Red Hat’s “Global Desktop” Version Slips

Red Hat announced that their planned “Global Desktop” release of the Red Hat operating system is slipping. Pundits thin this may give SuSE Linux an edge… we’ll see!

Red Hat delays its global desktop Linux indefinitely

“Mixing technical concerns with a truckload of business issues, Red Hat has stealthily acknowledged slipping its deadline for Red Hat Global Desktop (RHGD), which might have given it an edge against Novell’s competing SuSE Linux. Unlike the existing Red Hat Enterprise Desktop (RHED), the planned RHGD is aimed exclusively at small, reseller supplied implementations in emerging geographic areas such as Brazil, China, and India. Red Hat also sponsors a community project called Fedora, which develops and maintains a free desktop product. But RHED and the forthcoming RHGD are both commercial products geared to businesses. First announced at the 2007 Summit users conference, RHGD was then expected to ship a few months later. ‘The technology side of the product is complete,’ according to a blog posting which slid quietly on to Red Hat’s Web site this week. ‘[But] there have been a number of business issues that have conspired to delay the product for almost a year,’ interjected the anonymous blogger, about midway through a more generic update on ‘What’s Going On With Red Hat Desktop Systems?’ Indeed, some of the contributing factors listed in Red Hat’s blog are unarguably business-related, including market changes and “start-up delays with resellers.’ RHGD, by the way, is supposed to be supplied by Intel channel partners in these emerging markets. Others reasons mentioned, though, lean to the technical side, including hardware changes, ‘multimedia codec licensing knotholes,’ and ‘getting the design and delivery of appropriate services nailed down.’

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