“IBM is due to put some muscle behind its oft-professed support
for Linux and actually do something about it later today. The
company is to announce that it will offer Caldera OpenLinux 2.4 on
ThinkPads… from Q3.”
“Clearly we have here another sign of how exceeding slow the
mills grind round at Big Blue. It’s been possible to run Linux on
ThinkPads for yonks, IBM has been committed to preinstalling Linux
on ThinkPads for yonks plus n, and the company even managed to
screw up by getting ThinkPads accidentally certified compatible
with Red Hat a little while back. Accidentally, because
nothing had actually changed between the not -certified and
certified stages.”
“IBM’s big problems, apart from the company tending to prefer
talkware to shipware, have concerned hardware IP. The ThinkPads
include DSP-based audio and internal modem, and the bits of IBM who
own this IP wouldn’t necessarily smile on an open source
connection. Last we heard IBM was fixing this, but that was a very
long time ago, and the current generation of ThinkPads still can’t
use the internal modem under Linux, and still has some audio
issues. “