The weekly series continues. Here are some of the more positive news and developments at Novell, whose bragging rights are well earned.

The popular blogger Liquidat tells us about his experiences with the OpenSuse Build Service. It is part of an interesting series of posts.

After playing around with the OpenSuse Build Service for some days now I decided to build development packages of kblogger as a first real life test.

More on OBS here. Liquidat had some minor setbacks at the end, but he still stubbornly supports Opensuse and Fedora.

Under new leadership, Opensuse Alpha6 was announced a couple of days ago.

AJ [Andreas] used to write here, that he's glad to announce. I can't say I am - I am relieved I can announce openSUSE 10.3 Alpha6 to you. I didn't have a chance to put too much testing into more than the i586 DVD5 and the KDE CD. But I didn't want to wait any longer either. So I'm left with hoping the best.

Still on the issue of Opensuse, have a look at this article which nicely covers Hack Week.

According to legendary scientist Albert Einstein, "everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom." Perhaps that is why open-source software is such fertile ground for innovation.

[...]

[Q:] Are there plans to do another Hack Week in the future? If Novell does another Hack Week, is there something that you would like to see done differently?

[Nat Friedman:] Absolutely. We're looking at doing it again in 6 months or so. No date is set yet, but in the future we hope to involve more participants from the community.

Novell has just begun an important initiative in Asia Pacific.

Novell announced today the launch of the Asia Pacific chapter of the Novell Linux Champions Club, following the success of the Champions Club in Europe. The objective of the Club is to build a community of Linux proponents among Novell’s strategic partners and their partners, eventually creating a Linux-friendly ecosystem in Asia Pacific.

ELCOT's migration to SUSE Linux is explored in the following new video. I'll admit that I'm worried about embedding YouTube videos. Some Free software users/advocates loathe them and even complain. Richard Stallman has vocally whined about such videos of his talks, which he is unable to access. You can't blame him. There is some truly Free software that can play them however. It's no longer experimental.



It is quite fascinating to see how large organisations handle a radical IT transition. Italy's decision to switch 3,500 government PCs to SUSE Linux could benefit from ELCOT's lessons. Maybe they should communicate or exchange technical reports, such as the one produced by Birmingham last year.

Early in the week, Novell celebrated a GroupWise success story which also involved GNU/Linux.

The City of Saint Paul was running disparate e-mail platforms that required increasing IT administration as they often experienced downtime. Standardizing on Novell€® GroupWise€® on SUSE€® Linux Enterprise Server created a unified e-mail platform across the organization, reducing hardware costs by 75 percent and achieving 99.9 percent uptime.

As a government agency, the City of Saint Paul provides municipal services to the more than 275,000 residents of Minnesota's capital city. The City has more than 3,000 employees across 125 different locations.

Nothing about "intellectual property" or 'protection', so well done, Novell! The company also had an honourable mention here:

IT executives in Singapore resoundingly awarded technology giant Hewlett-Packard (HP) top prize in Computerworld Singapore’s survey on desktop and server management vendors, based mainly on its ability to follow through on its service commitments to customers.

HP finished well ahead of its closest rival, Computer Associates (CA), while Novell’s ZENworks line of solutions warranted an honourable mention.

[...]

It [Novell] recently sealed a partnership with Capgemini under which the outsourcing powerhouse will bundle Novell’s Linux-based server and desktop management tools in the solution packages it puts together for its generally sizeable clients.

Later in the week, Novell got itself a new business partner.

Acronis will create new storage management solutions for SUSE's Linux Enterprise customers and provide advanced disaster recovery, backup and restore, partitioning and data migration solutions including centrally managed online server backup, server disk imaging, and bare-metal restore solutions for SUSE.

Fortunately, Novell and Microsoft were not mentioned in the same sentence quite so often in the past week. Can Novell ever distance itself from that 'partner' in its road to independence? That would render many of our complaints pointless. Just don't let Microsoft make Linux distributors suicidal. They should know better by now. Just watch what happened to Linspire.