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Slackware Project Delivers Slack/390 10.0 for Mainframes

Some of the key people behind the Slackware variant of the Linux operating system have announced a version of Slackware for IBM's System/390 and zSeries mainframes. Slack/390, as the port of the popular Slackware for X86 Linux variant is called, is the culmination of the four years of work to move the highly-respected (in Linux circles) Slackware Linux to the mainframe. Slackware joins Debian in offering a free version of Linux for mainframes and Red Hat and Novell, which charge an arm and a leg for their Linux implementations on those venerable IBM servers.

Kudos to Mike Kershaw, of Marist College (near IBM's mainframe stomping grounds in Poughkeepsie, New York) and Mark Post, an infrastructure specialist at Electronic Data Systems, for creating the Slack/390 port from the X86 version, which was created by Patrick Volkerding in 1993 and is still maintained by him. Kershaw is buried in work these days, and Post has taken over as main developer and maintainer of Slack/390. The Slack Project's X86 and 390 ports are both based on the Linux 2.4.26 kernel, and run in 32-bit mode on X86 systems and 31-bit mode on the mainframes. Adventurous types who want to play with the Linux 2.6.7 kernel can do so, but the official Slack 10.0 releases still officially use the older Linux kernel.

The Slackware Project bothered with a mainframe port because plenty of people want to put Linux in a logical partition or in a z/VM partition on their mainframes to play around, but they don't want to use evaluation versions from Red Hat or Novell and they don't want to pay a lot of money to these companies even after they decide to buy. Sine Nomine Associates, a systems and network engineering company based in Ashburn, Virginia that lent the Slack/390 project some time on its Multiprise 3000 mainframe to help them create the Slack variant for mainframes, is offering commercial-grade technical support for the Slack/390 edition. The company already offers support for the Debian, Red Hat, and Novell Linuxes for the IBM mainframe line.

Microsoft Settlement Pushes Novell into the Black Big Time for Fiscal Q1

One of the things that operating system and middleware maker Novell has had a tough time doing in the past decade is make money, and acquiring commercial Linux distributor SUSE has not really changed that fact all that much, even if it did alter (in a positive way) Novell's long-term prospects to make money.

In fiscal 2005's first quarter ended January 31, Novell booked sales of $290 million, up 9 percent from the prior year. SUSE Linux and related products accounted for about $15 million in sales, or about half of the company's growth. (Novell said it sold 21,000 subscriptions to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server in the quarter, and recognized $7 million in revenue from those sales, putting the average license price at around $334.) Ignoring a $448 million legal settlement with rival Microsoft and a bunch of minor charges and benefits, profits in the first quarter were essentially flat at $10 million, or 3 cents a share. With those charges and benefits and the Microsoft settlement thrown in, Novell brought $392 million to the bottom line, which worked out to 90 cents a share.

"Novell made steady progress on executing its strategy this quarter," said Jack Messman, the company's chairman and CEO, in a statement accompanying the financial results. "We still have work ahead of us as we continue to reposition the company in our growth markets. Our solid balance sheet gives us increased financial flexibility to execute strategic initiatives in the future." Specifically, Novell now has $1.7 billion of cash and short-term investments on hand. That's nearly a year and a half worth of revenue.

Turbolinux Releases Beta of 64-Bit X86 Support

Japanese commercial Linux distributor Turbolinux has announced that it has put out a free preview of its upcoming 64-bit version of its Turbolinux 10 Linux variant. Up until now, Turbolinux has only supported 32-bit Intel and AMD architectures, but with this preview the company is supporting the 64-bit extended memory architecture championed by AMD and now adopted by Intel. The 64-bit support is not, however, a version of Turbolinux 10 for Intel's Itanium processors, which have a completely different architecture. The 64-bit variant, which will be sold separately from the 32-bit version, is expected to be commercially available soon.

The company says somewhat curiously that it "expects the 64-bit market to grow quickly in 2005 and looks forward to further 64-bit platform development." That may mean Itanium support is imminent, or that the company has its sights set on other 64-bit platforms, such as IBM's Power chips. The X86-64 support is not Turbolinux's first crack at 64-bit support. The company created a special version of Turbolinux 8 several years ago especially for the 64-bit Opteron processors from AMD; this version was, however, targeted mainly at the workstation market.

Turbolinux Gets IBM Backing for xSeries Servers

While the major server makers and the two dominant commercial Linux distributors like to pretend that the Linux market is only a two horse race--that's Red Hat and Novell--the reality is that there are many hundreds of thousands of instances of other Linux distributions out there in the world, not to mention all those macho machines that have the real, open source, no-name Linux installed. There are so many markets in the world, and even more niches within those markets, that there is plenty of room for variety and specialization. Which is why IBM's Japanese unit has just inked a deal with Linux distro Turbolinux.

Under that deal, IBM will distribute and support Turbolinux 10 on its xSeries 206 (uniprocessor Pentium 4, tower), xSeries 306 (uniprocessor Pentium 4, rack-mounted) and xSeries 346 (two-way Xeon-64 DP, rack-mounted) servers, which IBM says are aimed at firewall/gateway and application/database server use for small and medium customers. What they are really aimed at is Fujitsu, which rules the entry X86 server market in Japan. Turbolinux is the dominant Linux distro in Japan, too. If you want to beat Fujitsu, you have to run Turbolinux. It is that simple.

IBM says that it will expand its support for Turbolinux on the remainder of its xSeries server line as customers demand it. With Turbolinux being a member of the Linux Core Consortium and coding to the Linux Standards Base, it is not inconceivable that IBM could eventually work with Turbolinux to port its Linux variant to its i5 and p5 Power-based servers as well as its mainframes. This would allow IBM to attack both the large Japanese and fast-growing Chinese Linux markets, since Turbolinux supports both Japanese and Chinese (in addition to English and Korean).

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 Gets Common Criteria EAL4+ Certification

Linux distributor Novell and server maker IBM have announced that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 has been certified at the Common Criteria EAL4+ level, which makes the combination of Linux on specific IBM eServer platforms suitable for applications that demand the highest security. While Novell was adamant that the EAL4+ level had been reached, the Common Criteria project portal has not yet posted the certificate. It is unclear what IBM servers have been certified with SLES 9.

The two companies also announced that SLES 9 across the entire eServer line--xSeries X86 servers, i5 and p5 Power-based servers, and zSeries mainframes--had been certified as being compliant with the Common Operating Environment (COE) standard from the U.S. Department of Defense. With the COE compliance, SLES 9 on IBM's eServers can be used in command and control systems.

Cray XD1 Linux Super Gets Traction

Supercomputer maker Cray is extremely pleased that it has secured an order for its XD1 Linux-Opteron supercomputer to be installed at the Maui High Performance Computing Center, part of the U.S. Air Force's research facilities for space surveillance and image processing. The order for a 1.4 teraflops XD1 with 288 Opteron processors is part of a larger $23 million deal Cray has inked with the Department of Defense to modernize some of its computing facilities. Cray also announced last week that the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, would be installing an XD1 system to do protein structure analysis and molecular modeling; the size of this XD1 system was not announced. The company also said that CINECA, the Italian national supercomputing center based in Bologna, would be installing a 144-processor XD1 system (that's about 700 gigaflops) for its 25 affiliated universities to play with.

Cray says that the unique architecture of the XD1 machines (which you may remember as the OctigaBay machines before Cray snapped that company up) is allowing the XD1s to deliver very good performance on various HPC benchmark tests, including the touchstone HPC Challenge kicker to the well-known Linpack Fortran benchmark test. The fact that the XD1 can scale from gigaflops to many teraflops all in a single architecture is also pretty appealing to XD1 customers. So is the fact that it runs Linux.

Scyld Lays Out Plans for Linux 2.6

Having just announced its Beowulf Series 29 cz-5 release of the Linux clustering software, the Scyld Software subsidiary of commercial Linux system vendor Penguin Computing is looking ahead to the future, says Walt Wallach, vice president of software engineering, and that means a move--eventually--to the Linux 2.6 kernel.

The Scyld BeoMaster cluster management software is currently based on the Linux 2.4.29 kernel, and in the supercomputer cluster market, which is dominated by two-way servers, having a stable platform is much more important than being on the latest Linux kernel. So neither Scyld nor its approximately 100 commercial customers are in any hurry to change things. That said, Wallach knows that, eventually, HPC applications will move to the Linux 2.6 kernel, and he says that Scyld's Beowulf clustering will support the same feature set on Linux 2.6 as it does now on Linux 2.4. The timing of the move to Linux 2.6 will be dependent on customer needs, he says.

"We don't know when the shift to Linux 2.6 will be," says Wallach. "But we will provide concurrent Linux 2.4 and Linux 2.6 support for at least 18 months once we make the shift." That shift will probably start late in 2005, which is also when the future Beowulf Series 30 clustering software (if it is indeed called that and purely coincidentally) is expected to be available.