Plus: PalmOne offering Treo 650 users free memory due to RAM issue; Connect Computing, Mandrakesoft to offer Linux server wares to small businesses.
Sun last week said it has agreed to purchase IT services company SevenSpace. With the purchase, Sun takes a farther step away from its traditional focus on supporting only its Solaris operating system platform and beefs up its support for competing operating systems such as Windows, HP-UX and AIX.
SevenSpace, a 4-year-old company that specializes in remotely managing and monitoring IT systems and applications, was of particular interest to Sun because its managed services technology will let Sun’s support organization provide service-level agreements for software from vendors such as Oracle, SAP and PeopleSoft on a wider variety of operating systems. The companies did not disclose financial details of the agreement.
The change to flash memory from dynamic RAM for PalmOne‘s new Treo 650 smart phone appears to have had the unintended consequence of reducing the amount of memory that is actually available to users. As a result, PalmOne plans to offer a free 128M-byte expansion card to Treo 650 purchasers to get around the problem. Small files, such as contacts or tasks, now must be stored in chunks that are much larger than the actual files. This means that the same files a user stored on a Treo 600 might not all fit on the Treo 650.
The Treo 650 was released last month through Sprint and palmOne’s Web site.
Consulting firm Connect Computing and Mandrakesoft have formed a partnership to offer Linux server software to small businesses. The two have come up with Mandrakelinux Dedicated File Server, a Samba file server, and Mandrakelinux Dedicated Email Gateway, a Postfix e-mail gateway that ships with SpamAssassin and virus protection software. All the tools needed to get up and running install as part of a single process, and the software is priced at less than $1,000.
The Mandrakelinux Dedicated File Server features Samba 3, which is compatible with Windows.
