Operating System Planets Align

People worried that we wont be able to get this global warming thing under control were no doubt pleased to hear that European scientists have discovered a planet much like Earth. If we ever need to cut bait and run, all we have to do is travel 20.5 light-years, or about 120.5 trillion miles, and were home free!

The operating system planets seemed to align last week as Red Hat announced a real-time version of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 5, the latest iteration of the Linux kernel made its official debut and Microsoft released the first public beta of its new Windows Server platform.

As Senior Editor Peter Galli reports, Red Hat originally intended to include real-time Linux capabilities in RHEL 6 but decided that the market couldnt wait. Real-time Linux is all about “determinism,” or decreasing latency, which is especially important in embedded systems.

Much of the real-time Linux code, an initiative driven by Red Hat, has made its way into the main Linux kernel, and the very latest version of that kernel has arrived: 2.6.21.

In Linux-Watch at eweek.com, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports that the update came later than Linux creator Linus Torvalds would have liked but that it will bring with it changes in how Linux handles process scheduling and time.

Microsoft, meanwhile, has released the first public beta of Windows Server “Longhorn.” The company once said Longhorn would come out at the same time as Windows Vista SP1, but as Peter and Microsoft Watch Editor Joe Wilcox report, Microsoft is now hedging a bit on that promise.

And speaking of Vista, are you ready to deploy it across your enterprise? If so, be sure to read Technical Director Cameron Sturdevants review of SCCM (System Center Configuration Manager) 2007. Microsoft is touting it as the tool for deploying Vista en masse, but Cameron finds its just one of many tools for doing the decidedly complex job.

Also in the Labs section, youll find the results from a survey conducted among 545 IT professionals about their Vista views, as well as a sample RFP developed by Andrew Garcia and Anne Chen that will help guide you through your next hardware refresh.

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