Intel and Red Hat promote new desktop standards

May 10, 2007 07:29 GMT  ·  By

Red Hat, one of the largest companies providing open source solutions has just announced the release of a new product at the famous Red Hat Summit in San Diego. The Red Hat Global Desktop aims to define a completely new concept of the traditional desktop paradigm. According to Red Hat officials, the customers' necessities have increased a lot in the past few years and the market needs something that apart from satisfying them, would meet accessibility criteria too.

Based on the open source standards, the desktop proposed by Red Hat intends to bring a better security and also to manage all the online services and applications adopted by the customers. The desktop should provide high performance but with the lowest hardware requirements possible. Thus, Red Hat teamed up with Intel for the desktop platform. The future "online desktop" as they're hoping it will become, will be shipped first with Classmate PC, a low cost notebook provided by Intel to students, but it will be compatible with all Intel's future platforms, Affordable, Community or Low-Cost PC.

"To address the demand for Linux on desktop systems by our customers in emerging markets, Intel and Red Hat worked together to deliver a pre-certified, cost-effective solution for Intel's reseller channel to extend their business value", said Steve Dallman, General Manager, Intel Worldwide Reseller Channel Organization.

The new software is designed for the small businesses or governments on the emerging markets, and it will include a lot of the source code used in the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project. The first release of the Red Hat Global Desktop is programmed for this June, and it will come with a traditional user interface, but future updates will enjoy a totally new design where the applications and local data should be integrated into the online services.