Although nobody has been able to smuggle out a single screenshot of the top-secret IBM Linux desktop operating system (OS) — often referred to as "Blue Linux" — I have friends who have seen it. I am assured that it not only exists, but is being used by large numbers of IBMers. "They are going through a process of eating their own dog food right now," I was told.

The bad news is that the company may sit on the OS for up to two years before actually releasing it. I saw a gossip item about this, and an IBM insider confirmed the self-imposed delay to me.
Can IBM be pushed onto a faster track with this product? Someone had better do that.

Read more: ABC News.

I was involved in procuring a high performance cluster system based on myranet switch for my old work from IBM. They talked about Linux avidly and passionately, describing it as the "future of UNIX" on more than one occasion. They were prescribing SUSE in this case to run on the cluster, but they tinted at an IBM version of Linux to come in the future.

What's also quite interesting is that Novell bought SUSE Linux, and that they also bought the wonderful Ximian Gnome as well, which I am sure will no doubt wind up being all mixed together and recast some time soon as some kind of "Novell Linux" of some sort.

Complete story here.

But also note that:

You WILL probably have to pay for this little bit of wonderfulness, but to be honest if it was really cool and not too expensive, I think I probably would, if I came with better driver support for industry standard hardware, etc, which Linux is getting.

I can't see Linux being the desktop king any time soon (MS owns that) but then things have changed out there before. Many times. Never forget that.

Overall, I see the IBM Linux thing as a little "Novell-Linux Reactionary" - remember I said they bleated on about SUSE as well. I am sure that SUSE is going to be big very soon, in some form or another.

I bought Mandrake 7.0 a long time ago ( & got free upgrades thanks to it ) & if SuSE were to have a nice distro for not too much ( 20€ max ), I wouldn't mind purchasing it. As long as you oculd get good Tech support for it & maybe some decent DualView support, I'm all for it.

Will they do the same thing is RedHat though ? Will they concentrate on the business market & leave the free distro to an alternate "group" a la Fedora ?

Have you had a look at the recent Novell 6.5 P66?

It's wonderfull, I last looked on 5.1 and now they have actually added X-Windows on the server itself....

The have managed to make the tree allot less "bloated" at the time of install also...

We tried connecting a Linux desktop machine into the Novell tree and it worked wonders... I'm really impressed with them...

We shall see what will happen now on January 5:th when Novell will release the first officiall open beta of Novell 1.0 for *nix