By Nick Patience
Next week Red Hat Software Inc will release the next major cut of its version of Linux and the company is maintaining its focus on the server side with increased scalability, while taking whatever it can get of the desktop Linux market at the same time. As usual, Red Hat will not charge for the software beyond the cost of packaging and distribution as its business model relies on the support and services around Linux to make a living. It also relies on the open source community to develop the operating system, which it tweaks and supplements with tools to make it easier to use.
Red Hat Linux 6.0 will be announced on Monday, April 26 with shipment scheduled for May 10. The current version, 5.2 was released in November 1998. The major new feature this time will be increased scalability through support for symmetric multi- processing. Red Hat co-founder and chief executive Bob Young, resplendent in his own red hat, says this version will scale all the way to 8-way and will start to taper off at 12- and 16-way. The 5.2 cut realistically only made it to two processor support. The Linux kernel of the OS is 16Mb and the whole thing will take up 400Mb of disk space.
The 6.0 cut supports the KDE and Gnome user interfaces and the GTK graphical libraries on which they are built. It also supports the GIMP graphics manager and includes the Red Hat Package manager. Young is reluctant to talk about GUI or library wars within the Linux community – the company was recently accused of trying to break out on its own on the user interface front, ignoring the calls for standardization in the Linux community. But he fully supports the standardization efforts and claims his company will probably be the first to implement the Linux Standards Base (LSB); an initiative by the major Linux distributors (Caldera, Red Hat, VA Research and so on) to standardize on a single version of the Linux kernel and OS libraries. It is expected to get underway within 6-12 months. However, Young notes that the issue of the GTK libraries for instance, is in danger of becoming the Linux equivalent to the Unix spat over Motif. He says there needs to be choice over libraries, as the open source development model will ascertain which ones work and which ones do not.
Young notes that while his company’s concentration is on the server, control of the desktop is crucial to the small OS’s future. Right now the desktops that are vulnerable to Linux are the dedicated machines such as terminals in hotels and retail outlets. In fact Red Hat’s rival, Caldera Systems Inc recently secured a 4,000 desktop order form a major hotel chain – exactly the kind of applications the network computer crowd was supposed to dominate, but never did. That will be the limit of the desktop penetration until major consumer desktop applications such as Microsoft Office, Intuit’s TurboTax and the like get ported over, says Young. As helpful to the cause as Corel Inc’s early port of WordPerfect to Linux is, users don’t buy PCs to run WordPerfect, he says. Red Hat currently employs about 120 people in the tobacco fields of North Carolina as Young describes its Research Triangle Park home.
