by Dwight Johnson
The Comdex Linux Pavilion, November 18. I was walking by the Red
Hat booth in an uncommon moment when the throng had thinned from
its usual four deep. I could see a shrinkwrapped Red Hat 5.2 box
prominently displayed–this had not been available at the beginning
of the week.
Seeing an available person sitting on a stool, I stepped in and
introduced myself. Imagine my surprise when I discovered I was
speaking not to Red Hat but to an employee of Hewlett Packard.
Only a few days before the opening of Comdex, Hewlett Packard
had announced it would support Linux with their Firehunter product,
had opened up a dialog with Red Hat about quality assurance, and
now, through that mysterious time warp alchemy which can only occur
in the Free Software community, was demoing the product on Linux in
the Red Hat Comdex booth.
Firehunter is a product of interest to Web server administrators
which monitors and tracks performance and can initiate notification
and corrective action when preselected performance levels are
exceeded. It is written in Java.
After getting a short and impressive demo of Firehunter, I
stepped over to the other end of the Red Hat booth and introduced
myself to a person wearing a Red Hat shirt.
Once again I had been fooled. Instead of a Red Hat employee, I
found myself speaking with Paul Guillet of the French company Linux
Kheops.
He was showing off his new magazine, Linux Magazine
France, and his story was so good, I decided to get some more
of it for Linux Today readers.
It turns out that Linux Magazine France is only the
latest successful venture of this amazing young Linux entrepreneur.
The magazine is certainly notable in itself insofar as it has only
had one issue so far, but that one issue sold 20,000 copies and
succeeded in making money for the developers despite the fact that
it had only six full page ads in it. Emboldened by this success,
Linux Kheops is making a monthly out of it (it was originally
envisioned as a quarterly).
Guillet, it turns out, four months ago went into partnership
with Joel Bernier in his two companies Red Hat France and Linux
Kheops.
Red Hat France prepares the French language Red Hat distribution
for market. Guillet informed me that Version 5.2 would be released
in France next week.
The other company, Linux Kheops, distributes Linux, not only Red
Hat, but S.u.S.E., Slackware, Debian and Caldera throughout France
to retail stores and also VARs. In addition, Linux Kheops has
launched a Linux corporate training program.
Linux Kheops already has contracts with government divisions in
France deploying Linux in pilot programs with the potential for
mass deployment in 1999 and beyond for nationwide virtual private
networks and other advanced network technologies.
Guillet told me that distribution of Red Hat France has grown
from 400 a month at the start of the year to an estimated 10,000 a
month in December.
Linux Kheops distributes Linux to the enormous Surcouf computer
warehouse in Paris. Guillet claims that Red Hat Linux is the top
software seller at Surcouf, surpassing even Windows 98 in sales. He
said Surcouf currently dedicates 30 square meters to Linux products
and will be expanding to 60 square meters in December.
There are many more stories to tell here from the Linux Pavilion
at Comdex. Stay tuned.