LinuxWorld outgrows original outfit

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through open-source software. The show will see the release of OpenMFG version 1.2, which includes improvements either developed or sponsored by customers or resellers--a first in an OpenMFG release, the company said.

•  SugarCRM is another company trying to tackle established software giants, in this case in the customer relationship management market. It will announce Sugar Enterprise Edition, described as a higher-end option with features such as the ability to work with the Oracle 9i database and not just the open-source MySQL. It costs $449 per user per year. All SugarCRM versions also will get a design that permits third-party software modules to be added.

•  Start-up EnterpriseDB is expected to release on Tuesday the first version of its open-source database of the same name, built on top of PostgreSQL. It will also detail a three-tier pricing program for its support services, starting at $1,000 per processor per year.

Linux specialists
That's not to say there's no representation from those focused on Linux itself.

Red Hat, the top Linux seller, will detail a "major security initiative," spokeswoman Leigh Day said, discussing how the company will invest resources in coming months and work with partners to address the issue.

Novell, the No. 2 Linux seller that covets Red Hat's position, will detail a plan to revamp one of its two Linux products, trying to spread it as widely as possible and attract outside programming help. The project, called OpenSuse, resembles Red Hat's Fedora.

Another long-time force in the Linux realm also will try to elevate itself: Debian. This version has chiefly been produced in a noncommercial, volunteer effort, but several organizations whose Linux products are derived from Debian are banding together to try to get more critical mass.

The effort is called the Debian Common Core, or DCC, Alliance, said Ian Murdock, founder of Debian and a company called Progeny that seeks to commercialize Debian. DCC will be detailed Tuesday. Debian itself and several variants will be based on the common core to improve compatibility and provide a single contact point for computing companies, he said. The first version of DCC is expected in September.

Server allies bang the drum
Server manufacturers were among the first in the computing industry to endorse Linux, jumping on the bandwagon in 1999. Linux succeeded there for three reasons: It is well adapted to running on the powerful networked machines; Windows hasn't been as popular in that market as on desktop computers; and servers that ran Unix typically required expensive hardware rather than common and inexpensive Intel-based machines.

At the show, Hewlett-Packard plans to announce it's opened four new Linux expertise centers to help software companies support Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Suse Linux Enterprise Server. And though its high-end NonStop servers don't run Linux, HP will announce they now can run more than 200 open-source software packages, including Apache, Samba, Jabber and Zope.

Blade servers are thin systems that slide into a chassis with a shared power supply and network connection. On Monday, IBM plans to announce that New York University has purchased a system with 256 JS20 blade servers, which use IBM's PowerPC 970 processor and in this case run Linux.

IBM also plans to describe a new high-performance technical computing product called Grid and Grow. The product bundle includes a BladeCenter chassis and several blade servers along with grid software and IBM services for assessment, installation, tuning and training. It uses blade servers with Intel Xeon, AMD Opteron or IBM PowerPC processors and has a starting price of $49,000.

Also planned is an announcement from Dell of two new low-end single-processor servers, the PowerEdge 830 and 850, that incorporate a dual-core Pentium chip. The PowerEdge 830 is a tower model with a starting price of $699 that replaces the 800; the 850 is a 1.75-inch thick rack-mounted model that starts at $749 and replaces the PowerEdge 750.

And Dell said it's added support for the MySQL database and the JBoss Java application server, two widely used open-source software packages sold by companies of the same name. Dell is selling support subscriptions to both packages, a significant endorsement for the start-ups.

Linux can be a convenient entree for hardware makers to make their way into the market. Among those announcing products at the show are Penguin Computing, Pogo Linux and Supermicro.

Another is start-up Bivio Networks, which sells a system that's based on Freescale Semiconductor's PowerPC processors, runs Linux and is equipped with special-purpose hardware to accelerate network traffic. The start-up's products are used as a foundation for network tasks such as monitoring network security or optimizing how information is sent over wide-area networks, said Paul Liesenberg, vice-president of marketing and product planning.

Bivio's products are typically used as a foundation for other companies' products, but the current offering, the Bivio 2000, is used in devices costing $60,000 and up. The company will introduce the Bivio 500, sold at $9,000 to $10,500 for use in devices that retail for about $20,000, Liesenberg said.

Showing up at LinuxWorld is important for the company, which hopes to become profitable in 2006, and should allow it to get close to application developers, Liesenberg said. "Linux has become a vehicle for many different fields, especially networking," he said. "I expect to find quite a few Linux developers working on such applications."