Rusell Pavlicek of InfoWorld describes some of what he saw and liked at the recently concluded LinuxWorld in New York:
Clusters seemed to be omnipresent. From IBM to Dell to HP to NEC and many more, various cluster engines littered the show floor. The most groundbreaking of the bunch was the SGI Altix 3000.
In the business server software category, lots of people were discussing products such as Red Hat Advanced Server, SuSE’s Openexchange Server, and SCOoffice Server. Red Hat Advanced Server features long release times designed to be attractive to corporate situations and a cluster manager for failover capabilities. SuSE’s Openexchange Server provides a solution for corporations seeking to replace Microsoft Exchange with a lower-cost Linux alternative.
In the business desktop category, products such as Red Hat 8 and SuSE Linux Office Desktop drew lots of attention. Even in the show’s press room, the PCs were set up to dual boot Red Hat and Windows. Unlike many earlier shows where the PCs were set up for Windows only, I saw a number of journalists successfully using Linux without so much as a comment. And that’s the game on the desktop – producing an easy-to-use tool that nontechnical people can use to get their work done.
Among the more interesting solutions at the show was ERP from ABAS Software. A Java-based enterprise resource planning solution, ERP is aimed at bringing big capabilities to small to midsize businesses.
I had visited LinuxWorld in New York in 2002. That is when the idea of using LTSP as a base for low-cost computing solutions struck me, when I saw it in one of the stalls.
