 Linux Development Platform)
February 4, 2002... Hewlett-Packard has expanded its Linux portfolio with new software, servers and services. Targeted at telcos, network equipment providers and other enterprises, the offerings include a pay-per-use utility pricing program for Linux service...

FSMLabs Pinches Turbo Korea COO.(Finite State Machine Labs names Rodney Johnson VP of worldwide sales and business development)
February 4, 2002... Finite State Machine Labs (FSMLabs), creators of RTLinux, has found itself a VP of worldwide sales and business development in Rodney Johnson. Johnson joins the company from Turbolinux Systems Korea, where he was COO. Ironically Turbolinux...

Start-up BladeLogic Does Deal with HP.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Six-month-old start-up BladeLogic Inc has announced what it calls its first major deal. It's integrated its Network Shell server management tools with HP's ServiceControl Manager (SCM). Together the stuff is supposed to let admins manage Linux,...

Covalent Raises $18m.(Menlo Ventures led the financing)
February 4, 2002... Apache specialist Covalent Technologies has raised a $18 million third round, taking its total financing to $36 million. Menlo Ventures led the financing, which included participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital and Granite...

Sony Ship Linux Kit for Playstation 2.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Sony is selling a Linux operating system for its Playstation 2 game console. It's reportedly so Playstation can run Linux apps, so that Linux programmers can use it as a platform to develop games. The kit comes with a 40GB hard drive, a USB...

More Layoffs at LynuxWorks Reported.(LynuxWorks recently laid off about 8% of its employees)(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Sources say embedded OS vendor LynuxWorks recently laid off about 8% of its employees, its second headcount reduction in six months, leaving it with slightly less than 200 people. Sources also said the San Jose, California concern has...

An Uncharacteristically Radical HP To Push Desktop Linux.(teaming up with MandrakeSoft to market Mandrake Linux OS)(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... HP in a daring move said it's teaming up with MandrakeSoft to peddle the Frenchman's Linux to the US and European desktop market. HP's full line of business PCs, both the Professionals and Essentials, will be certified and HP will sell the...

Glory Be. It's Not. It Is. It's LSB!(Free Standards Group Linux Standard Base specification)
February 4, 2002... Well, imagine that, a reinvigorated Free Standards Group (FSG) has actually delivered the long-awaited, long-promised, long-delayed Linux Standard Base specification, which was once feared would never rouse itself long enough from its great...

IBM Loves Linux.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... IBM's commitment to Linux is supposed to be paying off. It says it's working with 2,500 Linux customers worldwide, with products ranging from web serving to large supercomputers doing genomic analysis. Blue is also supposed to be running Linux...

Wanted: Desktop Linux Beta Testers.(Xandros seeks testers for Desktop 1.0 code)(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... The quixotic Xandros operation that inherited Corel's Linux interests is shopping for beta testers to shake down its Debian- based Desktop 1.0 code, due to hit market in May. It's looking for 200 people for the first phase of the test that will...

Cobalt's Fortunes Wax and Wane.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... The nose counters at Netcraft have been keeping tabs on Linux-based Cobalt unit - effectively Sun's other x86 OS now that it's killing x86 Solaris - and says that "Although the number of ip addresses on Cobalt machines has increased over the...

CA's Numbers Game.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Computer Associates has added 23 - count 'em 23 - new offerings - 17 of 'em available now - to its Linux portfolio. Twenty are for mainframes. Overall, CA has 54 Linux-based products, 42 shipping, the rest in beta. CA supports Linux across...

PHPed Ported to Linux.(NuSphere PHPed Advantage)(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
February 4, 2002... NuSphere is readying a Linux port of its PHPed integrated development environment. It's in beta and is expected to move into general availability in March.

Compaq, Sendmail Team Up.(combines Sendmail's Mailstream Manager with the ProLiant DL360 server)(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Compaq and Sendmail have paired to offer a Linux-version of Sendmail's e-mail software on ProLiant servers. The customizable offering combines Sendmail's Mailstream Manager and Integrated Mail Suite software with the ProLiant DL360, 380, 580...

Sun Loses E*Trade to Linux.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Citing cost savings and performance, online broker E*Trade is migrating from a proprietary platform to Linux. Its new gear will include IBM's Intel servers. E*Trade CTO Josh Levine said the brokerage picked Linux because "open systems and...

OSDL Turns Linux Designer After All.
February 4, 2002... Well, well, isn't Intel on a roll. HP is signed up as one of its telecom server customers and rumor has it IBM and maybe Compaq could be next. The theory is it's getting traction against Sun in the telecom space, where Sun is known to derive...

Egenera's Little Coup: Four Fosters on a Blade.
February 4, 2002... Egenera, the Linux blade start-up, is reportedly in manufacturing now with a four-processor blade packaged in a 1U using the Foster MP chips that Intel isn't supposed to launch until CeBit in mid-March. Egenera's got an early parts supply and...

Europe Okays HP-Compaq Merger; Walter Says it's the Kiss of Death.
February 4, 2002... Many people think Hewlett-Packard took another step toward its ultimate destruction Thursday when the EU, as widely expected, blessed its proposed purchase of Compaq. The deal sailed through review without HP having to sacrifice any assets or...

IBM CEO To Quit at the End of February.
February 4, 2002... The widely watched changing of the guard at IBM is finally in play. The company said Tuesday that heir apparent Sam Palmisano, 50, will take over as CEO on March 1. He's expected to have a good 10-year run. Lou Gerstner, whose contract...

Compaq Skates Off on its New Blades.
February 4, 2002... This is the same story that broke on Monday. Long about now it would be useful to know how those darling people Compaq and Hewlett-Packard segregated off in that clean room to divine their future as a single entity have dealt with blades....

Intel May Invest in Wasabi.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Sources say Intel may pick up a stake in young New York City-based NetBSD house Wasabi.

Montecito & Chivano.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... ZDNet got it right. Intel has got two revs of Itanium on the drawing board called Montecito and Chivano that incorporate concepts from the DEC Alpha chip whose IP Intel licensed last year along with hiring Alpha engineers. Montecito will come...

Hammer Hits First Silicon.
February 4, 2002... AMD got first silicon on its Hammer chip in January, according to AMD Fellow Wayne Meretsky. Now whether that means AMD so-called Clawhammer or its Sledgehammer or both of them because they're basically two sides of the same coin is completely...

Compaq Aggressively Ups its Guidance.(Statistical Data Included)
February 4, 2002... Either the idea of impending marriage really agrees with Compaq or it just took delivery on some really superb Columbian weed. Saying it's on a roll after coming in profitable in Q4, the company brazenly upped its guidance for fiscal 2002...

Yup.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... After first telling US Today (CSN No 434), HP CEO Carly Fiorina has now confided to the SEC that HP may make more layoffs and it looks like she means whether or not the Compaq deal goes through. In other words, more than the 15,000 they are...

HP's New Little Servers.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... HP is bringing out a small to mid-sized business server that starts at $649 for a configuration with a 950MHz Celeron chip and a 40GB IDE drive. The thing is tagged the tc2100 and can be had with a 1.13GHz Pentium III with 512KB of memory and a...

Dueling Web Sites.
February 4, 2002... Walter Hewlett, the HP director and guy Carly and her thralls accuse of being a Luddite for opposing their Compaq deal, set up an anti- acquisition web site at www.votenohpcompaq .com/. Not to be outdone, HP responded in kind with an evocative...

Xeons To Get Hyper-Threaded.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Hyper-Threading, which is what Intel has taken to calling what was originally known as Jackson Technology - sneaky widgetry for fooling server applications into thinking two processors exist when actually only one does - is coming to all Xeons...

IBM Global Services Invests in Aduva.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... A little bird says IBM Global Services is putting money into Israeli-based start-up Aduva Inc, the dedicated Linux patch peddler. The money - and we're not sure how much it is or whether we'll ever know - is reportedly an addendum to the $14...

McKinley Watch.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... Gee, the famous peek-a-boo McKinley chip, Intel's second stab at getting a 64-bit microprocessor off the ground, has been sampling with OEMs for a whole year now. How time flies. Intel of course is expecting to launch McKinley, which requires a...

From the Where-Are-They-Now Department.
February 4, 2002... George White, the founder and ex-CEO of Corollary, the company that got acquired by Intel and gave the world the Profusion chipset - make that eventually gave the world the Profusion chipset - we had to wait for it a long time - it was hard -...

So They Had a Skunkworks All Along.(Brief Article)
February 4, 2002... We went down this road ourselves a while back and failed to tease the answer out of Intel so our hats are off to the Mercury News, which managed to turn a source and get him to admit that Intel does indeed have an ultra-secret skunkworks off in...

Sun Blinks.(Column)
February 11, 2002... Well, something sure spooked Sun to make it act like a horse taking off at a gallop when it saw a rattler. Sun missed a golden opportunity to make a splash at the LinuxWorld show in New York last week - where the guys manning its booth were...

Korean Import To Rival Sun's StarOffice.(HancomLinux)(Product Announcement)
February 11, 2002... Two years ago an outfit called HancomLinux Inc spun out of Korea's premier word processing company Hangul and Computer (Hannsoft), the company that bitterly complained to the Korean government that Microsoft's Korean version of Word 2000 had...

Microsoft Music Hosted on Linux.
February 11, 2002... Storage house Scale Eight signed a million-dollar deal with Microsoft to host its online music business, which sends out about 20,000 simultaneous audio streams. Marketing director Michael Davis says the company has four server clusters...

WS-I: Out of the Closet.
February 11, 2002... Told ya so. Told ya so. Told ya they were putting this thing together. To head off a modern Tower of Babel, IBM and Microsoft are spearheading a Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) that they say will work out a common...

Sun To Sue Microsoft FT Says.(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... The Financial Times has a story out saying that Sun Microsystems is about to sue Microsoft for its anticompetitive behavior in playing fast and loose with Sun's precious Java. The paper seems to be under the impression it could happen any...

Linuxcare Refugees Turn Consultants.(Wild Open Source)
February 11, 2002... A few of the refugees from Linuxcare including its old director of research Henry Hall are emerging from gestation as a bicoastal consultancy called Wild Open Source. Hall, who always thought his job title at Linuxcare was a misnomer and...

NuSphere Surrenders mysql.org to MySQL.
February 11, 2002... NuSphere has handed over the mysql.org domain name to MySQL AB, the Swedish software house that's suing it for infringing its trademark. NuSphere acquired the domain name the middle of last year and started operating a MySQL community on...

Everyman Clusters from Cray.
February 11, 2002... Cray has gone to Dell, which seems a tad out its element in Cray's company, for a three-year supply of Intel servers and storage to make into Linux clusters for its customers in an evident shift in policy toward support and service for the...

Larry, Sun & Linux.
February 11, 2002... Larry Ellison's now widely circulated declaration to financial analysts last week that Oracle is going to shift off the three HP servers that run most of its business and go with a Linux cluster of cheaper Intel-based servers instead provoked...

Red Hat To Expand Network.(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... Red Hat plans to extend its Red Hat Network subscription service later in the year so ISVs can use the channel. Red Hat execs said early discussions with third-party software vendors indicate interest in their using the Red Hat Network. ...

Borland Targets C++ Web Services Opportunity.(Product Announcement)
February 11, 2002... In the run-up to the great Microsoft tools party in a few days, Borland says it's got its Borland C++ Builder 6 ready, saying it can do rapid development of e-business apps with web services support in a "true" C++ visual development...

HP Sets Date; Eyes Turn to ISS.
February 11, 2002... HP will seek shareholder approval for its contested acquisition of Compaq at 8 o'clock Tuesday morning, March 19; Compaq shareholders, provided the deal hasn't been savaged, will get to express their opinion the next day. Having a date...

Walter to Carly: "Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire".
February 11, 2002... Episode 13: HP CEO Carly Fiorina publicly claims on Monday that she's got enough votes to put the Compaq merger over. Her b?te noir Walter Hewlett immediately calls her a liar claiming her "statement appears to be a clear violation of the...

Poof, There Goes That Dell Itanium Box Again.(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... eWeek swears it's got the story nailed this time. It's saying again for the second time that Dell has canned its Itanium Precision Workstation 730 for lack of interest. The first time through a few weeks ago Dell denied it although not...

Whoops.(Correction Notice)
February 11, 2002... Hmmm. Seems we got the story a bit twisted. Tim Witham, the director of the Open Source Development Lab didn't say he couldn't get the vendors to back a hardened data center Linux, he said he was about to start rallying them to the cause when...

Compiler Framework for Itanium Ready.(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... Intel and its buddy of the last year the Chinese Academy of Sciences have delivered themselves of an advanced compiler framework for the Itanium line. They're on a two-year quest to develop the next generation of compilers. The framework is...

HP To Trump Old Guidance.
February 11, 2002... HP said Monday that its Q1 results are going to shoot through the guidance it gave back in mid-November when it forecast that its revenues would be down sequentially because of seasonality. It said an obviously surprising uptick in consumer...

HP Writes Blade Spec.(OpenBlade)(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... Hewlett-Packard, the first of the major vendors to move into blades a couple of months ago, has come up with a blade specification it calls OpenBlade meant to rally followers to its CompactPCI-based architecture. HP wants its approach,...

Intel Seeks Hyper-Threaded Apps.
February 11, 2002... In an effort to drum up as much ISV support for its high-end, margin-enhancing Xeons as it can, Intel has devised an Early Access Program so folks whose server software is - tsk - still unoptimized can truly partake of the glories of...

IBM Workstations Put Under One Umbrella.(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... IBM has folded its Sun-baiting RISC-based Unix workstations into its Intel-based IntelliStation line, bragging that it's the only outfit to be going after the $7.5 billion workstation market with a three- pronged strategy of Windows, Linux and...

Sun Launches Cobalt Qube 3.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
February 11, 2002... Sun has introduced the Cobalt Qube 3 server appliance targeted at home networks, small businesses, remote offices and educational accounts. It's pitching the thing as a three in one widget, an intranet server, secure shared gateway and...

Linuxcare May Be Changing Tack.(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... Having been sent to the spa for a makeover, the disaster-prone Linuxcare, the pioneer Linux service shop, is now reportedly developing a product. The fact that it's got two ex-IBMers at the top may be suggestive of its direction. Other- wise it...

Home to Mama.(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... Egenera has reportedly lost its VP, future products Rich Fichera, who's resigned to go back to Giga where he was some sort of infrastructure senior researcher.

Blade Pioneer Makes the Great Leap to Intel; Begins Jihad To Knock Off Compaq.
February 18, 2002... Told ya so. Told ya so. Told ya Transmeta's last remaining server design-win would go Intel. The way blade pioneer RLX Technologies is going to pull off this little Texas two-step is to "bifurcate" its line. It'll have low-power,...

Microport Killed: Another Unix Chapter Closes.
February 18, 2002... Seventeen-year-old Microport Inc, the first company to put Unix - as opposed to Xenix - on the Intel 286, is going out of business. It's the second Unix-on-Intel operation to be deep six'd in the last few weeks if you count Sun mothballing...

IBM Out To Nail .NET.
February 18, 2002... IBM wants to be lead dog in software and so its Americas software marketing team has devised a "Take Out Microsoft Campaign" as part of its "Crush the Competition Series." Goodness, we didn't know staid old IBM was so rip and tear. Why,...

RLX Out for More Gelt.(Brief Article)
February 18, 2002... Rumor has it RLX is out shopping for a third round. A year ago it got $40 million from such as Soros, IBM and Ignition. It's been stretching its resource since summer so it wouldn't have to go back to the well until now to avoid being gouged....

Good Lord! Microsoft Actually Open Sources Something. No, Really, Honest.
February 18, 2002... A couple of years ago Microsoft bought a gaming operation called Bungie Software Products. Bungie's staff was destined to become the Bungie Studio inside Microsoft's games unit reportedly working on X- box games. Bungie did Myth, a...

ServerWorks Magic Makes Boxes Denser.
February 18, 2002... ServerWorks has put out some Memory eXpansion Technology SystemI/O core logic it says doubles the effective memory capacity of 1.26GHz Pentium III-based servers and above and halves the number of DIMMS needed. It says the widgetry reduces...

HP Numbers Not as Good as They Look.
February 18, 2002... HP was awfully anxious to have good numbers to post Wednesday for its first quarter, ended January 31, hoping the momentum will push the Compaq acquisition over the top. It was important to prove it hadn't been distracted either by the economy...

Dell Profits Up 5%.
February 18, 2002... Dell Thursday night said it had earned $456 million net, 17 cents a share, on revenues of $8.1 billion in its fiscal first quarter ended February 1. The earnings were in line with what Wall Street expected to the penny. Amazing how they do...

Red Hat Picks Up ArsDigita Assets.(Brief Article)
February 18, 2002... Red Hat said Wednesday that it had acquired certain assets of troubled open source e-commerce ISV ArsDigita in a small transaction of undisclosed size. The company also hired ArsDigita's leading developers and consultants. Red Hat...

Linux NetworX Debuts Cluster Software Lite.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
February 18, 2002... Linux NetworX has introduced an entry-level, limited-function version of Cluster-WorX, its cluster management software. ClusterWorX Lite - for clusters of 16 nodes or less - includes node cloning, system monitoring and remote secure access...

IBM Makes Airy Claims for New Entry Server.(Product Announcement)
February 18, 2002... IBM has brought out an eServer it says can consume 57% less electricity and generate 63% less heat - at the max of course - than its hated rival Sun. The new one-way and two-way addition to the p610 family runs both Unix and Linux. ...

Non-Settling States Want To Look Up Microsoft's Skirt.
February 18, 2002... Okay, so what would destroy Microsoft, set the computer industry back 25 years, do untold damage to the American economy, endanger the US forces in Afghanistan, fund organized crime and prevent disabled people from accessing computers? ...

Walter Says HP Vote is Over Whether Carly Stays or Goes.
February 18, 2002... Walter Hewlett, the would-be HP-Compaq merger spoiler, was at least briefly convinced that he needed an answer to HP management's whiney complaint that he's not offering an alternate plan lest not having one work against his position. So...

There'll Be No Living with Them Now.
February 18, 2002... IBM can now claim to be server leader with 29.3% of US revenues, up 7.8 points to $4.9 billion year-over-year, according to Dataquest. All the other major vendors lost revenue last year it said. Sun, IBM's target, dropped from 22% to 21.4%....

Judge To Air Antitrust Settlement.(Brief Article)
February 18, 2002... The presiding judge in the Microsoft antitrust trial is apparently going to hold a hearing the week of March 4 on the settlement between Microsoft and the Justice Department, a few days before the remedy hearing being pressed by the nine states...

HP Cuts Tags.(Brief Article)
February 18, 2002... HP has trimmed the price on some of its 1U and 2U LP1000r and LP2000r IA-32 servers 11%-31% in North America. Also slashed to move are some of its server appliances, down 14%-29%, stuff that's good for web caching, streaming media caching,...

Sun Releases ABIcheck to Open Source.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
February 18, 2002... Sun has got this application development tool called ABIcheck that it's released to the open source community. It says it will ensure compatibility between Linux releases.

ISS To Speak Last Week in February.(Brief Article)
February 18, 2002... Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), the Maryland-based proxy voting consultant that's estimated will control somewhere between 8% and 20% of HP's stock when the shareholders finally have their say on the Compaq acquisition on March 19,...

Sun's StarOffice Pricing Dilemma.(Brief Article)
February 18, 2002... Reports suggest that Sun is considering charging corporate accounts for StarOffice on the theory that free software spooks them because it implies no support. The figure being bandied about is 70 bucks a seat. It seems Sun can't quite get its...

Well, They Must Be Playing Ice Hockey in Hell Then.
February 18, 2002... Okay, reports are surfacing from the netherworld that hell has in fact frozen over and that Intel will get the chip business - and maybe even the board business (read longer shot) - for Sun's upcoming, low-end, general-purpose, edge-of-network,...

No Samples Yet.(AMD)(Brief Article)
February 18, 2002... Allegations to the contrary notwithstanding, as near as we can figure out, AMD hasn't delivered any Hammer samples to anybody. Shoot, the thing just hit first silicon last month.

SuperNOS II.
February 25, 2002... Gad, it's back. SuperNOS. Unix survivors will dimly remember Novell's unshared flirtation with a so-called overriding network operating system when it owned Unix. Well, the idea's apparently gone and taken up residence at Sun Microsystems...

RLX Ups the Ante.
February 25, 2002... It wasn't sure it could pull it off but with clever engineering and classic thermodynamics, it says, RLX Technologies has managed to stuff 24 of its new Intel-based blades in a 3U, the same number that it was getting using the vaunted low-power...