By Rachel Chalmers
There’s plenty of news in the Linux world, with a major release slated for the next few months and significant announcements from four vendors. Linux maintainer Linus Torvalds has told developers to get ready for pre-2.4 releases of the kernel and for a code freeze. In the Linux version numbering scheme, odd decimals indicate development kernels while even numbers denote stable versions. Thus, the 2.4 edition will be the first major upgrade since the release of 2.2 in January. We’re obviously not going to have a 2.4 this millennium, but let’s get the pre-2.4 series going this year, wrote Torvalds to the Linux kernel mailing list, with the real release Q1 of 2000.
Meanwhile embedded Linux specialist Lineo Inc has named Viosoft Inc’s Arriba as its integrated development environment. Arriba will ship as part of the Lineo Embedix software development kit. Lineo’s embedded Linux system software development is far ahead of any known competition, said CEO Bryan Sparks. Aggressive software development by Lineo’s engineers, coupled with the work of partners, like Viosoft, is producing an embedded Linux development environment that is competitive to existing market leaders of embedded system software.
The market’s momentum continues to grow. Sun Microsystems Inc has reversed earlier, hands-off policies towards the Linux community with the announcement that customers will be able to order Red Hat Linux 6.1 Deluxe SPARC directly from the Sun Store. This is not a surrender, though. Anyone who wants their operating system pre-installed will have to take Sun’s own Unix flavor, Solaris. Up the road in Mountain View, California, LinuxOne Inc, the company that came from nowhere and that has been criticized as an attempt to cash in on Linux hype (CI No 3,794), has announced a distribution agreement with China’s Sichuan International Economy, Science & Technology Promotion Association. The Promotion Association will distribute Chinese language versions of LinuxOne OS and LinuxOne-Lite.
And after spending nearly two years on the front pages of trade and mainstream press, the maverick operating system has finally attracted the notice of venerable San Jose, California-based graphics software company Adobe Systems Inc. The company has made the radical decision to support Linux in two of its products: FrameMaker and a Postscript-to-PDF conversion tool. Executive VP Bruce Chizen explained the move: Adobe monitors its markets closely to keep apprised of customer trends and requirements, and we’ve seen a growing interest among our customers in the adoption of the Linux operating system. Well spotted.
