Yesterday I attended the Red Hat Linux World Tour event in Boston. It was an interesting event and they spoke a fair amount about their strategic direction and future plans. As is fairly clear by now they are focused on the enterprise customer who needs real support for their Linux servers. Toward that end they've been beefing up RHN so that it is becoming something of a competitor to Open View in addition to the original update management capabilities it had. I'm not really convinced of just how valuable RHN really is, especially for the small and medium sized businesses. Does anyone have real experience with using it?
They are putting quite a bit of effort into broadening the capabilities of the system by providing more middle-ware pieces on top of the base operating system. For example they are adding a J2EE Application Server (based on the Jonas app server) that will be bundled with the system. They've been aggressively establishing business relationships with other vendors and that seems to be going really well. They recently established a deal with Windriver (who is the 800 pound gorilla of the embedded systems software space) where RH Linux would be the base O/S of choice. They are also having increasing better response from companies like NVidia for improved graphics drivers. This is all pretty encouraging news. One of the most interesting tidbits I learned from the evening is of a project called White Box Enterprise Linux which provides a set of binaries built from the RHEL sources that is available without the Red Hat annual service fees. You can learn more about them from their website (and can download the CD iso images too!) at: http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/ -- Dan Coutu Managing Director Snowy Owl Internet Consulting, LLC http://www.snowy-owl.com _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss