red

The release of Fedora Core 4, the latest free version of Linux from Red Hat, has been pushed back a week.

Fedora programmers had hoped to release Fedora Core 4 June 6, but the current schedule now gives June 13 as the release date. The move means the software likely will arrive at just about the same time as Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris.

Red Hat and its programmers have largely controlled Fedora for most of its existence, but the company is make Fedora into a neutral project through the establishment of the Fedora Foundation last week.

After having dipped a Solaris toe into the open-source waters last January, Sun Microsystems will take the full plunge next week. The company's OpenSolaris effort will go live early next week, a Sun representative said Tuesday.

Sun initially said it would release OpenSolaris in 2004. Instead, it released one piece, a performance utility called DTrace, in January, and said it would release the rest by the end of June.

Sun is releasing Solaris under a license called the Community Development and Distribution License, a variant of the Mozilla Public License. OpenSolaris is aimed at popularizing Sun's version of … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Use of Linux on personal computers may not have made major inroads against leader Microsoft, but it has become prominent in conversations with information technology executives, Red Hat Chief Executive Matthew Szulik said Wednesday.

"It is a dominant element in most of my discussions," Szulik said in a meeting with reporters here Wednesday. That's a far cry from actual sales, of course, but it's a big change from two years ago, when the subject rarely came up, Szulik said.

Two software packages have been invaluable to the desktop Linux movement: the OpenOffice.org alternative to … Read more

Months late, the SCO Group has unveiled a Web site set up to detail its claims against Linux, which the company argues in court cases violates its own Unix intellectual property.

SCO said in October it planned to set up the Web site--something of a counterbalance to the Groklaw site that frequently takes potshots at SCO's claims. Initially expected to be called ProSCO and upon launch in November, the site ended up with the name SCO IP.

The site is "designed to provide you with factual information around litigation related to the SCO Group," it said. … Read more

The bad news for Red Hat is that programmers now routinely produce clones of the company's premium version of Linux. But the company believes it's actually good news.

CentOS and several other organizations are drafting off Red Hat's work to build a stable version of Linux with long-term support. Red Hat believes the projects can help attract new customers to its own products, but many are perfectly happy the clones and tech support by mailing list and search engines.

News.com will report more on this development Thursday.

An effort to extend Red Hat's Fedora version of Linux to computers using Intel's Itanium processors is getting under way. A lead programmer, Silicon Graphics employee Prarit Bhargava, has established a mailing list, and is trying to coax Red Hat to release an Itanium version of its "rawhide" prototype Linux.

Fedora is Red Hat's fast-changing version of Linux, intended to attract outside programming involvement and to mature new technology quickly. Fedora today supports x86 processors such as Intel's Pentium and Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron, and the forthcoming Fedora Core 4 will extend to IBM's Power processors … Read more