The system is scheduled to go live on March 31st, and it will be upgraded as needed to meet user demand, said Len Santalucia, Senior Consulting Specialist for IBM's Americas Linux Sales team.

Each virtual machine will have SuSE Linux for S/390 installed and be connected to the Internet outside IBM's firewall, so that you can experiment with providing Internet services from it, Santalucia said in an interview.

"We want anybody that has any desire to see what it's like," Santalucia said. People porting software, developing web applications and testing web hosting will all be welcome, he said. "We want to show the Open Source world how open we are," he added. Santalucia spoke about Linux on the S/390 architecture at a New York Linux Users Group meeting last night.

More information about the "Free access to a Linux for S/390 development environment" program will be posted on IBM's "Free Access" web page soon.