Practical Technology

Red Hat announced today, November 10th, that long anticipated release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6. The announcement itself was anti-climatic. Everyone in Linux circles knew that RHEL 6 was coming. What I did find interesting–as customer after customer and partner after partner said how wonderful RHEL was and Red Hat Red Hat EVP [...]

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A friend recently asked me if I really wanted VMware, a company with a former Microsoft guy in charge, VMware, to buy Novell? His unspoken message was “Wouldn’t that be horrible for Novell’s Linux?” Bless his heart, clearly he hasn’t been paying attention to the relationship between VMware and Microsoft. VMware, a semi-independent fiefdom of [...]

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Novell’s history has been full of ups and downs. Once, with NetWare, it was the networking operating system powerhouse. Then they tried to be a consulting company. More recently, Novell has been both a Linux company and a friend to Microsoft. VMware has long been the go-to business virtualization company. But now everyone is in [...]

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If you spend much time in a CIO or CTO’s office, you’ll have heard the phrase “software stack” a million times. It usually means a suite of operating system, utilities, and applications designed to deliver various services. For example, the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python) stack is what lies behind many Web sites, and the [...]

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Hardware companies don’t tend to have their own Linux distributions. IBM uses Linux everywhere, but they don’t have their own Linux. Dell will be happy to sell you notebooks and netbooks with Ubuntu or a workstation or server with RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). But, no major OEM (original equipment manufacturer) has had a house-brand [...]

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