Red Hat made some guttural, almost inarticulate, awfully confusing noises Wednesday from its user-cum-analyst meeting in San Diego when it tried to say that it's finally going to play the desktop card.

Red Hat has always been rather, oh, comme ci comme ca about Linux on the desktop, pushing it off waiting for the right alignment of stars before starting to chase it.

Well, it appears its astrologers have perceived the long shadow of Microsoft in the heavens above the emerging world and figure they better do something before Redmond becomes the sole surviving sun given stuff like Windows Starter Edition and $3 software on offer, stuff Red Hat derides as "crippled" and a "joke."

So Red Hat Wednesday rattled the name of Microsoft's Siamese twin, Intel, like a voodoo woman's chicken bones over a terribly vague new client product called the Red Hat Global Desktop that isn't global at all yet but meant strictly for small businesses and local government in the BRIC countries where its rollout is gonna start next month - to people, mind you, who can ante some kind of payment for an annual support contract. Exactly how much is still unclear.

Ignoring for the moment Red Hat's bluster about "the traditional desktop computing metaphor being as dead as a dinosaur," and Red Hat "creating more useful, more powerful and more accessible experiences," and "not shipping another Windows clone," the Global Desktop is simply a cut-down version of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 5, the latest version of the code it sells to corporate workstation users in the Old and New Worlds.

According to Scott Crenshaw, the guy with P&L responsibilities for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat has ditched all but 500 or 600 of the 1,500-odd programs attached to Linux to create this Global Desktop, slanting it of course toward the office with OpenOffice and an assortment of other pick-and-choose productivity apps.

It's supposed to fit in a small footprint but darned if we didn't forget to ask the darling Mr. Crenshaw how small - he was busy explaining that it was in no way crippled like you-know-who's and we got distracted - but it seems that there are minimal hardware requirements so it will work on boxes like Intel's so-called Classmate line, a low-cost schools-directed box (even though it's not meant for the education market) and Community, a widget Intel dreamed up for rural India.

Red Hat also mentioned two supposed Intel lines that neither we nor Intel corporate PR ever heard of called Affordable and Low-Cost. (We'll get back to you on that.)

Anyway, Red Hat says it's "collaborated closely with Intel to enable the design, support and distribution of the Global Desktop to be as close as possible to the customer," whatever that means.

And naturally, the Global Desktop is positioned as cheaper and more secure that "He-whose-name-we-dare-not-speak."

Red Hat intends to get the software into the emerging markets through Intel's reseller and white box channels. Mr. Crenshaw said the VARs would be the front-line support, followed by Intel, and only Red Hat as a last resort.

That's step one.

Red Hat intends to bring the widgetry to Europe and America in time. Exactly how long from now appears to be up in the air. Could be this year, Mr. Crenshaw said. Could be next year.

Meanwhile, it looks like the widgetry will be changing. The Global Desktop will be on an annual rev cycle as opposed to its big brother, which gets updated less frequently. That will change the application software and the look-and-feel, which Red Hat expects will be impacted by its experience with the One Laptop Per Child project and the Sugar user interface it's been building for the widget that's supposed to break with the traditional client metaphor.

Red Hat expects the desktop in time to become a webbier affair, pushed into "software-as-a-service" such as Google's Documents and Spreadsheets productivity applications perceives things.

By the time the Global Desktop gets to the US and Europe that's what it may be.