Jacksonville (but Raleigh first) or Bust!

I love roadtrips. Especially ones that involve a stop at a major Linux company. A month ago I filled out a feedback request form on Red Hat’s website to see if it would be possible to visit the Raleigh headquarters, as I was planning a trip to Jacksonville, North Carolina and Raleigh is on the way. To my pleasant surprise, I received a very quick and courteous response from a senior project manager (who would have thought that I’d get a response from anyone save an intern?) who indicated that it was very much possible and should I ever wish to submit my resume, he would be more than happy to take it.

It seemed that due to my wife’s work schedule, our trip to Jacksonville (and thus Red Hat headquarters) would not be possible, but it would seem that I will be able to go after all. With that in mind, I am looking forward to the trip.

I need to get away for a little bit. Between school, my internship, and work, I haven’t had any time to really unwind. I am debating leaving my laptop here in Indiana so I can take a break from that. At the same time, I know I am going to want to post the pictures from my roadtrip as soon as I upload them.

I’m hoping to be able to head down to Wilmington and see the USS North Carolina again. During my last visit, I didn’t have the time to see the entire ship, and I’m hoping to see the upper platforms of dreadnought.

Red Hat Global Desktop

 Remember when you could buy Red Hat Linux as a shrink-wrapped box at your local Best Buy? Not since Red Hat Linux 9 (2003) has a Red Hat operating system been available as a boxed media set that could be purchased from a retailer.

Well that hasn’t exactly changed, although the month of September will make the Red Hat Global Desktop available, which fills in a niche that Red Hat had long neglected.

While Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.5 and 5 are targeted at large enterprise customers in need of high level security, smaller customers who found the price prohibitive were forced to use rebranded versions of Red Hat such as White Box or CentOS. The only other alternative was to use the Fedora brand of Red Hat’s operating system, which although featuring bleeding edge code, suffered from the relative immaturity of the code.

While it will only be available through Intel white-box channels, it will certainly be an imrpovement over Red Hat’s current distribution strategy. Furthermore, Red Hat is in negotiations with Microsoft to make available codec such as WMF fo various media formats.

From my point of view, this could be an excellent opportunity for Red Hat. The customer will benefit from having a machine with Red Hat Linux that doesn’t require the often difficult to axquire cooperation of manufacturers such as Dell or HP. More than that, the customer will have a machine that comes with support, that is quite often murky where Linux on x86 is concerned.

While the shrink boxed Red Hat Linux has not returned, we can take at least some assurance from Global Desktop that Raleigh has not forgotten about the little guy.