SuSE Linux for S/390 Available Today

Nuremberg, GERMANY, Oakland, CA - October 31st, 2000 - Today, SuSE Linux, the international technology leader and solutions provider in Open Source operating system software, announced the general availability of SuSE Linux Enterprise Server for S/390. SuSE´s Linux distribution for the mainframe allows enterprise customers to scale Linux from PC clients to host systems.

"We are glad to be the only company today delivering a worldwide Linux distribution for IBM S/390 servers", said Roland Dyroff, CEO of SuSE Linux AG. "SuSE Linux Enterprise Server for S/390 is the result of the unique partnership between SuSE and IBM. SuSE's technological leadership and expertise in combination with IBM's strength and reliability make SuSE Linux for S/390 systems the operating system of choice in the enterprise server environment."

With the general availability of SuSE Linux Enterprise Server for S/390, SuSE supports more IBM server platforms than any other commercially available Linux distribution. "It´s great to have the SuSE Linux for S/390 distribution generally available and ready for our customers to put into production", said Nancy Roath, IBM Vice President Enterprise Server Brand Marketing. "SuSE´s Linux for S/390 and our S/390 and zSeries servers together provide an industrial strength that´s ready to support mission critical server applications."

SuSE Linux Enterprise Server for S/390 supports IBM´s G5 and G6 servers as well as the popular IBM Multiprise 3000. There are three methods for installation of SuSE Linux. First, in a logical partition (LPAR). Secondly, as a guest under the operating system VM (Virtual Machine), and finally, within the Virtual Image Facility (VIF), which allows to implement several thousand independent Linux images on one machine.

"We used the same source code base and build process for SuSE Linux Enterprise Server for S/390 as on our other platforms", explained Marcus Kraft, development manager for SuSE Linux on S/390. "This quality attribute makes SuSE Linux unique." With common APIs Software developers can create applications on a PC and migrate them easily to their preferred target platform. Administrators benefit from common setup and configuration. "It was a major effort to ensure we have a well tested, real Linux distribution, not just some code that runs on S/390", said Kraft.

SuSE Linux Enterprise Server for S/390 includes more than 700 application packages specifically tailored for the enterprise environment. SuSE Linux S/390 also includes a rich set of support and service options for any kind of enterprise needs, including installation planning, training, performance measurement and tuning.

About SuSE:

SuSE Linux is the international technology leader and solutions provider in Open Source operating system (OS) software. SuSE´s unique expertise in Linux and their largest development team worldwide dedicated to Open Source software has contributed to the recognition of SuSE as a leader in Linux solutions. SuSE offers the largest support database to the public, and owns the largest hardware database in the Linux market. Furthermore, SuSE supports more hardware platforms than any other commercially available Linux distribution.

Designed for Web and enterprise server environments and efficient as a home and office platform, SuSE's distribution, surrounding features, effective configuration and intelligent design result in the most complete Linux solution available today.

SuSE Linux AG, headquartered in Germany, and SuSE Inc., based in Oakland, CA, are privately held companies focused entirely on supporting the Linux community and Open Source development. With a workforce of over 500 people worldwide, SuSE has offices all over Europe, Latin America and in the US.

SuSE contributes considerably to Linux development projects such as the Linux kernel, glibc, XFree86TM, KDE, ISDN4Linux, ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) and USB (Universal Serial Bus).