HP Backs Red Hat in Government Biz Bid, Nov 02, 2007

HP today released new Multi-Level Security (MLS) Services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 in support of the open source OS vendor's government push.

A decade ago, Intel was shipping the Pentium II processor and Linux was a fringe operating system used by a few Internet fanatics. No one at the time would ever have thought the two in combination would be a match for Sun's SPARC/Solaris combination, HP's PA-RISC/HP-UX, IBM's POWER/AIX or SGI's MIPS/IRIX.

Linux is ready to take on a more serious role in enterprises, a senior Hewlett-Packard executive has said.

Late last month, hardware vendor HP announced plans to offer desktop computers in Australia with Red Hat Linux, OpenOffice.org, and Firefox installed. Now the company has confirmed that it is expanding this program to other parts of the world.

Hewlett-Packard's decision last month to sell desktop PCs with Linux installed on them in Australia is giving hope to Linux advocates at the Encompass HP user group that a similar system may be on its way in the US.

HP and Red Hat have started selling a new Linux-based desktop PC targeting small and medium-sized businesses.

Ending months of rumors, Hewlett-Packard appears to have released its first mass-market PC with pre-installed Linux. Specifically, the company will soon be selling RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) Desktop 5 on its HP dx2250 PC to Australian customers.

Hewlett-Packard's ambition to build the "next-generation datacenter" depends on Linux and open source, an HP executive said at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo Wednesday.

The pact allows NASA's procurement department to select from HP desktops, workstations, blade PCs with Linux and Unix capabilities, servers, and printers, among other offerings.

Turns out Oracle CEO Larry Ellison does have a few friends and one of them is HP.

While everyone knows that Linux is now pervasive in IT organizations, the slippery nature of open source software makes it difficult to gauge how deeply it has penetrated into the data centers of the world.

The HP company might start the production of PCs with preinstalled Linux system. However, the vendor's global initiative is not yet relevant in Russia. HP's Russian office said there is not much demand for open source OS in this country.

The good news, according to an HP executive, is that the company sees "the Linux desktop nearing critical mass." The bad news, for would be off-the-shelf Linux desktop buyers, is that it's still not there yet.

Hewlett-Packard is closing custom deals for thousands of desktop PCs running Linux, which has the company assessing the possibility of offering factory-loaded Linux systems, an HP executive said.

HP is making $25 million by supporting the free Debian GNU/Linux distribution in what may ultimately turn out to be a challenge to commercial distributions from Novell and Red Hat.

"Linux is a non supported platform for the DC7700 Series. How can you screw up that? I tried SuSE Linux Enterprise 9, Knoppix and RHEL 8. Couldn't get it past the boot screen."

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