LinuxWorld Day 1: Big Green Linux, preloaded desktop Linux, and the virtualization of everything

The first day of LinuxWorld 2007 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco — and its companion conference Next Generation Data Center — witnessed a flurry of announcements from both big vendors and small vendors. I also met with several vendors that I thought had the most interesting new products or developments to discuss.

Here’s a quick recap of the top developments from day one:

• IBM unleashed a bunch of new announcements, the most interesting of which was the “Big Green Linux” initiative that is aimed at using Linux servers to reduce costs and energy consumption. IBM also announced its Open Collaboration Client, which is essentially Lotus-based productivity apps ported to Linux, integrated into Novell SuSE, and aimed at loosening Microsoft’s grip on the productivity market
• Dell and Lenovo carried the flag for desktop Linux by announcing that they will now be preloading Linux as an option on some of the desktops they they sell
• Splunk released version 3.0 of its popular log seach software. The new version includes some Flash-based reports in addition to all of its aggregated data
• Everyone was talking about virtualization. IBM sees it pushing IT back toward mainframes, albeit new mainframes running Linux. Dell CTO Kevin Kettler talked about virtualization on desktop hardware, where the IT department can run its software image and users can do personal computing in a separate VM, which can be blown away

One company was conspicuously absent, or at least very low key: Red Hat

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