Oracle made a weird announcement at its Oracle OpenWorld love-fest and trade-show. The company announced that it was releasing its own Linux: the Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Oracle Linux.

If you want to know what Oracle's roadmap is for Linux, just watch what Red Hat does. Oracle Enterprise Linux is just a clone of RHEL. Getting a sense of what Oracle really has planned for Solaris - aside from deploying it in SMP systems and clusters - is going to take some time. Oracle's plans for virtualization and system management are more clear.

During the Oracle OpenWorld conference (Oct. 11-15, San Francisco), speculation mounted that Oracle was preparing an Unbreakable Linux offering that features the MySQL database — and targets Microsoft’s Windows Server-SQL Server combo. Here’s the scoop.

Ever since Oracle introduced its Unbreakable Linux support program in late 2006 there have been doubts about whether the company could continue to maintain compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

People outside of IT seldom think of Oracle as a Linux company, probably because it isn't. Oracle has always been considered a database and application company. So now that Oracle owns their own operating system in the free and clear, what benefits do they gain from maintaining Unbreakable Linux? The answer is probably: "Not much".

Oracle is now out with Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.5 (OEL)- a week after its base, Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 5.5 (RHEL) was released. That's pretty quick and in my view, one of the quickest turnarounds yet from Oracle with their version of RHEL. Oracle has been releasing its own version of Linux with OEL, based on RHEL since 2006 and they've been updating OEL as Red Hat updates RHEL.

Oracle Corp. has rekindled its Solaris love. Sun's Solaris operating system will underlie new high-end data center appliances running the Oracle software stack. And Oracle EnterpriseLinux now becomes the preferred OS for lower-end commodity hardware.

Oracle has assured the European Union that the company will continue investing in Sun’s MySQL open source database. That move potentially clears the way for Oracle’s pending buyout of Sun. So what will Oracle actually do with MySQL? Early chatter involves a so-called Unbreakable MySQL plus a potential a specialization within Oracle's Partner Program. Here's the scoop.

With the Oracle VM Template Builder, Oracle is opening up its virtualization technology to build software appliances for any type of software. Sitting underneath the hypervisor technology is Oracle's JeOS, which Kumar explained is a version of Oracle's Enterprise Linux tailored specifically for Oracle VM template.