Blorgo wrote in with the news that Pacific HiTech has announced the bundling of IBM's DB2 Universal Database with TurboLinux. IBM is just rolling in the news today. It also appears that the companies have also agreed to work on future editions of both work together more smoothly.

Christopher Cashell writes "Everyone knows about Beowulf High Performance clusters, but it's often remarked that these are impracticle for most business uses, and that High Availability Clustering is still lacking. It looks like the guys at TurboLinux are working on fixing that. First seen on freshmeat"

diakka writes "Pacific HiTech believes that there is a large Linux market in China to be tapped. They plan on market their TurboLinux, which already has tools to handle the different character sets. Since Linux can run on low end hardware, and is easy to obtain a little or no cost, It seems likely that Chinese computer users may make up a much larger portion of the Linux community in the near future." What tools are available out there that allow the use of Chinese in Linux or X?

Nick Moffitt from SuSE has written in with pre-show report from the Linux Pavillion at this the falls Comdex. Things are almost ready to go out there. Hit the link below to read what he has to say. Update: 11/16 07:59 by CT : Kit Cosper of Linux-hw wrote in to send us a link to a page of Pictures from the show.

Pacific HiTech is to enter the US market. Currently it has has more than 50 percent of the Japanese Linux market, making it the second largest Linux distribution worldwide. Interestingly Pacific HiTech has been successful in the chip corporate market, and includes as customers the Japanese Broadcasting Corp., HSBC Securities Japan Ltd., and the Otsuka Shokai group, one of Japan's largest office supplies and systems integration firms. I'm also guessing that TurboLinux 3.0 is to be released soon. Any Japanese capable readers care to confirm? The first link was found in LWN.

Pacific HiTech report a recent independent OS survey by as saying they were number two in retail sales of operating system software capturing 7.35% of the unit sales, behind market leader Microsoft with 69.99% and edging out Apple with 6.12%. Pacific HiTech also do TurboLinux in English. Marketshare like this is presumably why they were named as one of the four participating distributions in the Oracle announcement, something which caused quite a few queries on /. Update PHT sent in more details on the survey.

It's definately been a hot topic lately, no doubt about it. But Daniel Quinlan wrote in to send us a press release from the LSB stating that the Debian/Red Hat standards project (LCS) will be working with the LSB. Daniel has also been named as Bruce Perens replacement as the head of LSB. Besides having an @transmeta.com email address, Daniel has been the head of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. I'm really glad to see this come together. Anyway, I've attached the announcement- click below if you want to read it.

Florian Cramer writes "Pacific HiTech yesterday announced a PowerPC release of its TurboLinux Distribution. The highlight: It comes with both the Mach-based MkLinux kernel and the monolithic (faster) LinuxPPC kernel. PowerMac owners will be happy to hear that, finally, there's a Linux distribution for their machines which is neither outdated (such as the current official MkLinux CD), nor hard to obtain (such as the LinuxPPC CD). Also, the choice between both Kernels IMHO is an idea that should be adopted by such forthcoming Linux/PPC distributions as Debian. "

Bruce Perens sent us a bunch of info about the status of the Linux Standard Base System. I'm running it as a feature to get some feedback on it. The LSB is definately one of the most important issues facing Linux these days; especially if we want it to continue to grow. Bruce also says "We would like to discuss the following proposal in BOF sessions at both Linux Expo and Linux Kongress. Nothing about the proposal is cast in concrete until after those meetings."

Both TurboLinux and Stampede have announced new versions. Proof positive that Linux is growing and thriving. If the 'Big 3' don't do it for ya, give one of these a shot. Thanks to maskatron and Ola Hakansson for the links.