Red Hat PM Says Global Desktop Linux Delayed to September

A highly anticipated consumer release of Red Hat Linux announced last May has been delayed a few weeks until sometime in September, according to a statement made in an e-mail by product manager Gerry Riveros to Reuters.

The "delay" may actually come as good news to many Linux users who had not yet actually known for certain which month the product would be released. In May, Red Hat announced the product's "availability," before pointing toward later in the year; since then, users have been relying mainly on rumor and speculation.

That May announcement promised a wider array of productivity tools for inclusion with the consumer-grade distribution, either selected or developed in close consultation with Intel. With this release, Red Hat committed to work with Intel to standardize and optimize the operating system's interaction with Intel-based hardware on a deeper level, which would in turn improve the reliability of Intel-certified hardware configurations that the CPU manufacturer plans to sell to developing nations.

The new system is expected to more closely support Intel's 64-bit Core 2 Duo CPUs and its vPro business technology platform, which incidentally is built around the Trusted Computing Platform.

"Red Hat collaborated closely with Intel to enable the design, support and distribution of Global Desktop to be as close as possible to the customer," stated May's Red Hat announcement. "In addition, Red Hat and Intel are taking advantage of Global Desktop's high performance and minimal hardware requirements to support a wide range of Intel's current and future desktop platforms, including the Classmate, Affordable, Community and Low-Cost PC lines."

At a San Diego Linux trade show that month, Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens was quoted as saying, "Users, requirements and technologies have changed so dramatically over the past few years that the traditional one-size-fits-all desktop paradigm is simply exhausted."

Reuters said the reason its reporter was given for the delay was to give Red Hat more time to implement a wider range of codecs and video format support. Notoriously, getting codecs to cooperate with TCP platforms has been nightmarish. Reliable multimedia for novice computer users has been one area where Linux in general has been deficient, so perhaps the few weeks' extra wait will be worthwhile.

9 Responses to Red Hat PM Says Global Desktop Linux Delayed to September

© 1998-2024 BetaNews, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy - Cookie Policy.