Operating Systems > Red Hat LinuxEssentials

Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst expects the enterprise open source software business to emerge from the economic crisis stronger than the proprietary market.

It was nearly two years ago at the 2006 Oracle OpenWorld conference that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled a plan to have Oracle provide support to Red Hat's own Linux customers.

Paul Cormier is Red Hat's executive VP and head of Red Hat products and technologies divisions. His experienced thumb is firmly planted in many Red Hat pies; including engineering, product management and product marketing. The company credits the introduction of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to Cormier's leadership and experience in enterprise technology. Cormier has returned Down Under on another visit to Red Hat's research and development team in Brisbane, and took some time out to chat with Computerworld about the anticipated boom in virtualisation, cloud computing, Microsoft's open source initiatives, CentOS, JBoss Application Server 5.0, how open source software can aid the current economic downturn, and of course, the growing role of Linux and RHEL in the enterprise.

Red Hat opened its new Asia Pacific engineering and support headquarters in Brisbane on Tuesday.

Expanding Linux adoption beyond key vertical markets is an important driver for Red Hat's growth, which remains steady even as one of its strongest customer sectors, financial services, is getting hit hard by the U.S. crisis, the company's CEO, Jim Whitehurst, said Tuesday.

Red Hat released a beta version of a Linux-based hypervisor Wednesday that can be loaded onto servers and desktop computers with a flash drive.

Red Hat plans to announce Thursday that it is open-sourcing Red Hat Network (RHN), its Web-based Linux infrastructure management platform, according to CEO Jim Whitehurst.

If you're waiting to see market-leading Linux vendor Red Hat release a desktop Linux operating system anytime soon to compete in the consumer market, then think again.

Red Hat has rolled out a beta-test of the next version of its flagship OS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.2, with a new kernel and significant changes aimed at server farms and at workstations.

Red Hat Fedora users who wanted an easier way to use the popular and free community-supported Linux operating system on portable USB thumb drives have had their wishes granted.

The Novell executive who architected an historic technology and intellectual property agreement with Microsoft has scolded rival Red Hat for not being innovative and warned Oracle's Linux play will fragment the company's operating system.