Linux Gram articles from September 2002

Linux Gram archives from September 2002

Turbolinux Spin-Out Comes a Cropper.
September 2, 2002... The engineering team responsible for the PowerCockpit server provisioning software that Turbolinux US, or what used to be Turbolinux US, was supposed to spin out into a separate company or reinvent itself around walked out en masse on Monday,...

Caldera Makes Mind-Boggling Jump Back to SCO.
September 2, 2002... Caldera International Inc, one of the four main Linux commercializers, has changed its name to the SCO Group in recognition of the fact that most of its money is coming from the Unix operating systems that it bought from the old Santa Cruz...

Caldera's Linux Revenues Are Pitiful.
September 2, 2002... Well, shoot, no wonder Caldera is changing its name to The SCO Group and pushing its Unix products up front. Basically, its Linux business is a washout. During Caldera's fiscal third-quarter earnings call Wednesday, CFO Robert Bench...

Caldera Dumps Tamang.
September 2, 2002... Caldera, which has now restyled itself the SCO Group, has run off its VP of marketing and business development Benoy Tamang, who was a long-time member of the management team that ousted Caldera CEO Ransom Love had working for him. In May,...

Newfangled SCO Group Drops BackOffice-like Volution Office Server.
September 2, 2002... Caldera, the Linux pioneer now recast as the Unix-touting SCO Group, has reportedly dropped the notion of launching the Linux suite it was readying called the Volution Office Server (VOS). VOS was supposed to be positioned - no tittering,...

AMD Reorgs for Hammer.
September 2, 2002... With its 64-bit Hammer chip looming, AMD has quietly split its microprocessor unit in two. It has moved Ed Ellett out of his role as vice-president of marketing for its desktop, mobile, workstation and server interests and has given him...

Datel Puts $299 Lindows PC in its Stores.(Datel Systems' Datel PC)(Product Announcement)
September 2, 2002... San Diego, California-based computer systems retailer Datel Systems has launched a LindowsOS-based PC in its two stores. Priced at $299, the Datel PC includes an 850MHz AMD processor, 128MB of RAM, a 20GB hard drive, a 52X CD-ROM, stereo...

Compaq's Knife Sprouts Second Blade.
September 2, 2002... So, HP, or rather the Compaq contingent at HP, has delivered itself of its anticipated blade upgrade, the dual-processor ProLiant BL p- Class system. It follows Compaq's first-generation e-Class widgetry with its low-voltage uniprocessor...

The HP-Compaq Merger Hasn't Clicked Yet.
September 2, 2002... Well, HP turned in its first quarter since it acquired Compaq and the magic that Carly swore would bewitch their PC and enterprise units - the storage and server stuff - once they combined has yet to produce the promised supernatural effect....

Dell Debuts $599 Small Biz Server.(PowerEdge 600SC and PowerEdge 2600)(Product Announcement)
September 2, 2002... Dell has launched a pair of servers aimed at small business. The PowerEdge 600SC comes with DDR memory and integrated gigabit Ethernet and is targeted at customers who want to migrate from a desktop PC-based network to a client/server...

Newisys Got the Audience It Wanted.(Brief Article)
September 2, 2002... Hammer start-up Newisys spent a lot of its time at its LinuxWorld public debut showing off its 2p AMD Opteron 1U prototype code named Khepri to the folks from Dell, IBM and HPQ, exactly the kind of traffic it was looking for since it wants them...

Sun's Situation Stinks.
September 2, 2002... Sun had a mid-quarter conference call with Wall Street after the market closed Thursday and Sun CFO Steve McGowan - Scooter was a no- show - told the boys and girls that not only wasn't the environment looking any better, it may in fact be...

IMS Ports Validation Test System to Linux.(Integrated Measurement Systems' Vanguard)(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
September 2, 2002... Integrated Measurement Systems Inc is offering its flagship Vanguard digital engineering validation test system with a Linux controller option. IMS is supposedly the first engineering validation test supplier to use Linux to control...

SBE Debuts SDK for Linux Apps.(HighWire 400p/M DKL kit)(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
September 2, 2002... Telecom products vendor SBE Inc has put out a developer kit for embedded Linux apps. The new HighWire 400p/M DKL kit combines SBE's HW400p/M CI core processor with a TimeSys embedded Linux SDK including the enhanced open source TimeSys GPL...

Itanium: Third in a Three-Horse Race.(Gartner report)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
September 2, 2002... Gartner has been off gazing at its crystal ball and says that come 2007, five years from now, Intel's 64-bit Itanium chip will be only worth $4 billion in server sales up against the Sun Sparc's $6.6 billion and IBM Power's $8.6 billion. It...

Microtel, Via, Wal-Mart & Lindows Break the $200 Barrier.
September 9, 2002... Windows wannabe Lindows.com has struck with that $199 Linux box it's been threatening to see get to market in hopes of lighting a tinderbox that burns down the Microsoft concession (CSN No 463). Lindows calls the price point "computer history."...

Linux Becomes Windows-Compatible in Two Years at the Outside.
September 9, 2002... Jeremy White, the founder and CEO of CodeWeavers, the commercializers of the long-running, never-ending open source Wine Project, which is reverse engineering the Win32 software layer so other people's operating systems can run Windows...

MySQL Gets .NET'd.(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... MySQL AB, the company behind the MySQL open source database, crows that its database can be accessed from within the Microsoft .NET development environment through multiple interfaces. Its integration with .NET is said to reduce the time...

Linux Turns Tables on Microsoft.
September 9, 2002... According to the New York Times and a Microsoft-backed pressure group called the Initiative for Software Choice, Microsoft is currently facing 66 government proposals, statements and studies in 25 countries in Asia, Europe and Latin America...

MS Loses 6% of the Web Server Market to Open Source.(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... Microsoft has lost 6% of its IIS web server market to the open source Apache web server according to the latest numbers from Netcraft, the Internet census taker. Most of the loss resulted from changes at the so-called domain name parks that...

Dell Reorgs.
September 9, 2002... Dell's been moving the furniture around inside its enterprise and client units apparently in search of that Platonic ideal known as the perfect structure that everybody's happy with. Dell's PR people have denied that anything's been...

Madison Sighting.(Intel microprocessor)(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... It looks like Madison, the next rev of the Itanium chip, is going to surface for the first time publicly at the Intel Developers Forum the week of Sept-ember 9. Unisys - not HP, which is looked on as Itanium's biggest booster - says it's going...

Linux Numbers Up.
September 9, 2002... Dataquest has fixed 32-bit Linux-on-Intel server sales in Q2 at $220 million, up $50 million year-over-year. Dell led with $59.2 million worth of the booty, HP was next with $58.6 million and IBM after that with $42 million. US shipments were...

Linux-Windows TCO "Roughly Equal" - Microsoft.(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... Microsoft apparently made a bit of a to-do over its Services for Unix (SFU) 3.0 migration kit at the Server DevCon it had this week and its director of Unix migration strategy Doug Miller was holding forth on how Microsoft figures the cost of...

Turbolinux Warning.(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... In the face of its retreat back to Japan, Gartner is warning clients off of the Turbolinux distribution, saying that "enterprises should discontinue or avoid deployments based on Turbolinux, except in geographies served by SRA," aka Software...

Yipes, Embedix Lives.(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... Ah, so that's why Lineo CEO Matt Harris was in India lately. Out of Bangalore, India's high-tech capital, comes news that a local firm called Infomart is developing a so-called Kaii PDA using an Embedix PDA Plus software stack from the...

Tower Upgrades Compiler for Linux.(version 3.9 of TowerJ)(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
September 9, 2002... Tower Technology has upgraded its TowerJ compiler for Linux and Solaris platforms. Highlights of release 3.9 include new threading capabilities, improved garbage collection and other unspecified optimizations. Tower claims the new...

Open Source Audio Codec Hardware-Ready.(Ogg Vorbis, Tremor)
September 9, 2002... An embedded version of the open source audio compression format with the odd name of Ogg Vorbis has been released. The embedded release, aggressively called Tremor, re-implements the Vorbis format, stripping out Vobis' dependence on floating...

Dell Lands SUNY Buffalo Linux Cluster Deal.
September 9, 2002... Linux continues its march into high-performance compute clustering with a win at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Buffalo's cluster, up and running for six-eight weeks, uses of 2,000 Dell PowerEdge 1650 dual-processor servers...

Intel Guides Lower.(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... Intel guided lower Thursday during its mid-quarter update just as Wall Street expected all week. It said Q3 revenues would come in between $6.3 billion and $6.7 billion rather than $6.3 billion and $6.9 billion like it thought before. It said...

HP Caught in Numbers Crunch.
September 9, 2002... The combined Hewlett-Packard-Compaq, which came together in May, managed to keep its worldwide lead in Intel servers in Q2 but lost close to five points in market share year-over-year according to the figures IDC's got. Dell, on the other hand,...

Mandrake Linux 9.0 RC1 Out.(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... MandrakeSoft has put out the first release candidate of Mandrake Linux 9.0 for testing.

IBM's Out Gunning for Intel Volume.
September 9, 2002... According to IBM, who's on the threshold of announcing BladeCenter, its first dense server, blades are the Next Big Thing. This is where it's going to settle old scores. The way it reads market shares figures, it's been getting more than its...

Sun-AOL Alliance Apparently Suspect.(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... Hmmm. The New York Times thinks the regulators investigating AOL's affairs may be poking around that 1998 deal between AOL and Sun that resulted in the Sun-Netscape Alliance. Under the terms of the deal they cut, Sun paid AOL $310 million a...

Newsforge Retracts.(VA software Web site)(Brief Article)
September 9, 2002... Before it failed to morph into the Compaq of Linux, or even a hardware shop that could support itself, VA Software also had overweening media ambitions as well and under its former VA Linux Systems avatar bought And-over.net for an ungodly...

Paula Hunter Tipped To Head United Linux.
September 16, 2002... According to sources in the United Linux consortium, a relative unknown by the name of Paula Hunter will be made head of the three- month-old organization this Wednesday, September 18. The job was supposed to go to ex-Caldera CEO Ransom...

When Is a Linux Super-Cluster Not a Cluster At All?
September 16, 2002... SGI, the graphics pioneer fallen on Dickens-like hard times and trying hard to reinvent itself out of the poorhouse, has turned up with a 64-processor Linux-on-McKinley benchmark that blows rivals like IBM's AIX-based p690s and Sun's...

NEC Makes Linux Fault-Tolerant, a First.
September 16, 2002... NEC has quietly gone into production in Europe and Japan with a fault-tolerant Linux, a wholly unheard of creature. The company is being a tad more conservative in the states and is currently in beta with the thing expecting to release it in...

A Clear Case of the Cart Before the Horse.
September 16, 2002... Lindows.com claimed last Tuesday that LindowsOS was finally able to support HP printers, only the most widely deployed printers in the world, and that folks who might have bought one of those Lindows machines that Walmart.com's has been selling...

PCs To Go the Way of Cell Phones, Lindows Speculates.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Playing off the fact that HP, Dell and Sony have gone with Corel's WordPerfect rather than the pricier Microsoft Works in their low-end consumer boxes, Michael Robertson, head of the wannabe Windows Lindows .com, figures that with Wal-Mart...

RackSaver Pledges Itanium 2 Blade Server.
September 16, 2002... RackSaver Inc, a low-profile San Diego, California HPC systems builder, says it expects to productize an Itanium 2-based blade server by the first quarter of next year. It says its homegrown design, the first hint of an Itanium dense server to...

IBackup for Linux Debuts.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
September 16, 2002... IBackup has launched a new application for backing up Linux server data offsite that expands its suite of applications for web-based online storage and retrieval. Dubbed IBackup for Linux, the kit is a suite of backup/restore apps native...

HP Expands its Platform Deal.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... The reseller deal between distributed and grid computing specialist Platform Comp-uting and Hewlett-Packard has been expanded into a new global multi-year systems integration and reseller pact to provide Linux, Windows and Unix cluster and grid...

SnapGear & Red Hat in Turnkey Embedded Deal.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Internet security appliances vendor Snap-Gear Inc and Red Hat have teamed up to provide turnkey embedded hardware and software products based on Linux. The partnership brings Red Hat's professional services capabilities together with...

Infloblox Debuts LDAP Server Appliance.(LDAP One)(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
September 16, 2002... Infoblox has introduced a Linux-based LDAP server appliance. Infoblox executives claim the LDAP One appliance is the first to focus on network services delivery and makes LDAP implementations easier. The widget, based on a 733MHz...

Sun Starts Eating its Own Linux Box.
September 16, 2002... Sun denies it, but it sure as heck looks like it's pitting its own Solaris/Sparc-based low-end Sun Fire V100 server against its new low-end Linux server. Sun is upping the clock on the V100's UltraSparc IIi chips to 550MHz or 650MHz and...

Intel Boosts Xeon Clock in Anti-Sun Move.
September 16, 2002... Intel boosted its Xeon MP chips for two-way servers and workstations from the 2.4GHz widgets it brought out in May to clocks of 2.8GHZ and 2.6GHz this week, attempting to create a huge gulf between itself and the best its RISC rivals,...

Intel To Make the World a Safer Place.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Intel is supposed to make the world a safer place by sticking some sketchy anti-hacker, anti-virus, supposedly opt-in security mojo it's cooked up called LaGrande Technology (LT) in its chips starting next year with Prescott. LT is the...

Intel To Put Hyper-Threading in Desktop Chips.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Intel says it's going to extend its Hyper-Threading technique, reserved so far for its server chips, to the desktop when it wheels out its 3GHz Pentium 4 widget later this year. The technology lets multithreaded software run as though it had...

Windows Servers Down 5% in Q2.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... After counting up all the numbers, IDC figures the Windows server market was worth $2.8 billion in the second quarter, off 5% bother year-over-year and sequentially. It gave a slipping HP 34%, Dell 23%, an all-time high, and IBM 16.6%. The...

Has Dell Found a Use for McKinley After All?(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Dell's supposed to have a teleconference on Tuesday to talk about high-performance computing clusters and Dell president and COO Kevin Rollins has been talking about the fact that maybe Dell might ship Intel's Itanium 2, which Dell has so far...

Sun Desktop Mystery To End Soon.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Sun in few days is supposed explain what it means by a Linux desktop - a market it's threatening to go into - and we'll all find out whether it's a classic x86 box or, as we've theorized, some sort of reheated NC, aka a Sun-Ray, backed by bank...

Office by Subscription Flops.(Microsoft Office)(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Well, it looks like Microsoft may be dumping the idea of selling Office by subscription. It's been piloting the notion in Australia, Brazil and New Zealand since May using Office XP in its Professional and Small Business flavors and from what...

The Many Faces of Red Hat.(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... Red Hat apparently has in mind to morph its new Advanced Server code into a list of various personalities like Red Hat Carrier Grade or Red Hat Embedded or whatever comes up.

ClawHammer Delayed.(AMD microprocessor)(Brief Article)
September 16, 2002... We were chasing this report all week but couldn't nail it and the Wall Street Journal irritatingly did and got somebody at AMD it could quote to say so too. The company is delaying the introduction of the desktop version of its novel 64-bit...

Mad Hatter To Crash Microsoft's Tea Party.(Sun Microsystems Inc.)
September 23, 2002... Well, the vaunted Linux desktop that has gotten it enough ink in the last few weeks turns out to be another one of those Sun strategies held together with chewing gum and duct tape, the kind of thing that makes the Little Rascals look...

IBM Blades Turn Swiss Army Knife: A Little Something for Everyone.
September 23, 2002... Well, IBM was supposed to announce its first dense server, the so- called BladeCenter, this past Tuesday, but decided that two announcements would be a lot better than one and shifted the BladeCenter introduction a week out. Instead, IBM...

Red Hat Linux 8.0 Imminent; Hints of Advanced Desktop.
September 23, 2002... At press time, Red Hat had sent an gold master down to the duplicator and had started boxing up Red Hat Linux 8.0, at one point code named Limbo, expecting the thing to be out early next month. What's interesting about 8.0 is that the...

Here's What IBM Meant To Say.
September 23, 2002... IBM hosted an analyst meeting the other day on its servers. And, well, you know how big companies sometimes have trouble speaking in clear, concise declarative sentences. What IBM was really trying to say, in its own muffled way, is that AIX is...

Red Hat Nails IBM Global Services as Partner.
September 23, 2002... This story has been updated here and there since it broke on Monday. Linux market leader Red Hat Inc, on the verge of posting its summer quarter, nailed a major, multi-year, potentially serious revenue- boosting deal with the mighty IBM...

Advanced Server Makes Red Hat Quarter.
September 23, 2002... Linux market leader Red Hat, in the throes of trying to establish a viable business model, pretty much hit its mark, albeit relatively modest, in its second fiscal quarter ended August 31 after a summer that's been pretty cruel to most of the...

Free Software Foundation Questions United Linux NDA.
September 23, 2002... The four weak sisters of Linux, SuSE, SCO, Turbolinux and Conectiva, are looking a tad weaker since rival Red Hat pulled the IBM Global Services trick out its fedora the other day. As the United Linux alliance, the four allied companies say...

RLX Blade Density Shrinks.(RLX Technologies RLX 1200i)(Product Announcement)
September 23, 2002... RLX Technologies, the blade pioneer, has cut its vaunted density in half to be able to get more powerful chips, headier storage and more memory on its blade. Its performance is still gonna be outgunned by IBM's upcoming BladeCenter, but the new...

Sun Out To Buy School Market Back.(StarOffice 6.0)
September 23, 2002... Sun claims it has donated $6 billion worth of StarOffice 6.0 - God, the numbers are like the size of armies in the Bible - to the Ministries of Education in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Chile, enough to cover 200 million students and donations...

McKinley Workstations Ship with Linux.(Brief Article)
September 23, 2002... Hewlett-Packard has started delivering its singular 64-bit Itanium 2- based workstations, the only ones in the industry, with Red Hat Advanced Workstation on 'em. Advanced Workstation is a form of Red Hat's Advanced Server, but not much...

Sun Drops Below Three Bucks.(Brief Article)
September 23, 2002... Sun's stock spent the week repeatedly diving below an ignominious $3. It closed Thursday at $2.71, a low point it hasn't seen in years. What made it go down and stay down yesterday was a Bank of America appraisal that said there was no...

Original NC Gets Another $2m.(network computer)
September 23, 2002... Remember the NC, the ill-fated network computer that was supposed replace the omnipresent PC? Well, in the same week that Sun started trying to breath new life into the SunRay, which is what its version of the thing became, as part of its...

Apache Worm Targets Secure Sites.
September 23, 2002... An Internet worm is rapidly infecting Linux-on-Intel systems by exploiting a vulnerability lurking in a common security layer used by the Apache web server. Ironically, the worm can invade secure Apache servers because of a hole in Apache's...

BMC Puts Linux Configuration App on zSeries.(Deployment Manager for Linux)(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
September 23, 2002... BMC Software has launched its configuration management application, Deployment Manager for Linux, for the zSeries mainframes. A tool for these big server consolidation projects, it's supposed to enable administrators to transparently...

LinOra Embraces Evolution.(uses Ximian's Evolution groupware suite)(Brief Article)
September 23, 2002... Ximian boasts that Boise, Idaho-based IT services firm LinOra Corporation has dump-ed Windows and moved its desktop PCs to Linux using Ximian's Evolution groupware suite for personal information management. Evolution integrates e-mail,...

XFS Makes It into the Linux Development Kernel.(Brief Article)
September 23, 2002... Linus Torvalds has merged SGI's XFS high-performance journaling file system into his BitKeeper tree suggesting that it'll show up in a future kernel release, according to LWN.net. XFS provides rapid recovery from crashes and support for...

LindowsOS 2.0 Debuts for Insiders.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
September 23, 2002... Lindows.com has launched LindowsOS 2.0 for its so-called Insiders, the people who have paid $99 to participate in the LindowsOS beta. The quality of the rev has met with the hiss jeers of the Slashdot crowd many of whom in their own inimitable...

Yields Reportedly Really Behind the ClawHammer Delay.
September 30, 2002... Ya know, some days it's like pulling teeth. So the first guy says the reason AMD pushed the delivery of its desktop Hammer chip out a quarter was to up its yield at, oh, say, 2GHz, the clock rate AMD's thought to be shooting for. It's...

Russians Wade in on Server Virtualization.
September 30, 2002... SWsoft Inc, the 85-man Russian company headquartered in San Francisco, says it's pushing the envelop on server virtualization, claiming to be the only outfit to be able to virtualize multiple 16p- 64GB Intel IA-32 environments and talking about...

Grand Schemes, Yes, But How To Pay for Them.
September 30, 2002... So now that the Linux Standard Base 1.2 and Lil8nux specs are finished, the Free Standards Group (FSG) decided to ask people what was missing and what else they should do. Well. The suggestions have reportedly come gushing in - along...

Is Lindows Chasing AOL Rainbows?
September 30, 2002... So Lindows now fancies itself the stuff of an "AOL Computer" apparently on the strength of a license it took to the Netscape- branded mail client, browser and instant messenger that it's bundling with LindowsOS. What's not clear is the...

Intel Thought Police Strike NEC.
September 30, 2002... So Insight 64 consultant Nathan Brookwood was running this panel of industry folks that he had assembled to talk about the future of 64- bit computing at the Platforms conference back in July, when, during the discussion, Leonard Tsai, NEC's...

And So It Begins.
September 30, 2002... Well, apparently Newisys, the secretive Hammer start-up, has gotten its first nibble and has lined up a VAR that wants to resell the Texas company's upcoming AMD SledgeHammer-based servers. No, we haven't ferreted out the pioneer's name...

IBM Unsheathes BladeCenter.
September 30, 2002... IBM Tuesday finally went public with its contribution to blades, which it interprets as moving blades away from the edge and into the data center. The announcement was muted because last week IBM and Intel up and allied saying that Intel...

World's Smallest 1-Teraflop Cluster.
September 30, 2002... RackSaver, the company promising an Itanium 2 blade server in Q1 (CSN No 467), claims to have produced the world's smallest-footprint 1- teraflop supercomputing cluster - well, theoretically at any rate. It's a single-cabinet MegaDense...

MicronPC Upgrades.
September 30, 2002... MicronPC, the new comeback kid, had replaced its NetFrame 1500, 2500 and 3550 servers with the new 1600, 2600 and 3600, which move to the new Intel dual-Xeon chips, the Hyper-Threaded widgets, up to 12GB of DDR 266 memory and PCI-X expansion....

HP Boasts of Blade Milestone.
September 30, 2002... HP is sending around word that it has reached a "milestone" in its blade progress and has sold 1,800 blades in a month, the ones it got from Compaq, becoming, it says, the first vendor to do so. It claims a 54.8% market share. It's HP's way of...

Itanium's Fortunes Depend on Microsoft: Meta.
September 30, 2002... The Meta Group is saying that the near-term acceptance of the Itanium 2, the chip Intel spent a king's ransom developing, depends on Microsoft, whose software for the thing still isn't finished. Interesting, it figures Microsoft won't charge...

God, No Wonder the Stock Market's Collapsing.
September 30, 2002... UBS Warburg asked 85 CIOs, 50 in the US and 35 in Europe, a bunch of questions and none of the answers were very pretty. It's stuff like this that drove the Stock Market to the precipice Monday sacrificing whatever gains were left from bubble...