March 1999
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SGI to unveil Linux machines this May Looking into "rolling its own" Linux distribution as well By Nora Mikes, LinuxWorld

SGI Strategic Technologist Dave McAllister says that his company expects to show an Intel-based Linux machine at the Linux Expo show in Raleigh NC this May and that it will either be running one of the current Linux distributions, or a new distribution tentatively dubbed "SGI-Linux."

Though the final decision about doing a distribution has not yet been made, "right now we're going down the road of rolling our own," says McAllister.

In January of this year SGI began shipping its first Intel-based systems and it is on Intel, and not MIPS, that SGI will ship Linux.

"SGI is making Linux part of our core engineering" says McAllister. He notes that SGI's currently has "about as many" developers working on Linux as NT.

The company is also promising to open key features in its proprietary IRIX operating system to the open source community. Areas of code to be revealed include those which aid system Scalability and performance, memory management, high-performance networking and system management and administration tools.

While reluctant to disclose either a timeframe nor a list of specific packages for release, SGI officials said they have a rollout schedule for the release of formerly proprietary code lasting at least the end of 1999.

Two weeks ago SGI released the source code to its GLX graphics libraries.

"If you want to affect what goes on in the Linux community, you have to play by their rules... And the monetary unit for transactions in the Linux community is source code," says McAllister.

McAllister emphases that the firm does not wish to enter the "GUI wars," nor to further exacerbate splits already existent in the Linux community.

SGI, according to McAllister, plan to release "things that extend SGI's application Framework," and "things that make [SGI's] hardware look better."

Things like database accelerators and certain graphics technologies (SGI's Performer 3D graphics toolkit, for example) will probably remain proprietary. At least for the foreseeable future, says McAllister.

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