February 28, 2012

SLES 11 SP2 released

More than 21 months after SLES 11 SP1 today SUSE released the SP2 of their enterprise distribution. You can find more information on this release here:
As more information becomes available I'll update this post. Latest Update 5/18/2012.

February 23, 2012

Mainframe environments supported by Oracle

Recently there have been a lot of discussions with respect to what environments are supported for Oracle DB on the mainframe. On the Marist zLinux mailing list there is a good reply from a Oracle person. Here are a few more links for reference:

February 21, 2012

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8 released

Red Hat has announced the availability of RHEL 5.8. You can find more information on this here:
From a mainframe perspective this has been a pure bug fix release. There is one important feature update though. Red Hat included an update to the additional gcc44 package enabling complete z196 support. As a dependency the binutils220 package will be installed as well. With those two packages you can start building binaries targeted for the z196 with the -march=z196 option or at least tune for it with options like -march=z9-109 -mtune=z196.

February 20, 2012

z196 GA2 feature base support in Linux

The required Linux distribution versions for the base support of new features like OSA Express4 are documented in the announcement letter (pdf). To find it scroll down to the Software requirements section.

February 6, 2012

Updated Virtualization Cookbook

The virtualization cookbook from Michael MacIsaac, Brad Hinson, Marian Gasparovic received a major updates to cover z/VM 6.2 (including singe system image), RHEL 6.2 and the upcoming SLES11 SP2. All is now in one book and it's even got a cloud touch with a chapter on xCAT. The code examples also received an update.

Linux and VIPA - white papers

In the past month a few questions regarding the use of OSPF and VIPA on Linux have been raised. This is especially important to clients combining z/OS and Linux and System z. So here are a two references to start with:
(updated 9/30/2013)