By William Fellows
IBM Corp believes its Monday announcement will offer a Linux application execution environment that can be viewed as the next generation of Linux application compatibility. The company says that to achieve compatibility in Solaris, Sun Microsystems Inc simply ported lxrun, which Santa Cruz Operation Inc had provided on Unix a few years ago and added some bits and pieces. Moreover, lxrun only runs on Solaris x86 for Intel, which is a bit player in the marketplace. Sun has not announced a comparable capability for Solaris Sparc. IBM says it will support source and binary compatibility and promises it will show explicitly that its Linux application execution environment is better than lxrun.
