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Mandriva Delivers Linux Limited Edition 2005

Commercial Linux distributor Mandriva, the combination of Mandrakesoft and Conectiva, announced last week that it has delivered its interim Linux update as it readies the merged version of the Mandrakesoft and Conectiva Linux implementations, which will be called Mandriva Linux 2006, for later this fall.

After merging with Conectiva two months ago, the former Mandrakesoft decided that it would need to take some time to integrate the two Linuxes and that it wanted to move to an annual release schedule to make it easier for corporate buyers to cope with Linux, but realized that in the meantime, Mandriva would need to get some tweaks to Linux out the door for users who like to be on the cutting edge. That is what Mandriva Linux Limited Edition 2005 is all about.

Limited Edition 2005 includes the Linux 2.6.11.6 kernel and both the KDE 3.3.2 (with some backports from 3.4, including kpdf) and Gnome 2.8.3 interfaces. It also includes the Firefox 1.0.2 browser, the GNU GCC 3.4.3 compiler set, the GNU GIMP 2.2 image viewer, the CDrecord 2.0.1 CD cutter program (which supports dual DVD-CD-R players), the OpenOffice 1.1.4 office suite, and the MySQL 4.1.11 database. Limited Edition 2005 supports 32-bit X86 and 64-bit X86-64 and EM64T hardware, and like other Linuxes, Limited Edition supports 32-bit and 64-bit applications running side-by-side within the same platform. Contributors to Mandriva have immediate access to the software, as do members of the Mandriva Club (who buy their support for advanced releases upfront.) If you want to buy it, Limited Edition 2005 will cost you $65 in the States or €59 in Europe; it is only available online at the Mandriva store.

Turbolinux Previews 64-Bit X86 Support

Japanese Linux distro Turbolinux has partnered with Asahi Electronics to create a preview of its upcoming 64-bit support for its Linux distribution. Asahi is an X86 reseller located in Japan, and the company plans to bundle Turbolinux 10 for the AMD X86-64 and for the Intel EM64T memory extensions on the desktop motherboards that Asahi sells. So far, Asahi has distributed 5,000 of Intel's 64-bit Pentium 4 D925XCV motherboards in two weeks.

Turbolinux 10 for AMD64/EM64T is the official name of the forthcoming desktop release from Turbolinux, and it is based on the same Turbolinux Server code base as the company started shipping at the end of October 2004 in Japan and in the rest of the world in December 2004. While Turbolinux 10S is interesting in that it supports the Linux 2.6 kernel, it does not yet have 64-bit support. The preview of the desktop version of the software is, in a sense, a way to develop and test the 64-bit support on desktops first, and then move it into servers. Two years ago, Turbolinux 8 running on the Linux 2.4 kernel offered support for 64-bit addressing on the AMD Athlon64 processors, but in jumping to the Linux 2.6 kernel, Turbolinux has fallen somewhat behind Red Hat and Novell in getting 64-bit support out the door.

In a separate announcement, Turbolinux said it has sold 10,000 licenses of its Linux software to over 100 Asia/Pacific educational institutions under a special discount offering targeting such institutions. Under that offering, Turbolinux sells its software with discounts of up to 70 percent. A number of other institutions from outside the AsiaPac region--including MIT, Johns Hopkins, Melbourne University, Sacramento State University, San Francisco State University, and others--have participated in the offering.

Linus Looks at Alternative Software Change Management for Linux Kernel

Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux operating system, has informed the Linux kernel development community that he is considering a move away from the Bitmover software change management system from BitKeeper to another CVS after using Bitmover for three years. The move to Bitkeeper caused a bit of controversy in the open source community when Torvalds adopted it because it is not an open source program, even though the Bitmover client was distributed as a free binary. Torvalds made his announcement to the Linux community that he was exploring alternatives to Bitmover the day after Bitkeeper announced that it would stop giving away its CVS client for free and focus on commercial sales. While Torvalds went to great lengths to say some nice things about Bitmover, down the hall from him at Open Source Development Labs, Andrew Tridgell, who is paid full time by OSDL like Torvalds, has been working on a reverse-engineered version of a CVS client, called SourcePuller, that is open source and is compatible with Bitkeeper code repositories. Torvalds said he has examined and rejected using the Subversion SCM tool, and is looking at Monotone, which is distributed under the GNU GPL license.

Netline Delivers Open-Xchange Groupware for Linux

Netline Internet Service, the German groupware software developer that created the groupware behind SUSE's Openexchange Server, has finally released the commercial kicker to that product, which is called Open-Xchange Server 5. With this release, the Netline groupware is untied from SUSE 8 Linux Enterprise Server and can now be plunked down on other Linuxes, but Netline itself is promoting the software on SLES 9, Novell's current Linux implementation for servers. With the unbundling, OpenXchange Server 5 is supported independently from the underlying Linux, making it a lot easier to support than the older SUSE Openexchange Server, which often did not get the latest Linux patches when SUSE was supporting it and which has been more or less ignored since Novell acquired SUSE.

OpenXchange Server 5 is available right now on SLES 9, and will be available at the end of May for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4; the open source community that Netline has been fostering since last August has been instrumental in creating the Red Hat support, and that community is also working on a port to Debian Linux. The community is working on ports to Mac OS X and OpenSolaris, the former based on the FreeBSD variant of Unix and the latter a recently open-sourced version of Sun Microsystems' Unix, which is itself a mix of BSD Unix and Unix System V.

While you can get OpenXchange Server 5 free from the community (just like Linux), if you want support, the Small Business Edition (which supports from 5 to 25 users) costs $295 for five users and additional $25 per user above those five users; the Advanced Server Edition starts out with 25 users for $895 and scales up from there, also at a cost of $25 per additional user. Netline is guaranteeing tech support for OpenXchange Server 5 for a minimum of five years.

BZ Research Study Shows Linux More Secure than Windows

BZ Research has weighed in on the Linux-versus-Windows debate by polling some 6,344 software development managers about the strengths and weaknesses of both platforms. According to BZ Research's poll, about 58 percent of those surveyed said Windows Server was not secure or very not secure, compared to only 18 percent for Linux servers for those two types of responses. Of those polled, 66 percent said Linux for servers was a secure platform, while only 30 percent said the same for Windows Server.

The company also polled people about the merits of proprietary versus open source software in other categories, and found that desktop Linux was deemed secure by 44 percent of respondents, compared to only 17 percent for proprietary alternatives (which means Microsoft Windows for all intents and purposes). Open source Web servers were deemed secure by 43 percent of those polled, compared to 14 percent for proprietary Web servers. Similarly, 38 percent of those surveyed said open source operating systems (Linux, various Unixes, BeOS, and so forth) were more secure as server platforms, compared to 22 percent for those rooting for proprietary server platforms; components and libraries for application development split 34 percent to 18 percent on the open source-proprietary question. Those surveyed did, however, put more trust into closed-source databases, with 34 percent that they believed that proprietary databases were more secure, compared to 21 percent for open source.

Middleware Market Up Modestly in 2004, Says Gartner

According to research performed by Gartner, the application integration and middleware (AIM) software market accounted for $6.7 billion in sales of products worldwide in 2004, an increase of 5.8 percent over sales levels in 2003. IBM continues to dominate this space, with a 37.2 percent share of the market. And IBM's main rival for mindshare in the application server space--BEA Systems continues to lose ground. As you can see from the table below, Oracle is growing faster than IBM but is starting out pretty small, and Microsoft is seeing explosive growth in the AIM space and looks set to pass Oracle and start vying with Fujitsu for the third pole position in the market. AIM includes application servers, portals, messaging middleware, and transaction processing monitors, by Gartner's definition.

Arkeia Gets Novell Certification for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9

Backup software specialist Arkeia said last week that its Network Backup archiving software for Linux servers has passed the Novell YES certification process on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 implementation of the Linux operating system. By becoming YES certified, both Arkeia and Novell guarantee that Network Backup will work on SLES 9 and that Novell and Arkeia both have the means to provide full enterprise-level support for the product if customers deploy it in production environments. Arkeia said that 4,000 customers worldwide have deployed its backup solutions on more than 100,000 networks to date, and the company is focusing in like a laser on exploiting the massive move towards Linux in the data center. That said, Arkeia supports Unix, Windows, Mac OS X, and other platforms as well.