Linux Standard Base 3.0 Spec Unveiled
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

When only one operating system vendor is in control of the operating system, you don't need standards bodies and you don't need cooperation among the very many smart people who make up the intellectual ecosystem of a platform. So standards bodies are something of an anomaly as well as an enigma in the operating system arena--particularly after the way the Open Software Foundation and Unix International proved how well platform providers could work together in the 1980s and 1990s. READ MORE >

Red Hat's Sales and Revenues Up Smartly in Fiscal Q2
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Last week, investors in commercial Linux distributor Red Hat were slap-happy after the company announced its financial results for the fiscal 2006 second quarter ended August 31 and brokerage firm SunTrust Robinson Humphrey moved up Red Hat's ratings to a buy from neutral last Thursday, setting a price target of $22 a share. Red Hat's stock almost immediately jumped to that level, rising to just under $5 a share, an increase of about 30 percent from the Wednesday close. READ MORE >

Big Blue Updates Entry xSeries Servers
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM has done a very good job at making very scalable and powerful X86 and X64 servers with its "Summit" and "Hurricane" chipsets, and has therefore been able to drive revenue and profits at the high end of its xSeries server line. But like other server makers with plenty of enterprise server expertise--that would be you, Hewlett Packard, and you, Sun Microsystems--IBM has not had an easy time competing with Dell in the entry server space in North America or Fujitsu-Siemens in Europe and Asia. READ MORE >

Itanium Backers Launch Alliance to Bolster the Chip
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you were one of the handful of server suppliers who have spent untold hundreds of millions of dollars developing Itanium-based server solutions, would you want Intel to do the marketing talking and roadmap walking for you? Or would you want to ride on the coattails of the defensive as well as offensive Itanium marketing tactics by Intel's number one Itanium partner, Hewlett-Packard? Would you want to have some kind of direct say in how the Itanium ecosystem is being cultivated? READ MORE >

   But Wait, There's More

Red Hat and Buddies Pursue Common Criteria Security Certification with Future RHEL 5 . . . HP Buys RLX for Linux Blade Server Management . . . Virtual Iron Secures More Venture Funding . . . Mandriva, NEC Work on Linux Solutions for the Education, Public Markets . . . SGI Gets $100 Million Credit Line as It Plans Turnaround . . . Lakeview Technology Validates H.A. Clusters and EchoStream FS on AIX, SCO OpenServer 6, and Linux . . . Encrypting Data Tapes: Soon to Be All the Rage . . . READ MORE >

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