SAN DIEGO—Red Hat announced its upcoming new client product, the Red Hat Global Desktop, at its annual summit here on May 9.
The global desktop is designed to deliver a modern user experience with an enterprise-class suite of productivity applications, and was developed in collaboration with Intel to enable its design, support and distribution.
“We are taking advantage of the 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,” Red Hat Chief Technology Officer Brian Stevens said.
Red Hat is planning a Linux desktop offering “for the masses.” Click here to read more.
Red Hat recently told eWEEK that it was planning a packaged Linux desktop product that it hoped will push its desktop to a far broader audience than exists for its current client solution.
“As we move out with this new desktop strategy, which we will announce sometime over the next few months, we will really look at the desktop from the perspective of a very different market. This will be a more comprehensive offering that will target markets like the small and medium-sized business [SMB] sector and emerging markets,” Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s executive vice president of engineering, told eWEEK in an exclusive interview on this.
The move is designed in part to compete with Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 platform, which includes SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, both released in July 2006.
“To us, the traditional desktop metaphor is dead; it’s a dinosaur,” Stevens said during his opening keynote address at the summit May 9. “We don’t believe that recreating the Windows paradigm does anything to increase the productivity paradigm of any user. The new model has to be about the user, centered around activities and not just based on documents and applications,”
Steve Dallman, the general manager of Intel’s worldwide reseller channel organization, said the company had worked with Red Hat to deliver a pre-certified, cost-effective solution that Intel’s reseller channel could use to extend their business value.
“Running the Red Hat global desktop on Intel processor-powered PCs provides full access to applications and rich experiences to users across local markets, education, small businesses and government agencies,” he said.
Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Red Hat’s New Global Desktop Is Ready to Run
