Hopefully everyone's Thanksgiving was pleasant and peaceful. I'd like to announce that beginning Monday, December 2nd, Sine Nomine will begin providing a low-cost CD media creation service for Debian/390 which will deliver a complete Debian/390 Linux distribution and applications package installable via CMS tools with no obligation to purchase a support contract, and also a commercial service and support offering for Debian/390 at a price which is not sensitive to the number of engines or number of installed copies.
The Debian/390 distribution has started the informal process to be LSB 1.x certified, and we are pursuing beginning the formal certification process within the next week or two. Websphere 3.x and 4.x, DB/2 UDB, Oracle and DB/2 Connect have been shown to work, and the usual suite of open-source applications are available (the roughly 8000 dpkgs available with the mainstream Debian distribution). We have initatied discussions for formal testing of IBM and other ISV software and will pass on details as they are available. The intent of both offerings is to provide a stable, well-supported Linux distribution for the 390 and zSeries that can begin as an experimental or development system without incurring large startup costs, and grow seamlessly into an environment that can support production environments as your skills and confidence with Linux on System/390 and zSeries grows. Please see http://www.sinenomine.net/debian for more information on both offerings and the status of the distribution. -- db
