Hewlett-Packard's announcement of major amounts of Linux support at the New York LinuxWorld Expo was supplemented at the Linux Expo in Paris last week with the announcement of preloaded Linux distributions on some of its server products and the formation of support and training teams throughout EMEA, writes Bruce Tober.

In New York, the company announced a range of Linux-based products, technologies and services, including more extensive Linux support for more than 40 HP LaserJet and business inkjet printers.

Meanwhile, in Paris at the Third Annual Linux Expo, Bruno Cornec, HP's Linux Program Manager for EMEA told The Register that "implementation of most of what the company announced in New York will be individually defined in each country. In France, for example, we will make technical support for our Linux products available up to the mission critical stage, which is something we already do for all the other Operating Systems".

Cornec said that in addition to the company's own support and training staff engineers, it's putting together a team of partners throughout the region to provide those services more quickly and economically where on-site support is needed.

Another EMEA initiative in the move to Linux is the preloading the open source OS on the company's recently announced LP1000 servers. "These will be loaded with a RedHat-based distribution which we've adapted to fit the needs of a server rather than client machine," Cornec said. "It includes corporate software and a customisation package."

He explained that the preloading of the software will save purchasers an average of three hours of installation and configuration per machine. These units will be available on 15 February. Somewhat later, he added, SuSE-based distributions will be preloaded as an alternative at the customer's request.

"We will have to include others later, but Red Hat and SuSE are Europe's best selling boxed sets according to our research so we're starting with them. But we're already certified for those two as well as TurboLinux, Mandrake and Caldera." ®