Check this out!  IBM is giving away Linux address spaces on a z/OS
machine to anyone that asks for one, temporary of course.  Worth looking
into.  The price is right.

Article on Enterprise Linux Today:
http://eltoday.com/article.php3?ltsn=2001-05-07-001-14-PS-LF

The IBM announcement:
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/os/linux/lcds/

>From the article:
The physical hardware, which is shared by all Linux guests, is a 9672 G6
ZX7 with ten processor nodes and 32 gigabytes of real memory. Even in
mainframe circles, this is a pretty sizable box. For storage, IBM has
attached a Shark 2105-F20 with 2.1 terabytes online. Each Linux guest
gets 128 meg of "real memory" and one "processor" in the virtual
environment. The Linux kernel thinks that this memory and processor are
physical hardware but in fact they are allocated as virtualized
resources by the VM/ESA operating system, which acts as a hypervisor.
The root filesystem of each Linux guest is about 480 megabytes, which
sounds small until you consider that /usr and /opt are on separate file
systems that are mounted read-only.

--

By the way, I realized the reason IBM is changing the name to z/OS is
because it's changing to 64 bit architecture.  I also read today that
Linux can run on "bare iron", meaning mainframe hardware, with no other
operating system.  Not many shops can afford to mess with that right
now, but who knows down the road...

Your friendly neighborhood mainframe DB2 DBA, Linux newbie,  ;-)
Jim Herrmann