Always searching for the biggest, best-tasting lollipop, Red Hat Linux just decided to add a dash of earthy flavor. Linux vendors like Novell are focusing in on energy efficiency and power consumption, and hoping to catch some of the sugar sweet publicity that comes with anything green. Meanwhile Windows Vista is still angry and bloated.

Lately Linux developers have been focused on all sorts of mobile applications, but this news  has a variety of applications.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 has green improvements that should reduce power consumption. It supports CPU frequency scaling in virtualised environments, and includes support for Intel’s Dynamic Acceleration Technology, which can idle or, as Red Hat describes it, “quiesce” CPU cores. The system can also overclock busy cores to get more work out of them within safe thermal levels, Red Hat said. That’s according to ZDNet.

Good news for people who want to use their laptops 80-90% of each workday.

And although Windows Vista typically has a voracious appetite, it’s market share is equally as immense. RedHat Linux has endured some struggles in trying to catch up, and Windows Vista doesn’t show any signs of giving up anytime soon.

By way of comparison between the platforms, here are some statistics from IDC comparing players in the server market:

• Microsoft Windows servers showed positive growth as revenues grew 6.9% and unit shipments grew 9.8% year over year. Quarterly revenue of $5.7 billion for Microsoft Windows servers set an all-time high for a single quarter and represented the single largest revenue segment in the server market with 36.6% of overall quarterly factory revenue.
• Unix servers experienced 1.5% revenue growth year over year when compared with 4Q06. Worldwide Unix revenues were $5.2 billion for the quarter, representing 33.3% of quarterly server spending and reflecting continued IT investment in this server market segment, with particular strength in the midrange enterprise segment of the Unix market which comprises 53.8% of all Unix spending.
• Linux server revenue reached $2.0 billion for the first time in any single quarter on 11.6% year-over-year growth. Linux servers now represent 12.7% of all server revenue, up more than 1 point over 4Q06.

Regardless though, Linux has a large community of users and developers who believe strongly in its success, and if Red Hat Linux continues to pump out innovations that streamline performance it may become harder to ignore the value proposition it offers.

Related:

New Linux PC costs less than a single Windows Vista license

Campaign against Vista?

Linux thriving in an anti-Windows Vista market

Windows Vista more secure than Linux? Microsoft slams open source

Five reasons to hate Vista haters

Entry was posted on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 9:36 pm under Linux, Open source.  Print This Post

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