14 DAY TRIAL // Berthold Gunreben of SUSE Linux informed the openSUSE community about the upcoming availability of the openSUSE Linux operating system for the IBM z Systems architecture.
Also known as IBM System z or s390x, the hardware architecture is used by IBM on all of its mainframe computers, and in recent years, Linux kernel-based operating systems become very popular for these type of machines, with big names like Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Ubuntu supporting it.
The SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) operating system was already supporting the IBM System z architecture for its enterprise customers, but the time has come for the OpenSuSE Linux OS to support it as well, and today we are happy to inform you that a special port now builds for IBM z Systems in openSUSE Factory.
"openSUSE Factory now builds for the IBM z Systems architecture in a special ports project called openSUSE:Factory:zSystems," said Berthold Gunreben, OPS Services Team, SUSE Linux in the mailing list announcement. "This project is targeted to improve the integration of z Systems technology into the openSUSE distribution."
The road ahead
The team behind the openSUSE Linux port for the IBM z Systems architecture is young, and it looks for collaborations from members of the openSUSE community to improve it and make it reliable enough to be deployed on powerful IMB z Systems like LinuxOne Rockhopper or LinuxOne Emperor.
Thanks to this new project, it would also be possible for the team to discover and fix bugs, as well as to integrate new features in the IMB z Systems port much sooner than it would have been during the development cycle of the SUSE Linux Enterprise operating system. If you want to try it right now, go ahead and check out its wiki page.