FRAMINGHAM (02/04/2000) - Sun Microsystems Inc. made another cautious move into the Linux market at the LinuxWorld show last week, announcing that Bell Microproducts Inc. in San Jose will start shipping Linux servers based on Sun hardware.
The rack-mountable servers won't bear the Sun brand name, but instead will feature the "UltraSPARC Driven" logo that already appears on a variety of devices such as printers (but thus far, no computers) that have embedded Sun UltraSPARC processors.
Linux already runs on SPARC systems, but until now there was no officially sanctioned channel to buy systems with Linux preinstalled. The system boards aren't the same design as those used in Sun's own servers. Pricing starts at $2,099.
The following also occurred at LinuxWorld:
-- IPlanet E-Commerce Solutions, the joint venture between Sun and America Online Inc. that was formerly known as the Sun/Netscape Alliance, announced Linux versions of its iPlanet Messaging Server and iPlanet Web Server, Enterprise Edition software.
-- The Trillian Project announced that source code of its port of the Linux operating system for Intel Corp.'s IA-64 processor family has been released to the open-source community. The Trillian Project was formed a year ago to port Linux to the upcoming 64-bit Intel architecture.
-- Oracle Corp. offered its Dotcom suite at $6,767 for a one-seat developer license. This includes the Oracle8i database, application server and WebDB - all of which run on Linux.
-- Informix Corp. offered its Internet Foundation 2000 package at $199 for a one-seat developer license for Linux users through Oct. 10. A Unix-based version of that software typically costs $2,000.