Mandrakesoft Buys Rival Linux Distro, Conectiva
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Franco-American commercial Linux distributor Mandrakesoft last week acquired rival Conectiva, the Brazilian Linux distributor. The acquisition by Mandrakesoft comes just as both companies have cleaned up their books after years of losses caused by their attempts to commercialize Linux in their respective markets. This has not been an easy task for any company, including rivals Red Hat, Novell, Turbolinux, and others. READ MORE >

IBM Plans X3 "Hurricane" Chipset for Xeon Servers
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM last week began to talk about its third generation of chipsets for midrange and high-end X86 servers. The first-generation "Summit" EXA and second-generation "Summit-II" chipsets have helped IBM grow revenue and shipment market share in the high-end X86 server space, and with the "Hurricane" X3 chipset, due within a few months, the company hopes to push the X86 higher into the server market while at the same time getting a larger slice of the four-way server market. READ MORE >

Gartner Gives 2004 Server Report Cards
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

For all the talk about virtualization, partitioning, and other means of driving up server utilization and driving down box counts, the worldwide server market doesn't seem to be listening. This is a great thing if you happen to be selling servers for a living. According to Gartner, companies worldwide consumed and incredible 6.7 million servers in 2004, up 20.5 percent from the 5.6 million machines acquired during 2003. And even with average selling prices going down, server makers still raked in $49.5 billion in sales for 2004, an increase of 7.2 percent. READ MORE >

Aldon Opens Up to Linux and AIX with Lifecycle Manager 5.0
by Alex Woodie

At LinuxWorld, Aldon unveiled Lifecycle Manager 5.0, a new version of its flagship change management system for cross-platform development. Expected to ship during the second quarter, Lifecycle Manager 5.0 brings the benefit of enabling organizations to run their source code repository on any Linux or AIX server, instead of requiring an iSeries server. READ MORE >

   But Wait, There's More

Slackware Project Delivers Slack/390 10.0 for Mainframes . . . Microsoft Settlement Pushes Novell into the Black Big Time for Fiscal Q1 . . . Turbolinux Releases Beta of 64-Bit X86 Support . . . Turbolinux Gets IBM Backing for xSeries Servers . . . SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 Gets Common Criteria EAL4+ Certification . . . Cray XD1 Linux Super Gets Traction . . . Scyld Lays Out Plans for Linux 2.6 . . . READ MORE >

Reader Feedback and Insights

We value your feedback and insights. Feel free to send a letter to the editor. Letters may be printed, unless otherwise specified, and edited for clarity or length. READ MORE >