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Linux specialists Red Hat and SuSE Linux are updating their operating system software as open source continues its push into corporations.

Red Hat next week will release Red Hat Linux 9 Personal and Professional editions to Red Hat Network subscribers. The software will be available at retail locations April 7. Red Hat executives say updates to the enterprise products, including Enterprise Linux ES, Enterprise Linux AS, and Enterprise Linux WS, will come later in the year.

Red Hat Linux 9 includes an enhancement of the Bluecurve graphical interface and new threading technology.

"In the past Linux has had some deficiencies in its threads implementation. It wasn't really scalable. It had some standards compliance problems," says Matt Wilson, manager of base operating systems at Red Hat. With the new threading technology, Native POSIX Thread Library, applications such as Java-based software that perform multiple tasks at the same time will run better, he says.

SuSE for Itanium

SuSE, meanwhile, announced general availability of SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for Intel Itanium. It also announced that the software would be used as part of TeraGrid, a scientific computing system funded by the National Science Foundation and available to researchers nationwide. SuSE is partnering with IBM Global Services, which is deploying clusters of SuSE Linux systems to run TeraGrid.

SuSE isn't alone in making Linux available for the 64-bit Itanium 2 processor. Red Hat made its Red Hat Linux Advanced Workstation, now Linux Enterprise WS, available on Intel Itanium 2 workstations from HP last fall.

Bill Claybrook, research director for Linux and open source at Aberdeen Group, says it's good that Red Hat and SuSE are making their products available for Itanium, but notes that widespread adoption of 64-bit computing is a ways off.

"Companies are building hardware using Itanium 2, and the Linux guys, just like Microsoft, want to be there with an operating system that runs on that hardware," he says.

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