SUN’s stock has increased of 78% yesterday, meaning that Wall Street is taking the rumors pretty seriously.

This move would create an industry giant and would reinforce IBM on the server as well as on the software and services market. Synergy effects resulting from this acquisition would especially help IBM compete against HP on the server and storage market. SUN’s latest financial results were poor and even put in question the viability of the company itself. SUN’s customers can now be sure that one strong company will support them. On the hardware side, IBM’s and SUN’s blade market shares account respectively for 25% and 5% of the total. A consolidation of these portfolios could help IBM compete against HP’s unrivaled leadership on this fast-growing market. IBM and SUN already work together (Lotus Symphony, IBM’s collaboration suite, already integrates SUN’s open-source OpenOffice.org tools suite) and these two companies are known to be strong open-source advocates. However, this acquisition still raises lots of questions.

SUN develops (with Fujitsu) its own SPARC processor line for high-end, business-critical servers and IBM’s POWER processors are their direct competitors. Processor development is an extremely expensive process and I cannot imagine IBM maintaining two different processor lines within the same company and I assume IBM would eventually drop SPARC. So what about customers, especially in the financial and communication industries which have a big SPARC install base ?

AIX, IBM’s Unix, competes directly versus SUN’s operating system Solaris on SPARC, moreover, Solaris is a direct competitor to Linux on the mass market x86. SUN’s strategy toward Linux has always been from hesitant to hostile whereas IBM has always been a great Linux supporter. Big Blue will have to deal with a portfolio problem, as well as with internal cultural problems. Solaris’ users and admins are very loyal to it and SUN has put Solaris at the heart of its datacenter strategy. If IBM was to drop Solaris for AIX, this would mean a lot of frustration for the Solaris community.

Finally, on the database level, IBM’s DB2 and Informix compete versus MySQL and PostgreSQL (the latter not directly owned but pushed by SUN) and SUN’s open source application server Glassfish is a direct threat to IBM’s middleware technology Websphere.

A merger between SUN and Dell would have made more sense from a pure portfolio perspective :
- Dell has a strong blade and x86 portfolio
- it owns no business-critical line of servers
- it could have pushed Solaris on x86
- Dell has no footprint neither on the application, nor on the middleware, nor on the application layer.
Perhaps has IBM moved before Dell did, fearing an emerging third strong player on the datacenter market.

Even though SUN’s acquisition by IBM is not official yet, I think the two companies will have really a hard time until they are completely integrated. The two companies have different technology and business cultures and SUN’s products mostly directly compete with IBM’s. Furthermore, today’s economic climate will make things even harder, since Big Blue could loose a lot of energy for the integration instead of focusing on customers. Of course, both companies together can leverage their huge portfolio to create synergy effects, however, I doubt this would happen soon.

sudo modprobe kvm-intel
FATAL: Error inserting kvm_intel (/lib/modules/2.6.20-6-generic/kernel/drivers/kvm/kvm-intel.ko): Operation not permitted

In order to fully use your Intel processor on a HP laptop, follow the following steps :

- boot your computer
- when the BIOS window shows up, enter the BIOS manager
- enable the Virtualization technology in the BIOS menu
- save the changes and exit
- shut down your computer
- remove the battery and put it back in your PC
- boot your computer

and Intel VT should work without problem.

The usage of Linux is fostered within the company : each employee has access to LinuxCOE (which is a HP product and licensed under the General Public License) and can install his favorite distribution pretty easily on his personal computer. Ubuntu, openSUSE, Gentoo and others are at disposal and HP even provides licenses for SUSE and Red Hat.
Since MS Office is the most widespread office suite and most of my colleagues have Windows XP, it is unfortunately hard to work without it. With Crossover, which is a product based on Wine, allows me to use the MS Office suite as well as Internet Explorer 6 in some cases (*sigh*…).
The officially supported instant messaging protocol was Jabber, which is ideal to use in a GNU/Linux environment (for instance with Pidgin) but has been changed for Microsoft Communicator that I use via its web-based interface.
Due to the massive demand of employees, Firefox is officially supported by the internal IT service, in addition to IE.
On the customer side, HP is committed to Linux : the ProLiant servers are the most sold servers running GNU/Linux on the world and the Integrity servers shipped with the Itanium processors also run RHEL 5 and SLES 10 SP1. Moreover, there are lots of people at the company working as developers for open-source projects or kernel developers.

Nevertheless, the situation is not perfect for GNU/Linux or alternative software desktop users.
Linux is not officially supported by HP’s IT and there is an evident lack of communication around LinuxCOE. I even personally made senior technical consultants aware of it.
Not all internal web-based applications run correctly with Firefox and some multimedia streamed videos are encoded with codecs Linux cannot play.
I cannot share my calendar with my colleagues because Evolution does not work perfectly with Exchange 2007 (even if my e-mails and meetings invitations work fine) and there is no native application to take part to Netmeeting conferences (did someone try this solution ?). The move to Vista and MS Office 2007 is also planned but, so far, Crossover does not support this version so I hope there will be a workaround until here.

So far, using GNU/Linux as a primarily desktop operating system as an HP employee was not hard and I have been pleasantly surprised by the LinuxCOE offering, among other things. Even though I experience a little loss of productivity, I prefer to stay a little longer at work than use an other OS than GNU/Linux. If things need to do something which is really urgent and only doable under Windows, I have a VMware virtual machine ready to boot, however, this happens really rarely. So if you are hesitating to apply for a job or an internship at HP, thinking that you will not have the right/possibility/authorization tu run GNU/Linux, I hope this article will help to change your mind.

Of course, HP is a huge company and from an IT perspective, support multiple operating systems is a big effort. One the other hand, this is the best example of the advantages of respecting standards (real ones…) in order every user to have access to the information, independently of his OS.