Linux makes a date with IT giants

July's LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco will see open-source heavyweights Red Hat and Novell contending for space with Microsoft, as it presents for the first time at the event.

Bill Hilf, who runs a Linux and open-source lab at Microsoft, is due to present a session on managing Linux in a heterogeneous environment.

Microsoft has become more accommodating of community technologies recently, with Virtual Server 2005 now supporting Linux partitions, and the release of an installation software program under open-source terms.

Also at the event, Red Hat will announce a server-health monitoring module for its Red Hat Network (RHN) service, and a new management tool for Sun’s Solaris OS. RHN offers patch delivery, software provisioning and systems management services. The monitoring module will report hardware metrics, application performance and other features.

Security will get a boost with the release of Red Hat Certificate Server, and a free Fedora Certificate Server project will also be launched.

Novell is due to unveil its OpenSuse project at the show, opening up a version of its Suse Linux operating system for users and developers.

Novell’s Linux and open-source chief technology officer, Markus Rex, said his company would announce tested stacks like those of SpikeSource. Services startup SpikeSource last week released details of ready-configured open-source software stacks designed to enable faster deployment.

‹ Novell collaboration software, p5