SVS is interesting. SUSE is nice but I prefer Ubuntu.
The fact the linux box costs more than a MS box is strange and uncalled for but that's a weird HP marketing call.
Will recession boost open source desktops?
By Timothy Prickett Morgan • Posted in PCs & Chips, 11th December 2008 09:17 GMT
With the economies of the globe heading south - and Linux getting its first real crack at newbie end users not familiar with open source thanks to the burgeoning netbook market, maybe now is the time to start rethinking the use of Linux on commercial desktops.
That could be what Hewlett-Packard was thinking as it began shipping its Compaq dx2390 desktop PC with Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 operating system preinstalled on the box.
HP is offering SLED 10 on the machine only in the United States, and estimates that the street price of a base PC will come to around $519. The dx2390 is not exactly a speed demon of a desktop; it is a single-socket machine with a Micro-ATX motherboard; it is based on Intel's G31 chipset and it supports single- and dual-core Celeron, dual-core Pentium, and Core 2 Duo processors. The motherboard has two DDR2 main memory slots, four SATA ports, and four peripheral slots (a mix of PCI and PCI-Express). The machine's micro tower case has five drive bays.
The dx2390 does not appear to be available in HP's online store here in the States, but the dx2400 and dx2450, which are similar micro tower PCs, are. The base dx2400 with a dual-core 2 GHz Celeron E1400 with a stingy 512 MB of main memory (which is supposed to run Vista Home Basic) and an 80 GB disk costs $369 if you buy it online. The dx2450 is an alternative machine based on Advanced Micro Devices' Athlon and Sempron processors, and the entry Sempron box costs $349 with the same memory and disk. These low prices bring up another question: Why is the base Linux box HP is touting for businesses so expensive? HP didn't provide configuration details on the dx2390, so it is hard to say. A reasonably configured dx2450 with a 2.8 GHz Athlon X2 5400B processor, 2 GB of memory, and a 160 GB disk drive costs the $519; the most expensive Core 2 Duo machine (running at 3 GHz) with the same config costs $659.
HP also did not say whether it would sell the Linux box directly or just through the channel. HP did say that it was partnering with Novell to push its variant of the OpenOffice suite (which has tweaks to make Excel macros work properly) and to put together a set of 40 applications aimed at schools, including math and word games and such, to make the box appealing to educational institutions.
HP also said today that it would be putting a virtual security layer that it cooked up with Symantec using its Software Virtualization Solution (a name combining three of the vaguest words in IT), which Symantec got by virtue of its $830m acquisition of Altiris in January 2007, onto more of its business PCs.
In simple terms, SVS virtualizes an application instead of a complete computer system, as hypervisors running on servers and PCs these days can do. The SVS layer in the machine sits between the operating system and the application, and any changes that a program makes to the system as it is running are stored in this layer and wiped out when you stop the app. So, for instance, if your Web browser runs into some malware, you close the browser and the malware is deleted from that SVS layer. No fuss, no muss.
Back in September, HP announced that it was shipping its high-end Compaq dc7900 desktop PCs for commercial clients with a license to SVS that had been tweaked specifically to provide a security layer around the Mozilla Firefox browser installed on these Windows-based machines. At that time, HP said that it would eventually make this "virtual Firefox," which is technically known as Mozilla Firefox for HP Virtual Solutions, available on all of its business PCs.
HP is deploying a runtime version of the SVS application virtualization tool on these PCs, which allows an application that has been modified to run in this SVS runtime to load and run on a Windows or Linux box. These SVS-packaged applications can be streamed from the data center to clients through a number of tools, including the Altiris ones at Symantec as well as Microsoft System Center. The Firefox browser is probably only the first of many applications that HP will virtualize using SVS on its PCs. With the runtime pre-installed (it was available for free from both Altiris and Symantec), there's no reason not to make use of it.
Anyway, HP says that its Compaq dc7500, dc5800, dc5850, dx2400, dx2450 and dx2390 desktop PCs will soon be preconfigured with an SVS-secured Firefox browser. Both Firefox and SVS are free, so there is no additional charge; HP is offering tech support for the software as part of the PC support.
The fact the linux box costs more than a MS box is strange and uncalled for but that's a weird HP marketing call.
Will recession boost open source desktops?
By Timothy Prickett Morgan • Posted in PCs & Chips, 11th December 2008 09:17 GMT
With the economies of the globe heading south - and Linux getting its first real crack at newbie end users not familiar with open source thanks to the burgeoning netbook market, maybe now is the time to start rethinking the use of Linux on commercial desktops.
That could be what Hewlett-Packard was thinking as it began shipping its Compaq dx2390 desktop PC with Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 operating system preinstalled on the box.
HP is offering SLED 10 on the machine only in the United States, and estimates that the street price of a base PC will come to around $519. The dx2390 is not exactly a speed demon of a desktop; it is a single-socket machine with a Micro-ATX motherboard; it is based on Intel's G31 chipset and it supports single- and dual-core Celeron, dual-core Pentium, and Core 2 Duo processors. The motherboard has two DDR2 main memory slots, four SATA ports, and four peripheral slots (a mix of PCI and PCI-Express). The machine's micro tower case has five drive bays.
The dx2390 does not appear to be available in HP's online store here in the States, but the dx2400 and dx2450, which are similar micro tower PCs, are. The base dx2400 with a dual-core 2 GHz Celeron E1400 with a stingy 512 MB of main memory (which is supposed to run Vista Home Basic) and an 80 GB disk costs $369 if you buy it online. The dx2450 is an alternative machine based on Advanced Micro Devices' Athlon and Sempron processors, and the entry Sempron box costs $349 with the same memory and disk. These low prices bring up another question: Why is the base Linux box HP is touting for businesses so expensive? HP didn't provide configuration details on the dx2390, so it is hard to say. A reasonably configured dx2450 with a 2.8 GHz Athlon X2 5400B processor, 2 GB of memory, and a 160 GB disk drive costs the $519; the most expensive Core 2 Duo machine (running at 3 GHz) with the same config costs $659.
HP also did not say whether it would sell the Linux box directly or just through the channel. HP did say that it was partnering with Novell to push its variant of the OpenOffice suite (which has tweaks to make Excel macros work properly) and to put together a set of 40 applications aimed at schools, including math and word games and such, to make the box appealing to educational institutions.
HP also said today that it would be putting a virtual security layer that it cooked up with Symantec using its Software Virtualization Solution (a name combining three of the vaguest words in IT), which Symantec got by virtue of its $830m acquisition of Altiris in January 2007, onto more of its business PCs.
In simple terms, SVS virtualizes an application instead of a complete computer system, as hypervisors running on servers and PCs these days can do. The SVS layer in the machine sits between the operating system and the application, and any changes that a program makes to the system as it is running are stored in this layer and wiped out when you stop the app. So, for instance, if your Web browser runs into some malware, you close the browser and the malware is deleted from that SVS layer. No fuss, no muss.
Back in September, HP announced that it was shipping its high-end Compaq dc7900 desktop PCs for commercial clients with a license to SVS that had been tweaked specifically to provide a security layer around the Mozilla Firefox browser installed on these Windows-based machines. At that time, HP said that it would eventually make this "virtual Firefox," which is technically known as Mozilla Firefox for HP Virtual Solutions, available on all of its business PCs.
HP is deploying a runtime version of the SVS application virtualization tool on these PCs, which allows an application that has been modified to run in this SVS runtime to load and run on a Windows or Linux box. These SVS-packaged applications can be streamed from the data center to clients through a number of tools, including the Altiris ones at Symantec as well as Microsoft System Center. The Firefox browser is probably only the first of many applications that HP will virtualize using SVS on its PCs. With the runtime pre-installed (it was available for free from both Altiris and Symantec), there's no reason not to make use of it.
Anyway, HP says that its Compaq dc7500, dc5800, dc5850, dx2400, dx2450 and dx2390 desktop PCs will soon be preconfigured with an SVS-secured Firefox browser. Both Firefox and SVS are free, so there is no additional charge; HP is offering tech support for the software as part of the PC support.
