IBM announced the start of a public beta for a virtual Linux environment which allows IBM System p servers to run x86 applications without modifications. The main incentive is to widen the range of supported applications for the Power platform. Surely, IBM is hoping to gain back some market share for his AIX operating system, once customers are willing to move to System p. (Recently, Qantas ditched Linux for AIX, so things can’t be so bad for IBM’s Unix.) There is not much information available, even the AVE page is very mysterious about the technologies used. But since the company behind this is Transitive, who has created the Rosetta emulation engine for Apple, this should be more than vaporware.