Plenty of news on the Linux front today, with the official release of the latest stable kernel, 2.0.36, by the eponymous Linus Torvalds. It’s unchanged from the beta test version which has been kicking around the traps for a week or two. Linux 2.0.36 includes updates to ISDN, SCSI drivers and network cards, and is likely to be the last of the 2.0 releases. The much-anticipated 2.2 release is now expected in December. Meanwhile Red Hat, which regardless of its open-source roots works overtime to be seen as just another enterprise operating system vendor, has announced new software and support for the enterprise and an authorized reseller program aimed at encouraging VARs. The Official Red Hat 5.4 System Builder Edition is aimed at resellers who want to pre-install Linux on servers for their enterprise customers, while the Commercial Server Edition, built for exactly the same market, includes a 90 day support package with 24/7 out-of-the-box support. Both editions will be available from Red Hat in late December. From January, the company plans to sell support in a choice of incident packages, covering 10 or 25 incidents, or annual subscriptions. New programs for the channel will provide all the co-marketing, co-branding, training and certification you’d expect from Microsoft or Novell, as well as the incentive programs resellers know and love. In other open-source news, O’Reilly and Associates is expanding the hugely successful Perl Conference and Open Source Town Meeting it ran in August 1998 into a series of conferences on Linux, FreeBSD, Apache and Sendmail as well as Perl. It will take place under the one roof of the Monterey Convention Center on August 21-24 1999. Developers, mark your diaries.
