January 13, 2000 Web posted at: 1:46 p.m. EST (1846 GMT) by Jason Meserve

From...

(IDG) -- White Pine this week announced it is shipping a new version of its multipoint conferencing unit software, MeetingPoint, for the Red Hat Linux 6.1 platform.

This marks the first time White Pine has ported its software to the open source platform. "Everything in MeetingPoint is now available for Linux," says Roger Wallman, senior product manager for core technologies at White Pine. Wallman also noted that there are new versions for Windows NT and Solaris, which White Pine had supported previously.

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Wallman says the decision to support Red Hat's Linux flavor was based largely on customer demand. He adds that it is possible to port to other Linux versions, but that won't happen unless there is demand from White Pine's customer base.

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In addition to adding Linux support, White Pine increased the performance of its software, designed to connect multiple videoconferencing endpoints into a single call. Version 4.0.2 doubles the number of simultaneous connections a single server can handle: up to 50 H.323 (IP-based) users or 200 CU-SeeMe users (White Pine's own end-point conferencing product).

White Pine achieved the above numbers on a dual-processor Pentium 450 machine. "We just picked a fairly common configuration out there," Wallman says.

White Pine is only one of two companies (PictureTel is the other) that offers software-only MCU technology. It is the first to support the Linux platform.