Distro: News

Red Hat Thursday unveiled a new service aimed at making it more cost-effective for its customers to run and maintain one version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a longer period of time, reducing management and administration costs, the company said.

Canonical has updated its flagship Ubuntu Linux operating system to version 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex” with the KDE-centric distribution, Kubuntu, the first to ship with KDE4 as the default desktop.

Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst expects the enterprise open source software business to emerge from the economic crisis stronger than the proprietary market.

A beta version of Linux Standard Base (LSB) 4.0 released this week adds developer features to technology intended to reconcile differences between Linux distributions, the Linux Foundation said.

Since the free, online Wikipedia user-created encyclopedia began in 2001, the Linux-based IT infrastructure behind it has been expanded and lassoed together to keep up with the demands of the popular Web site.

A surge in demand for netbooks is helping drive business for Linux, as the devices are designed to be low-cost with smaller storage, according to Novell's chief technology and strategy officer for Linux.

Expanding Linux adoption beyond key vertical markets is an important driver for Red Hat's growth, which remains steady even as one of its strongest customer sectors, financial services, is getting hit hard by the U.S. crisis, the company's CEO, Jim Whitehurst, said Tuesday.

Red Hat Wednesday slightly topped analysts' estimates by posting revenue for the fiscal-2009 second quarter of US$164.4 million

Life just got easier for users of the downloadable or boxed retail versions of the Ubuntu Linux 8.04 operating system who want easy and cheap ways of adding DVD playback and improved audio capabilities to their machines.

Red Hat is set to demonstrate heavy Oracle applications running on a virtualized environment at next week's VMWorld. The company also aims to perform a live migration during the demo, claiming to complete the migration much quicker than can any of its competitors.

Red Hat and project contributors have released alpha code for Fedora 10, the next version of the community-sponsored, free and open-source Linux distribution that will include enhancements to the audio, security and wireless-connection features of the OS.