Last week was definitely busier, but there is still a fair bit of new stuff going on at Novell.

Let us start with OpenSUSE. Here is a long-time SUSE/Ubuntu/Mandriva blogger who writes about his experiences with openSuse 10.3 beta 1. He compares it to the latest Ubuntu alpha.

Well, it's getting to be that time of the year when the next generation of Linux distributions are ripening towards release. So I went over to the openSuse site and grabbed a copy of 10.3 beta 1 and then over to the Ubuntu testing site and grabbed 7.10 Tribe (alpha) 4.

The latest OpenSUSE is said to have a significantly improved boot time, which is something that, IIRC, was planned several months ago. It was mentioned in one of the weekly digests.

openSUSE 10.3 will include some great improvements to the init boot scripts which will dramatically decrease the time your computer takes to boot up. These come as the result of many different tests and research (documented here, and here); the first round of improvements have already been submitted and will make it into the final release.

DistroWatch Weekly featured an interview with the new leader of OpenSUSE. He has done quite a few interviews lately.

Since 1997 I [Stephan Kulow] have been working on the KDE project, mainly hacking libraries and doing release coordination. The Linux community was still pretty small back then, so while doing KDE releases I had good contacts with quite a few Linux distributions. In the summer of 1999 I was looking for a job I could do for two months as my girlfriend went on a long-planned US trip. Caldera had just introduced a graphical installer programmed using Qt and it was a very fascinating time helping to do a second version.

Stephan has just created a Live CD of the latest beta.

Stephan Kulow has created and uploaded Live CDs of the 1-CD installations for your pleasure: GNOME Live ISO, KDE Live ISO.

Moving on to some business news (corporate Novell and legacy software), Novell's site gives a status report for ZENworks and NetWare. A video of Ron Hovsepian's talk from LinuxWorld 2007 (streaming, embedded Flash) is finally up on the Web site as well.

Earlier in the week, Novell unveiled a Windows/Linux management tool. Here is one of the first articles about it.

Novell has released ZENworks Configuration Management, the latest release of its ZENworks systems management suite, delivering new configuration management capabilities including the ability to manage Windows clients from Windows, Linux, or Open Enterprise Server.

Here is another related article.

Novell helps customers transform data centres with new management solutions

[...]

These enhancements give customers the ability to leverage virtualisation in the data centre while helping them lower costs, reduce complexity and mitigate risks in their IT infrastructure.

Novell also updated Orchestrator.

Cassatt is likely to point out that their product acts as an operating system for a dynamic datacenter and that their technology is better.

The biggest news (other than the SCO ruling and some subsequent developments) was the acquisition of Senforce Technologies. Ron Hovsepian told us some months ago that many small acquisitions were under way.

The acquisition gives Novell both security expertise and technology that will allow it to tightly integrate endpoint security with its configuration management solutions,

While Red Hat managed to get a large contract with Virgin America and Swisscom, Novell got Casio.

Novell today announced that global electronics giant Casio Computer (Casio) is using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell with integrated Xen virtualization software to reduce the cost of consolidating servers while improving flexibility compared with alternative, proprietary virtualization software.

Here is the story of another company that remains loyal to Novell.

Initially, the company was using UNIX. Then they started deploying Novell products. The company's in-house IT team had developed a new server hardware, on which it wanted to implement the Novell Open Enterprise Server. It has been associated with Novell for approximately 10 years

The following new article is worth a quick mention as well.

Novell Inc. donated $47,000 in software to the Legal Aid Society of San Diego. Novell’s donation is part of its community relations program, which seeks to enable nonprofit organizations to realize their visions through the power of technology.

Before we finish this post, here are 3 Novell commercials (or promotional videos) that have just hit the Tube. Some are from LinuxWorld 2007.